Used Oil Analysis (UOA)

Oil. It's quite the topic. But lets say you don't want to really discuss it any more, you want to actually DO something to confirm, or not, your oil choice.

That is where the Used Oil Analysis comes in.

Basically, it's a matter of taking a sample of your used oil during an oil change and sending it in to a laboratory to see what chemicals, metals, and minerals exist in it, and what it's properties are. If you have a high, or climbing, amount of contaminates, something is going on inside your engine that you can see before something starts breaking. If your oil is the only thing that changed, you can see if it is wearing more or less from your oil change by the increased or decreased presence of contamination. You can see if your oil holds up under your engine's environment or if it's a subpar oil that breaks down too quickly.

Here is an example:

Submit your own UOA to the community repository!

Submitting an UOA is free, and so is seeing the collective cumulative results. The full data set is available for download as well.