Oil Filters
Oil Filter Buyer’s Guide
What Is an Oil Filter?
Your car’s oil filter is in charge of keeping your oil clean and making sure that the motor oil is always where it’s supposed to be. When the oil filter gets damaged, your car’s engine performance will be compromised.
You may have heard oil described as the “lifeblood of your engine”. It’s an apt analogy because oil is just as important to your engine as blood is to the human body. The moving parts in your engine are cushioned by a very thin film of oil between the moving parts and bearings. If dirt gets in between the bearings and moving parts, oil clearance will become excessive and you may end up with metal-to-metal contact and expensive engine damage.
Dirt particles as small as 10-20 microns are large enough to lodge between moving parts and bearing surfaces and cause engine damage. To give you an idea of how small that is, 10-20 microns is about ¼ the thickness of a human hair! Dirt and other particles can enter your engine past the air filter, from combustion chamber blowby and from normal engine wear, but there’s only one way these contaminants can be removed and that’s with your engine’s oil filter.
Your oil filter has to filter and trap contaminants without impeding oil flow for many thousands of miles. The composition of the filter media is proprietary to the filter manufacturer but in general is cellulose or synthetic media, or a combination of the two. Filters can be rated according to efficiency and capacity. An efficiency rating of 99% means that for every 100 dirt particles entering the filter, 99 particles are removed. The filter capacity must be large enough to hold the trapped contaminants before the next oil and filter change. We carry highly efficient, high capacity car oil filters for most every application.
We offer replaceable element cartridge filters as well as the more common spin-on filters. Spin-on filters have a stamped metal housing that must be strong enough to withstand high oil pressure at engine startup and vibration during engine operation. Most filters have an anti-drain back valve that prevents oil from draining back into the oil pan when the engine is shut off, ensuring that oil will be available to flow to the engine at engine startup. A bypass valve in the filter opens to allow oil flow when the oil is too cold to flow through the filter element, or if the filter becomes clogged from lack of maintenance.
Regular oil and filter changes are the most important maintenance services you can perform to prolong the life of your engine. Even premium motor oils break down with age and use, losing their ability to lubricate and protect your engine from wear, corrosion, and sludge. The car oil filter keeps the engine oil as clean as possible between changes, but it too has a finite capacity for protection, and should be changed before it reaches its dirt holding limits. Some advocate changing the filter at every other oil change, but if you consider the risk of expensive engine damage vs filter cost, this is false economy.
That’s why you should change your oil filter regularly. Good thing you can order an OE-grade replacement here at SuncentAuto.com. Choose from our wide selection of the best oil filter replacements that are available at reasonable prices.