Mixing synthetic and dino oil

[queenskid926]

Hey Jdub, I was in class bored as hell and was just thinking about oil and certain scenarios and came up with a two "What if" kind of questions regarding mixing synthetic and dino oil.

Question 1: I'm driving a car with synthetic oil, I check it and I'm a quart low, stranded with no synthetic oil in sight. Is there any damage done if i was to top it off with some non synthetic oil of the same weight? Say if I'm running 10-30 synthetic oil and i top it off with a quart of 10-30 dino oil?

Part 2 of that question is if I wanted to switch back to conventional dino oil and don't want to drain the oil, can I just continue to top it up with non synthetic oil every time its a quart low and eventually it will be nothing but regular non synthetic oil? Will that cause any damage to the motor switching oil that way? Lets say this test car is a quart low every 500 miles.

Again this is just "what if" questions, Im not attempting none of this, I just want to know what if. I'm just curious

 

[jdub]

1) No, you will not hurt it...you do want to use the same SAE grade if possible. The big thing here is not to run low on oil (that can ruin your whole day)...I will put whatever I can get to get the car home in that case.

2) Yes, eventually you will dilute the oil already in the car to the point where you are using straight dino oil. It will take a while though...past the point where it needs to be changed anyway. If it's burning oil at that rate, you've got bigger problems

The biggest thing about mixing oils is the additive pack...depending on what you mix, you can have additives cancel each other out or end up with too much of a certain additive. This upsets the "balance" of the add pack for a given oil...petro engineers spend a great deal of time tweaking the add pack to get the desired result for the base oil and for the purpose the oil is designed for (i.e. street vs track). Mixing oils is not a great idea unless you know exactly what you are doing...if you want to switch over to dino, change the oil and filter

 

[queenskid926]

thanks for droppin the knowledge jdub