Only downside is: You’ve gotta go it yourself.
Saved roughly $100, I did, I did! I even found a loose nut and tightened it before it went away.
We need a smug satisfaction icon.
Moving thread from IMHO to MPSIMS.
Tangential, but here’s a (possibly apocryphal, but I did hear it from a reliable source) story about saving money via oil changes.
As we all know, parking in Manhattan is ridiculously expensive. More expensive than renting an apartment in some cities.
So, some years ago, there was a quick-lube place that was offering oil changes for around twenty bucks. The guy who told me the story said that he had to drive into Manhattan a couple of times a week for business, and the parking cost was killing him. So he’d drive into the oil change place, ask for an oil change, and tell them he’d be back in a few hours. Then he’d go about whatever business he had, come back, pick up his car, and drive home.
I bet his engine lasted forever.
More seriously, changing oil is in some ways the most important regular maintenance task you’ll have with any car. It’s easy to do yourself (unless you live in New York and park on the street, but even then you can usually find someplace to do it), and you’ll save a couple of bucks, and if you use the expensive synthetic stuff, you won’t have that nagging suspicion that you get at your local Jiffy-Lube that even though you paid for the good stuff, what they actually put in your car was the cheapest possible motor oil they could buy in bulk.
Hey I think its great that you change your own oil. It gives you a chance to get to know your car better. I used to be a mechanic, and changed the oil on so many cars I lost count. That is why I don’t do my own oil changes any more. Well that and the fact that I have gotten lazy.
Shoot man, I hear ya. I don’t really consider oilchanges to be ‘working on your car.’
Disk Brakes…that’s the gateway to working on your own car.
And as I get older I find myself considering the money savings vs time and more and more I’m thinking ‘Pay someone else to do it.’ I’m looking at the STi and, knowing it’s going to need a clutch sooner or later ($350 in parts…$750 to have someone do it for me) I think it might be best to farm it out.
Changing my own oil actually costs me more than it would to get it done at a number of local places, because I get the seven dollar oil filter instead of the 3 dollar one, and I buy the fancy shmancy high-mileage oil (that may, for all I know, be the regular oil with a bit of Dawn detergent mixed in), but I enjoy the process. It’s almost theraputic for me, not to mention fun for this computer nerd to know that he knows how to jack his car up on a hydralic lift, drain his oil, change the filter, and get everything set up again and good to go.
Of course, now the conflict: My dad is sending me a certificate he got for a year of free maintenance for Pontiac vehicles (I know, it threw me off to hear about it too!)
So, do I keep changing my own oil, or do I take advantage of this free maintenance coupon? Actually, I might just wait and see if this coupon will cover getting the freon recharged in my car. The AC’s not good for much other than blowing warm air at me nowadays.