Which oil and filter is best for PowerBoost?

[Shane150]

I have done some reading and Amsoil and Motorcraft oil and filter keep coming up. I want to use the best oil and filter possible and appreciate some help in choosing them. I will be changing them myself. Cheers. Shane

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[UGADawg96]

Guess it depends on your definition of best.

As long as you follow the specs noted in the manual, it probably doesn't matter what you choose.

Just keep it simple and use 5w-30 synthetic and a motorcraft filter.

Buckle up, it's another oil & filter thread.

 

[Gros Ventre]

I'm partial to AmsOil. But look around and pick the one you think is highest quality oil. After all, there is synthetic oil, and then there is synthetic oil. As to filters, I use Canton Racing Products 8µ filter with one of their 1µ filters set up as a bypass filter. In any event look around at the filtration capability and pick the lowest you can find. Stick with that.

 

[ks54703]

With constant on off of the engine just keep in mind of fuel contamination of the oil. With the 21 PB changed oil at 5k miles but the approximate break down was 1000 miles electric, 4000 ICE miles.

As for oil / filter. Any oil and filter meeting the FORD specs.

 

[Shane150]

I live in colder climate and I saw a YouTube video which showed Amsoil was still flowing and everything else was flowing with a lot more restriction. Mobil1 and Castrol were the two that was compared.

 

[LCMM55]

With constant on off of the engine just keep in mind of fuel contamination of the oil. With the 21 PB changed oil at 5k miles but the approximate break down was 1000 miles electric, 4000 ICE miles.

As for oil / filter. Any oil and filter meeting the FORD specs.

Every 4000 miles on my 2021 PB F150. Mobile1 5w30 spec.

 

[Shane150]

Every 4000 miles on my 2021 PB F150. Mobile1 5w30 spec.

Thanks! Went with Amsoil oil and filter and will replace the oil every 8000km which for me works out to nearly once every 8-12 months.

 

[Calson]

With my last truck that had a diesel engine the Amsoil was the bottom rated motor oii with the worst additive mix. Best motor oil for the diesel was from Redline, Pennzoil, Valvoline, and Chevron Dello.

With a gas engine built after 2016 any oil that meet the SAE specifications is as good as any other motor oil. It only becomes a question as to whether the manufacturer specifies a synthetic blend or a straight synthetic motor oil. With my 2022 3.5L ecoboost engine either oil can be used in a 5W-30 weight.

 

[amschind]

I've used Royal Purple, currently use Castrol or Amsoil. A Chem E at a major told me that Royal Purple is great synthetic oil, but uses cheapo additives. Globally, the enemies of engine life are 1) "extended maintenance intervals" 2) Overheating 3) Random failure due to luck of the draw and 4) poor design.

3 is beyond our control, and it's what warranties are for. 4 requires that we be careful which vehicles we use. As an example, I love the Youtube channel "I Do Cars".....it's a guy who runs a parts shop in Missouri who tears down cores with a "Why did this fail?" bent. He recently did a 1.5L and a 2.7L F150 Ecoboost. The 1.5L was surprising for using a huge wet belt for the cams, which is of course known for failing and grenading the engine. But that's a cheapo powerplant, so I guess you get what you pay for. The 2.7L surprised me by using a tiny wet belt to drive the oil pump.....which failed and turned an otherwise good engine into a core. The 2.7/3.0L is VERY impressive in terms of its block construction, but inexplicably uses a rubber belt in a hot, oily environment that makes it nearly impossible to replace as a maintenance item. The take-away for me was that the 2.7/3.0L is a generally great engine that nobody should buy unless they intend to offload the truck around 80k miles because it is a ticking time bomb. I am still stunned by that finding, but it shows how deep you have to look to avoid lemons as you cannot trust automakers to do sane things.

