Originally Posted By: dparm
doofood, what bothers me about RLI is how they specify such a wide range of values on their PDSes. It's hard for me to tell if I'm getting a light, medium, or thin oil. Is there really that much variability in their production process? Would two different VOAs return vastly different results?
Until they lock that down and provide real data (or a much narrower range), I refuse to buy it.
Can't blame you.
For what my opinion is worth (i.e. probably not much), I don't get the sense that it's about variation in production processes. I think it's just that they are a small outfit and don't have time to keep updating the PDSs with the new info every time a formula is tweaked (which is relatively often compared to other companies since they are working with very new technology), and/or they simply don't feel it's worth their time to pin down more accurate numbers based on who their customers tend to be. I'm sure it'd be far more informative to ask them, though.
For my purposes, the recommendations I am receiving from Terry Dyson (based on my application) and my correspondence with the folks at RLI (based on their products) gave me enough confidence that RLI was worth trying out. The UOA (which you may notice was at a relatively short interval) was what sealed the deal. If I didn't have those things, I probably would share your feelings.