Best Reasons to Replace Your Oil Filter and Air Filter Regularly - Vol.296
Here are the most important reasons to change your filters as often as you can. As two of the most important and heavily used components on your car, you should be taking good care of them to maintain your vehicle's health and smooth running.
A Small Price to Pay for a Good Healthy Power Unit
Both the air and oil filters are relatively cheap items to replace. There are far more expensive components that could get damaged due to not replacing them that would certainly cost you a pretty penny. But the thing about the filters is that they play a huge role in the engine's cleanliness and long term health.
They get dirty quickly, and sadly, it can be perceived as a cheeky technique for mechanics at the garage to take them out and show you how dirty they are. Obviously most people that don't know much about cars would react with horror and the mechanic gets an easy "upsell". The fact is though that these parts do get a lot of punishment, and if they get blocked or excessively dirty they can cause all sorts of nasty problems in the future for your vehicle.
Ever been in a car that has stuttered and struggled to maintain a decent speed, losing power uphill and over long distances? If you have you'll know it's not fun, and if you haven't then you should aim to avoid it. 95% of the time it happens in older vehicles that have not had their filters changed enough times. Escalated damages can include blown pistons and broken gearboxes as result of overusing tired and clogged engines.
So to prevent such long terms risks, the relatively small amount of money a mechanic will charge you to swap the filters every couple of years or so is not so steep at all.
Air Filters Protect Fuel Economy
The air filter stops dust from being sucked into the chambers the engine uses to create its combustion. The engine needs pure oxygen, with as little dust as possible. Over time the filter will become increasingly dirty, and larger and larger clusters of collected dirt and dust will form on it.
Should these build ups ever break free and pour into other sections of the engine or block too much air from reaching the power unit, the car can suffer from drastic reductions in its fuel economy, which, in the long term, will cost you piles of money. One of the most effective ways to prevent fuel consumption rises is keeping your air filter clean.
Oil Filters Keep Things Running smoothly
The oil you feed your car does a number of things. It helps keep the combustion components cool, as well as provides key lubrications to the most worked frictions in the mechanism's huge array of constantly moving mechanical parts.
Dirty oil can result in a lot of things including less smooth flow within the circuits, more impurities near chambers and chemical areas and a less irregular supply of clean oil can lead to certain friction points being insufficiently oiled which on the long run can result in permanent damage.
Changing the oil completely in a car is commonly a far more expensive task than replacing the filter. It certainly can take far more time and effort for practically the same ultimate cause.
Keeping the oil clean in a vehicle is essential and the only thing doing that is the oil filter. Changing it regularly will result in clean oil, properly functioning parts and far less risk of lengthy and costly procedures down the line.
The next time you go to a garage, your mechanic should highlight these two aspects for you but if it's been a while you may want to request he check them. The expression is its better safe than sorry, and well, with filters in a car, this certainly applies.