gsean400

My car has been burning or leaking oil over the years.. usually after 2xxx miles i will get a low oil light and i will top off till my next oil change at 3000 miles. But just last week i did my oil change, and 3 days later i was out of oil.. i added 1 quart and i've been running on that quart for almost a week with no problems.. when i did lose my oil i did smell a strong burning oil smell and saw some oil around my valve cover gaskets. Is it possible it leaked out my valve cover gaskets? I was running the car pretty hard that week also. There's no smoke coming out the exhaust and the car seems to be doing just fine. Im just wondering why i lost fresh oil and im not losing my added 1 quart? Any ideas before i take it to a shop?

akafixture

How many miles are on your car? If you are losing that much you would see it somewhere. I would think that you are starting to burn oil. Any other maintenance or repairs done to the care?

You can tighten the valve covers some, I did and it stopped a small leak but I need to replace them. It might be that you have multiple leaks.

gsean400

i have 250,000 on the car. I thought i might have been burning oil also.. but i dont see any whitish/blue smoke coming out the exhaust. Im so confused right now.

kevin3344

Believe it or not you can lose a lot of oil from your valve cover gaskets. You'll see a big difference when you have those done; and you won't be getting any of the fumes inside the cabin. Once I did mine my oil consumption dropped considerably.

More recently I would lose about a quart in between changes, and the dealer said it was my dipstick o-ring gasket. You might not think much of it, but let me tell you I can't believe how much a $6 gasket makes! I still lose a little oil (with 225,000 miles I expect that) but I can almost go the entire time between oil changes now without adding oil.

The last thing I'm going to change is my oil pan gasket (along with transmission pan) but the dealer said those weren't bad. Check those 3 areas and I'll bet you'll be good - and see a huge difference!!

badblackgs

iTrader: (1)

say playa, take the time to pull your intake boot off that connects to the throttle body and open up your throttle blade and take a bright flashlight and peek inside your intake manifold. Im curious to see how much oil is inside yours. It gets there by the positive crankcase ventilation system. yes, obviously oil leaks externally would cause loss of oil, but if your losing it that fast, it would either be smoking profusely or leaking onto the ground which you couldn't miss.

akafixture

Good call badblackgs,, forgot about the PCV valve. Easy to clean as well, but cheap enough to get a new one.

lastguy

az-dave， have you had your oil report now? if I missed it which page it is in? thanks!

CPTSOLO

Getting low oil light means oil level is about 1 quart lower than minimum or worse. It means the engine is about to burn out without oil. If this happens in 2000 miles, there is a serious leak or sludging somewhere. This is a serious problem that should be fixed..

You can buy an oil leak kit, adding a dye into the oil, wait a few days and shine a UV light into the engine, may be you can see large leaky areas. The pros would pressure wash the entire engine then watch where oil leaks out, a surer and faster method..

Some car has small oil return holes or stuck oil rings on pistons. When blocked or stuck by bad, old oil, oil will not return to crank case but get pumped into the cylinder head, causing sludge, which is condensed, hardened grease. Car with this problem would lose a lot of oil but no smoke, no leaks, cannot figure out where the oil goes,

You can try flushing the oil with engine flushing chemicals like GUNK. Follow instructions but I usually use haff strength, double time, half bottle into oil and idle 20- 30 minutes. That dissolves the hardened sludge. Dumped oil will be black and thick like tar. Do it twice and with every oil change, you will notice engine runs smoother, may be losing less oil,