Where and how is it best to change your oil?

Car owners (at least the older ones) still remember the huge queues at repair shops from Soviet times, when you had to book a slot a month or more in advance. That was mostly down to the shortage of garages relative to the number of cars on the road, so changing your own oil in a garage (or even just on the street outside your building) was more of a forced necessity than a way to save time and/or money.

Today the situation has changed completely, and there are countless oil-change spots, with hardly any queues at them. And the price of the work is hardly a reason to cut corners either. So does that mean there's no problem and the topic isn't relevant anymore? Not quite.

As service points where you can have your engine oil changed have grown in number, a car owner's choice has widened considerably — and not just the choice of where to change the oil, but also how to do it. Let's try to work out which choice is the most sensible.

Garage, service station, or express oil-change spot?

For a Zhiguli built in the 1970s-80s, mechanical contaminants getting into the oil (in plain terms, dust and dirt) weren't quite so painful, given the engine's short service life and the low precision of its internal parts. But for a modern engine with high efficiency, that same kind of contamination can prove fatal. After all, higher efficiency is usually achieved by tightening clearances and precision tolerances, which means any grain of sand or metal shaving that gets into the engine will most likely lead to rapid wear on the friction surfaces.

So the main rule when choosing where to change your oil is: it must be clean there, with no drafts. It's strongly discouraged to change oil outdoors or in a drafty space — in that case, there's no way you can keep foreign particles from getting into the oil filler neck.

How can you tell that a workshop really is clean? Changing the oil in most engines takes no special expertise, so what you should look at first of all is how clean the work area is and how tidy the mechanic is. In a good workshop:

1. The floors are clean, you can still see what colour the lifts were when they left the factory, there is no layer of dirt and dust on the workbenches, and they clean up after every car.

2. Once the car is on the lift, the bay doors are closed, even in the worst heat.

3. For every car the mechanic takes fresh rags from a clean pack and, before draining, wipes down everything around the filler neck and the drain hole.

4. Before the change, the engine is covered with a special cover (or at least a large clean rag).

5. The mechanic's overalls are washed, if not every day, then at least every other day.

If you can't ensure all of this in a garage, I don't recommend changing your oil there.

As for the choice between a garage, a service station, and an express oil-change point (bearing all of the above in mind), that, in principle, is up to you. The fastest option is an oil-change point, the most expensive is a service station, but it's important to understand that a service station can also give you a diagnostic check of the running gear, and this usually won't take much extra time or money. And a regular inspection of the running gear is the key to safe driving. You won't be able to hear or feel plenty of the faults that can lead to extremely unpleasant consequences while driving, especially if your car has good sound insulation.

Vacuum extraction or traditional draining?

The main advantages of a vacuum oil change are speed, no need to remove the engine's under-tray, and, accordingly, a lower price for the service. At the same time, in most engine models (especially older designs), a vacuum change leaves behind more oil than a drain does. What's more, vacuum extraction can't remove the sediment and deposits on the sump pan walls, which get flushed out along with a drain.

Traditional draining has one more advantage: if the lift allows it, the car can be tilted a few times in different directions, and very little used oil will be left in the engine. The drawbacks are more time (and therefore more money, if you weren't planning a running gear inspection) and more mess: it's impossible to drain oil without a single drop landing on the floor and the mechanic's clothes, so bays like that are usually dirtier. With vacuum it's the other way round: the oil is pumped into a closed container and the work area stays cleaner, but during such a change you won't see the underbody, the running gear or even the brake pads.

Given everything above, a sensible recommendation is to alternate a vacuum change with a traditional one at least occasionally, combining an oil drain with an inspection of the underside of the engine and a diagnostic check of the running gear.