Quote:
Originally Posted by Jordanwolf
Oil coolers in cold temperatures seem to be a concern thrown around basically everywhere you read, which is why I asked.
Surely there are negatives? Because right now it mostly seems too good to be true, besides the price, unless that is the main negative.
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The concerns are about oil ever getting hot enough in the winter to burn off any moisture in the oil, not about how it affects the car starting in really cold temperatures.
Depending on how long your drives are it might not be getting hot enough even without any sort of oil cooler. You need oil temperatures to hit at least 100C to burn off any moisture. If you're really concerned about that part, I'd suggest logging it stock to see how hot the oil is getting on your daily usage to see if it's actually going to make any difference or not. Even the liquid to liquid setups like the OEM forester one won't get the oil up above 100C since the coolant is ideally never that hot.
I can tell you this much, a 15 minute drive through town in the middle of the winter didn't get the oil hot enough even without the cooler. Mine would need a good spirited drive to get the oil that hot in the winter, even bone stock.
Some other negatives...
Potential huge failure point if something punctures the core. If you were to have a big hole put it in at WOT it wouldn't take long at all for pressure to drop low enough to be catastrophic to the engine. I was lucky that when my core developed a leak it was small enough that I noticed the puddle long before it was bad enough to ruin the engine.
You can't drain the oil out, so there's always some old oil left. If that really bugs you then you can drain, fill, run for a couple minutes, drain, refill and it'll do a better job of flushing the old oil.
Like I said, I've had it on my car for ~5 years now and it's daily driven all year. 185k kms, original engine, easily 50 track days on it. YMMV, but I have zero regrets putting one on.