Checking Car Motor Oil Level

Video Transcript

Hi this is Jeff Wong with Expert Village and today we're going to learn the basics of maintaining your vehicle. Be sure to change your oil every 3,000 miles or at whatever interval is recommended by your manufacturer. One of the things that you should check on your vehicle is your engine's oil level. So with the engine off you can open up the hood and find the dipstick. It's usually located near the engine block and it usually has a yellow or maybe a black colored ring. Have a clean paper towel ready, remove the dipstick by pulling up and wipe it off once and then reinsert it all the way down into the hole and pull it back out. You can read the engine's oil level between the two marker dots. Your engine oil should be somewhere half way in between these two dots. When your engine is cold it'll read closer to the bottom dot and when your engine is hot it'll read closer but not exceeding the upper dot. Now that we've determined that our oil level is a little bit low, so we need to add a little bit of oil. So we need to find out what kind of oil we need. First you can locate the engine oil cap located on the top of the engine. It's usually a black cap and it's labeled motor oil and you want to look for a number under the label SAE. It'll say something like here it says 5W30 or 10W30 and that tells you the weight of the oil. So when you go to the store to find oil, look for the corresponding number, this is 10W30. So traditionally we have three types of motor oils that we can choose from. We have regular motor oil, which cost about $1 a quart. We have full synthetic motor oil, which cost about 4 to $5 a quart. The reason why it's more expensive is because the synthetic formula resists heat and breakdown a little better. And in between we have a synthetic blend which is a mixture of synthetic and regular motor oil and this is what we'll be using for our vehicle. So to fill your motor oil remove your engine oil cap by turning counter clockwise, place it aside. You may want to use a funnel to reduce the chance of spilling over your engine. You must take note that to fill the oil from the dipstick's lowest line to the highest line, only requires half of quart of oil. So pour slowly because you can always add more, but it is very difficult to take oil out. After you've poured in some oil, to check how much oil is now in the engine repeat the step of removing the dipstick, wiping it clean, reinserting it and checking that your engine oil level is roughly half way between the low and the high markings. Now that you engine level is at the proper level you remove the funnel and close the engine oil cap up and give it a slight push to make sure it's closed and you're done.

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