Finally, on 1 and 2, most of the engines on that channel are dead due to lack of maintenance and/or overheating. WHICH oil and filter you use and "3000 vs 6000 miles" matters far less than the fact that you are keeping up with maintenance intervals. 6000 probably does no measurably harm over 3000, but 10000 mile intervals will catch up with you (again, depending upon your timeframe). There are diesels where folks never change the oil and they make it 30k miles (at which point $700 in savings cost the idiot owner $12k in repairs)......automotive engineering has gotten exceptionally good in some respects.

 

[Calson]

Cannot go by miles driven as a vehicle driven primarily on the freeway at 65 mph and after 5,000 miles has been in operation for 80 hours or less is not the same as a taxi in NYC that after 5000 miles of driving has been operating for 250 hours. Guess which vehicle's motor oil has the most in need of changing.

I guess people have short memories but there were thousands of articles written about the new engines and new motor oils being developed to meet the EPA 2017 requirements for lower viscosity motor oils to improve fuel economy. Any oil that can meet the new standard is going to be better than any oil produced for the old standard. Thousands of engines were run exhaustively and then torn down to check of excessive wear of any parts.

But going back to STP and Amsoil it is a good investment to spend money on marketing to convince a gullible public to pay more for some product with magical properties.

My first car was a 1952 Willys and in those days a vehicle with more than 100,000 miles on the original engine was considered to be very special. And the American engines were geared to run at 2,000 rpms at freeway speeds. It is not unusual now to have car engines go for more than 300,000 miles without any major repairs and the difference is in the materials and the lubricants being used.

 

[Shane150]

I'm partial to AmsOil. But look around and pick the one you think is highest quality oil. After all, there is synthetic oil, and then there is synthetic oil. As to filters, I use Canton Racing Products 8µ filter with one of their 1µ filters set up as a bypass filter. In any event look around at the filtration capability and pick the lowest you can find. Stick with that.

After watching a few Youtube videos and reading a few oil test reports, without being easily influenced, I decided to use Amsoil oil and filter. Canton filter was a stretch for me but I did look at them and they look solid. Is the top lid on Canton filters easy to remove given the placement of PowerBoost filter? Right now I will aim for 5000miles between changes but I will also monitor the oil life meter and change earlier if necessary.

 

[Gros Ventre]

After watching a few Youtube videos and reading a few oil test reports, without being easily influenced, I decided to use Amsoil oil and filter. Canton filter was a stretch for me but I did look at them and they look solid. Is the top lid on Canton filters easy to remove given the placement of PowerBoost filter? Right now I will aim for 5000miles between changes but I will also monitor the oil life meter and change earlier if necessary.

Yes, I have no problem getting it off or back on. I use their short filter. There's likely room for the longer one, I was just unsure of that early on and ordered the short one. The particular location leaves much to be desired by the Ford engineer that set that up............ :-( , but that's life in the big city.

 

[Gros Ventre]

I just realized you asked about taking the top lid off the Canton filter. I do my own oil & filter changes. I take the filter off as a unit and then take the top lid off the body on the bench. Trying to remove just the top lid up in that cranny where Ford put the filter woud be a real drill...

 

[JerseyGlock]

I've been using Amsoil https://www.amsoil.com/p/amsoil-extended-life-5w-30-100-synthetic-motor-oil-xlf/

 

[amschind]

Cannot go by miles driven as a vehicle driven primarily on the freeway at 65 mph and after 5,000 miles has been in operation for 80 hours or less is not the same as a taxi in NYC that after 5000 miles of driving has been operating for 250 hours. Guess which vehicle's motor oil has the most in need of changing.

My first car was a 1952 Willys and in those days a vehicle with more than 100,000 miles on the original engine was considered to be very special. And the American engines were geared to run at 2,000 rpms at freeway speeds. It is not unusual now to have car engines go for more than 300,000 miles without any major repairs and the difference is in the materials and the lubricants being used.

I think that these are two really important questions:
1) What determines engine life, and how does that vary based upon the engine? At the extremes, a diesel will churn through the miles at highway speed under load but WILL NOT TOLERATE highly intermittent use or neglect. A gas engine will shrug off being left to sit and marginal maintenance, but isn't quite as good at churning out the miles. I agree that as manufacturing has improved, the differences have diminished, but ULSD may have been the real equalizer. The lubricity of high sulfur diesel is insane, and the move to zero sulfur diesel kicked one of the legs out from under diesel longevity.

