[quote=“Patton” post=67461]What do you think about Rotella?
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It’s been a while since I was obsessed by oil but IIRC there are 3 flavors of Rotella and everyone seems to talk as if there are only 1. Of the 3 only 1 of them had decent levels of ZDDP, but the additive packages of the 3 could have changes several times since.
Related.
Oil certs and ZDDP. People talk as if the oil certifications of the last decade are directly linked to reduced levels of ZDDP. That’s not quite the way it went down tho. The oil certs that required reduced ZDDP only applied to the lighter wieghts and not to xW40 and thicker. The actual cause of reduced ZDDP in those oils was economic decisions by the oil mfr’s. Maybe ZDDP is expensive, or maybe there were savings in using the same additive package in xW50 as they used in xW30, I don’t know. As quick as I usually am to blame government meddling, this was an oil OEM call, not a bureacrat’s.
ZDDP and detergents. Oils need detergents in order to deal with the oxidents created during the combustion process. The more detergents, the longer you can run the oil. If you run low on detergents the oil will turn acidic and start chewing on metal. On the flip side, detergents aren’t slippery so the more detergent you have the less slippery stuff.
Most detergents are antagonistic with ZDDP. That is to say, they don’t like each other. How much they don’t like each other depends on the detergent. The reason this is important is that it prevents a direct comparison of ZDDP between oil types. For example, a common detergent is calcium. An oil that is high in calcium will need more ZDDP to provide anti-wear protection than an oil that has less calcium. Therefore you can’t simply compare an oil with 1200ppm ZDDP to an oil with 1300ppm ZDDP and call the latter better.
Oil is complicated, and everything that was true 6 months ago can’t be trusted to be true today. If someone wants to get all obsessed by oil and do the research themselves, more power to them. Me, I’ll just stick with the small group of oils that the smart guys like Navarro prefer and not make my brain hurt by trying to absorb all the details of the hundreds of other oil types.