Publisher's Note: Welcome to our 39th edition of Tech Tips Tuesday on "Keys to Maintaining Healthy Oil Pressure".  We'll be re-publishing an edition of AMSOIL Tech Tips for you every Tuesday.  Click on the Blog Category "Tuesday Tech Tips" to see everything published to-date.

Keys to Maintaining Healthy Oil Pressure

John Gardner: Well, there's something you never want to see when you're driving along: your oil pressure dropped to zero. It might just be an oil pressure sending unit, or you may have a real problem. Welcome to this AMSOIL Tech Tip. It's all about the oil pressure.

You can see right here is an electrical gauge. It uses an electrical signal, so that could fail, and you may have oil pressure. So what you want to do is you want to run a manual oil pressure test. Just look at your manufacturer specifications, find an oil plug in there, pull out your sending unit, put your gauge in there, fire up the vehicle, and read your oil pressure. What should your oil pressure be? Well, once again, you're following your manufacturer specifications. Ours is fine there, but Len, that's not the case all the time.

You got these oil pressures and you got these technologies, man, like variable valve timing. Oil drives these wipers to the left or to the right. Oil has to go through these tiny little passages to get there. Len, all this technology has to function, and heat plays an important part when it comes to oil pressure.

Len Groom: That's correct. Heat has a direct relationship with oil pressure. As the heat goes up, the pressure can come down, and there are a number of things that can affect that. Just the temperature outside can have an effect on that. What you're doing to the vehicle can have an effect on that.

If you're towing, if you have the air conditioning on, different environmental factors will have an influence on that. My point is, we build the oil to be able to deal with all of that. So, we have the proper base oils in there. They're very robust, very strong, so that they don't fall apart under heat, and you see that oil pressure loss.

John Gardner: When you think about that, I had a Dodge, and the manufacturer called for three to five at idle oil pressure. Not a good thing.

Len Groom: No, it's not a good thing, right. You want to make sure that you're built properly, providing that protection.

John Gardner: Absolutely. You end up with zero oil pressure. Len, I know you never want to see this, and I don't either.