Toyota Corolla 2007 CE Oil Change Pump Question

Just a thought...

How is a pump/vacuum for better than putting the car on one jackstand and taking the drain plug out for free? I don't see the point in buying a vacuum that you will use once, maybe twice, a year when you can take the drain plug out for free.

Beside avoiding crawling on the floor I can see another point: Eventually the drain plug thread wears out. (Luckily it's normally the plug that wears out first, so you can buy a new plug). I used to use a 12V siphon pump on my 2000 Corolla 4WD, but only at every other oilchange, between the filter changes. The siphon pump will not get all out. If that will work on your car I really do not know.

Asbjørn from Norway

Don't you think you are wasting your time and money by doing the siphon thing and not changing the filter at every change ? Much of the dirt is laying at the bottom of the oil pan and you have some left in the filter.

I always change the filter at each oil change. YOu only spend a few more dollars (or whatever the money is) on an expensive item to repair or replace..

I understand that Mercedes dealers are using a siphon method for oil changes:

I rarely drive my car anymore, maybe 3000 km a year, and the only reason I change my oil once a year is due to cold weather moisture contamination to the oil during the winter months. Any sediment that may accumulate at the bottom of the oil pan would be an insignificant issue for my application.

I've never used the siphon method for changing engine oil (I have for transmission fluid), but I had a good freind who created his own rig for doing this. He showed it to me one time and in an effort to convince me it worked as well as conventional draining, he removed the drain plug after siphoning out the oil. Almost nothing came out (about what I usually get after it seems like I wait forever for all the oil to finally drain out of the drain hole. Although he did not convert me to the siphoning method, he convinced me, at least for his car (a 3.8L Buick), that it work about as well as removing the drain plug. I am not at all worried about the possibility of crud being left in the bottom of the pan by the siphoning method. I don't think it is any more likely to be left behind if you siphon the oil out versus conventional draining, and even if it is, where is it going? If it hasn't already been caught by the oil filter, then it seems likely it was stopped by the pick-up screen. Maybe I am lucky, but I've never had the oil pan off one of my cars where there was any significant accumulation of "stuff."

My friend's rig consisted of an old helium can (the small sort you can buy to blow up ballons) and a ball valve. He used an the air compressor driven vacuum pump (looks like a brick to me, but creates a vaccum by passing a stream of air through a venturi) to pull a vacuum on the can. After he had pulled the vaccum on the can, he closed the valve and attached a hose to the can. He would insert the hose down the dipstick tube and open the valve. Volia, the oil would be sucked out of the oil pan. When he heard a lot of gurgling, he's shut off the valve. The can could hold enough oil for several changes before he would need to empty the oil and recharge the vacuum.

I have a different sort of rig I use for sucking out transmission fluid. It is sort of like a bicycle pump attached to a big plastic can. You can use it to create a vacuum to pull fluid out of a transmission, or reverse the flow to pump it back in. The plastic can is graduated so you can see how much fluid you pulled out. Even if you are going to drop the transmission pan to change the screen, it is nice to remove the fluid first so you don't ahve a mess when you drop the pan. This rig would certainly work for sucking out engine oil, but to me it is at least as easy to just pull the drain plug.

Ed

Ed Ed

I'm closing in on 60 years old. My father was a used car dealer when I was a kid, I worked in a gas station at 16. I have been wrenching on cars since I was about 10.

I have never ever in my life seen a drain plug thread that was worn out, except one (that's one out of several dozen) that was put in wrong by some idiot with a huge wrench and no sense of feel. Worn out threads is a very remote occurance. Nothing will wear out in the performance of a routine oil change UNLESS the gorilla at the airport that handles your luggage comes over to do the oil change. Seriously. And, they sell plug repair kits for less than $20. If one is reasonably careful they will never have this problem, and if they are not so careful then for $20 they can fix the mistake and learn how to be careful from that day forward.

Draining the oil out the bottom of the engine does get all of everything that needs to be gotten, and it does it every time without question. there is no substitute for draining the oil.

If you are changing oil in lots of engine and do not have a lift to dedicate to the job, or a pit to park over, then sucking the oil out might make sense because as you pump the old oil out you can walk around the shop doing another task. But for the guy at home changing his own oil, I don't see how the cost of a pump could possibly pencil out. I own three cars today, two years ago I had 6 -- my car, wife's car, two kids cars, my truck and a Jeep -- and I could not justify the cost of pumping the oil as opposed to draining it out the bottom. I spend plenty of money on my fleet -- I bought an OBD II Scan Tool for $150 -- and I like having a crap-load of tools, but I don't see any benefit to owning a pump that sucks the oil out when I can open a drain plug and get the oil out for free.

I never let the "pros" do it anymore. I've had problems with overfilling, crossthreading the drain plug, and tightening the filter down metal to metal, necessitating shredding the filter to get it off. That about covers half of the times I had the "pros" do it. Nope, not for me anymore.

Moisture issues are all the more reason to drain rather than siphon. Let that thing drip out for about a half hour and get all that moisture contaminated oil out.

Then you're not actually taking it to professionals.

Trying to save a buck, eh? It's the cheapest man who spends the most.

The guy who handles my Honda, it's like watching an artist at work.

When you find a true pro (as opposed to a hack), you stick with him.