Last weekend I glanced down at the tacho that read 6500+ and I thought, " must soon be time for an oil change." ( I was at an AutoSolo at the time )
My car only does around 3k miles a year but I still like to do an oil & filter regardless. To coin a phrase, " oil is cheaper than engines."
I have 2.5 litres left over from last years change so I might as well buy 5 litres of the same, Mobil Super 2000 10w-40, a filter and as my alternator pulley
is rough and gives the belt a hard time I’ll get a spare one.
So on line, and order a filter and belt, postage £2; thinks at under £3 for the filter I get a spare. P&P up another £2. Look for the oil and it’s £3 dearer than Halfords,
but then postage goes up another £7.
So back to 1 filter & 1 belt, and top down and off in MiXi to Halfords with my 10% members discount to get the oil.
That’s £16 I’ve saved with 10% off vouchers this year. That’s a good chunk towards next years OC membership.
Having been a seller of various items of assorted weights and values over the years carriage costs are a minefield. From my own experience Royal Mail and ParcelForce are the quickest and most reliable. For smaller items I wouldn’t go anywhere else.
When you have bulky and heavy items to shift they can be expensive though and the other couriers can beat them on price. The trade off is it will probably take going on for a week rather than a couple of days.
If you want to keep the costs down try www.postagesupermarket.com The are a reseller who work with most of the courier companies including ParcelForce but offer cheaper prices. I used them regularly a while ago to send out large heavy parcels by ParcelForce for around £11 per package. Going direct to ParcelForce would have cost over £20 a time.
It’s only when you start sending a lot of stuff yourself that you realise that other online sellers aren’t ripping you off with P&P charges. When you have to start buying cardboard boxes, packing tape and label envelopes the situation becomes even clearer.
Hmm, my old Triumph Thunderbird dropped more than an oil change during the recommended intervals. So it always had fresh green Duckhams.
Somehow it also accumulated grit in the oil tank which needed regular flushes. How?
But then in those days there was no oil filter on a bike and we all threw away the air filter for the sake of an extra few ponies. If only I knew then what I know now!!!
When I was sending out books the P&P worked out at about £3.50 per book, a hardback that had only cost £3.30 to be printed. Hence a delivered cover price of £19.99 to allow for discounts and a trade rate of £8 for a tiny profit.
I don’t see how Az or the CF sellers can be so cheap unless they pay nothing for the goods and have the mail providers over a barrel.
RichardFX. Not sure exactly what you mean by Az or CF sellers. If you are referring to sellers on eBay and elsewhere from the Far East who sell plenty of items at 99p including delivery to the UK it puzzled me at first.
It seems that to send international mail you pay your local postal company. In our case this is Royal Mail. They pay the receiving country ‘Terminal Dues’ to complete the delivery in the destination country.
Royal Mail and China Post set their rates according to the local market. What would cost us several pounds to send UK to China would cost a few pennies China to UK.
The rates of ‘Terminal Dues’ are set by the Universal Postage Union. At the last count 192 countries coming together to set the rates. The way it is run the UK gets one vote. So does the US. The American postal service is even more unhappy about all this than the Royal Mail.
All the Far East countries are more than happy to keep voting to pay our postal service peanuts to forward their packages.
All goes to show why I can buy an item from China and have it delivered to my home cheaper than I can post it on to my next door neighbour.
I,m not so sure oil changes need to be as frequent and the manufacturers indicate. Car derived vans have longer service intervals than their identically engined cars? Seems like just an excuse to get you into a dealer earlier as a private car driver.
Another reason i doubt it is necessary to change you oil as frequently as you might think is as follows… My boss commutes to work 4 days a week. It’s a 250 mile round trip. Let’s say he is financially careful, rather than a tight ar**, and he does not have his vehicle serviced.
He drives a 15 plate c200 Merc with 130,000 miles on it. The last time i drove it the service interval said it was 41,000 miles OVERDUE!
His oil hasn’t been changed for @50,000 miles. It still sounds fine.
With that kind of motoring the modern oil in a modern engine is probably OK, after all the C200 has a big engine cruising at a tiny throttle setting, and a minimal percentage of cold starting in that mileage. If it is not burning any oil, then I’m not surprised.
It is too many short journeys in winter that kill an engine.
When I needed to take the head off my old 1.4SE Astra at 175k miles because of the head gasket beginning to leak, my micrometer showed there was no measurable ovality, I could barely feel any lip at the top of the bores and it was using less oil than when brand new. It was doing a mere 20k each year commuting to work around the M25, with a dealer service every 10k. Lifetime cost of 19p per mile, purchase to scrap.
I was wondering about my oil as only done 1300 miles in nearly 12 months. But car has full service history and really want to keep it that way and still looks clear on the dipstick. Bit like a boat i have, service is 300 hours or 12 months and it only averages 75 hours a year and the oil comes out as clean as it goes in. Better safe than sorry i suppose for what it costs.