I'd actually like to hear to Gros Venture has to say about this, as depending upon when he served he was at least peripherally involved with a Morse-Fairbanks 38-1/8D (which is what the -71 series always dreamed of being). Those monsters and the Napier Deltics are a sort of epoch in engine design that is actually making a comeback, but they were just brutes which were pretty difficult to kill.

2) Machining tolerances have improved by thousandths of a inch, but the percentage difference has been immense. MAIN journals are fractured now on the 2.7/3.0L....the amount of play in parts has come down to infinitesimally small levels. A former Ford line supervisor who I met after he settled on a different career demonstrated that he machining tolerances 10 years ago for the rear diff housings were a fraction of the thickness of a sheet of paper. A guy who ran a diesel parts shop pointed out that in the 1960s, a car that made it 100k miles was excellent. In the 1990s, 250k miles was doable. Now, we should be able to get 500k miles.

I think that 1 and 2 combined support some interesting conclusions, but as always they are governed by luck and personal taste. Lots of folks here like to get new trucks....that's a luxury item for them. For those folks, 500k or even 100k miles is someone else's issue, and while they aren't opposed to vehicle longevity, they aren't affected by it. There is also the issue that wrecks are common and don't need to be our fault. For those of us whose philosophy of owning vehicles is "buy as much value as you can and wring as much value out of that purchase as you can", spending more on maintenance likely makes sense even with the uncertainty surrounding the benefits. Amsoil definitely has an MLM/cultish marketing strategy that I'm instinctively suspicious of, but they're selling me automotive lubricants. I'm currently running Premium Castrol and I think K&N filters. The long term cost of oil changes for me is about 60% vs taking the truck to a dealer with Motorcraft lubricants. The savings on cheaper but likely equivalent lubricants is fully eclipsed by the savings form doing the labor myself.

Taking a step back, the cost to me to gain the ability to do diff oil changes myself (I have front and rear diff covers with drain plugs) probably erased any savings from doing oil changes myself. I got the transmission fluid flushed at 25k miles, and that was $2.5k, which is pretty difficult to justify from a longevity standpoint (I assumed that it would be maybe 15% of that cost, otherwise I might've opted for something else). I bring these things up because they directly affect the proposed benefits of superior oil: if ANY component fails which renders the vehicle unsafe/unable to drive or prohibitively expensive to inspect/register, the status of every other system is instantly irrelevant. Taking ANOTHER big step back, this is my main reason for wanting a series hybrid (i.e. some kind of ICE driving a generator and electric motors turning the wheels):

If you have parts A, B, C and D, and each has a say 90% chance of remaining functional at the end of a year, and every one of them has to work of the whole system is a total loss, the most efficient way to improve total system reliability isn't to make that 90% higher for one or more of the components, but to COMPLETELY ELIMINATE one or more of the components. I.e. base case .0.9^4=0.65; 95^4=0.81; 0.9^3=0.72 and 0.9^2=0.81 0.95^2= 0.9. Consider that the point of diminishing returns affects these results, such that small improvements in reliability become progressively more "expensive" in engineering/manufacturing/material cost. Consider also that if those efforts are focused upon fewer parts, then the likelihood of improvement for a given cost is greater. In practical terms, the electric motor from the 195x GE fan is still blowing cold air and giving off a retro vibe, and I was the only person who maintained it, ONCE, in 2007. There are ZERO ICEs from the 1950s that can claim that degree of reliability. A solid oxide fuel cell with a thermoelectric bottoming cycle has 4 moving parts (fan motor, blower motor, fuel pump, water pump) with a thermal efficiency somewhere around 65-75%. For all of these dicussions, that's where I think that we are(/should be) headed.

Sorry for the long winded post, but it's a neat topic to me.

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