Harvest King Full Synthetic 5W-30 VOA

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Well... about a month late. Here is the VOA. $11.99 for 5 quarts at Rural King. Not by any means something to go ape about, but it looks solid for the price. I know, I know... I paid for 4 oil changes for a VOA with TBN... but sometimes you sacrifice for the community.

This went into my 2001 Subaru with 213k last week. Seems quieter than PPHM on startup so far.

 
Thanks for the VOA and it's a serviceable oil
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That's a good price but I find differences.

I have a strong Gold Plug drain plug and when I did a run of Shell CT Housebrand synthetic against full blown Pennzoil Ultra, there was 4-5x more metal particles on the plug with the housebranded oil.

But at this point in my car's life, the housebrand synthetics are more than good enough.
 
Thanks for posting, as it's always good to see a new VOA.
The odd thing about this oil is that although it has a little Moly, it has no Boron and a low level of Zinc based FM, EP and AW additives. I presume the lack of Zinc is required for some type of DPF approval.
It also has GTX levels of detergents, so I would not use it to clean up a block or an extended OCI.
Additives cost more than a cheap HC synthetic base stock these days and some of the comments about TBN are a tad off, 7.6 is kind of low, 9 or 10 would be more reasonable.
 
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I don't get it. Maybe I'm missing something. I use cheap house brand conventional oil and it comes out of the engine with more additives still present than in this VOA. All 5 additives are higher in my used oil.

What makes this a good oil, the TBN?

Thank you for posting this analysis.
 
Very weak add pack. Almost looks like a low SAPS oil but I doubt it was intended as such. Low Ca, low Phos, low Zinc, low everything. I wouldn't count on this getting through an extended OCI like other major brands (Castrol, M1, PP, QSUD, Synpower, etc.). A serviceable oil....but maybe only for 3K-4K miles.
 
This oil has a pretty light add pack but might still do well in service.
It would be interesting to see a UOA of this oil after it's been run to the point that your old Subie requires a quart of added oil.
I think we'd all be curious what that UOA would look like.
 
Originally Posted By: fdcg27
It would be interesting to see a UOA of this oil after it's been run to the point that your old Subie requires a quart of added oil.
I think we'd all be curious what that UOA would look like.


That's the plan, anyways... but there is no set timetable. For some reason that I have not yet figured out, my Subaru does not consume oil with any rhyme nor reason. I ran T6 for the first 3-4 oil changes and maybe had to add 0.5 quarts for all the OCIs total (7,500 mi each). Then, because I couldn't just leave well enough alone, I went with M1 0W-40. And it sucked down a quart in about 4k miles. Next up, Pennzoil Ultra Euro 5W-40. This was cruising along with zero usage up until about 6k, then used a full quart over the next 500 miles. This led to PPHM (last fill before this Harvest King) which didn't use any oil over a 5.8k OCI, but made all kinds of racket on startup.

Oh... I'm a filter [censored] too. Had PureOne 14610, M1-104, a K&N spec'd for a Porsche 924 (why? because it fit, didn't leak, and held over a half-quart more of oil!), and a Bosch D+ 3323 I believe. So in terms of being absolutely scientific, it wasn't. But I would imagine the time to hit a half quart of oil is probably around 4k. At current usage, it may be spring before I get there. How harsh the winter is will determine the amount of miles the old Forester gets since it's about 9.5mpg down on the Fusion I'm currently driving.

Glad you guys 'enjoyed' this new oil. So far, for $12, I'm good with it at 6k changes. Sometimes our expectations of oil these days beat up the reality of economy...
 
OK... update. Almost a year later, car has about 3k on it since usage has been reduced. I will likely go ahead and get the UOA done just to see how it lasted.

FWIW, this oil is Dexos approved and now has a daily price of only $9.99 for 5 quarts!
 
I just traded in my Mustang. My new car uses Pennzoil 5W-40 Euro formula. It's $9.00 per quart! And they just opened a new Rural King 25 miles away from me! I bought two jugs of Harvest King I can't personally use and gave them to my sister for her car.
 
Originally Posted By: SubieRubyRoo
I think that's what the consensus was... it's been a year since I looked at the bottle. It is no longer WPP since they changed from the 'Rural King' to 'Harvest King' branding.
Their "RK" synthetic was from Warren Oil, not WPP. (Yes, those similar names are confusing.)
 
Originally Posted By: SubieRubyRoo
I think that's what the consensus was... it's been a year since I looked at the bottle. It is no longer WPP since they changed from the 'Rural King' to 'Harvest King' branding.


I have 3 5quart jugs of the supppsedly "CITGO " Harvest King synthetic 5w30. I'll send a sample in when I get time
 
I just bought a couple of jugs of it myself. Although I believe Citgo does make this oil I could not correlate the dexos licensing number listed on the HK 5w-30 syn to a Citgo syn as mention in some post before. I found the numbers to be close but they are definitely not the same numbers.

Nathan
 
Originally Posted By: nsargeant
I just bought a couple of jugs of it myself. Although I believe Citgo does make this oil I could not correlate the dexos licensing number listed on the HK 5w-30 syn to a Citgo syn as mention in some post before. I found the numbers to be close but they are definitely not the same numbers.
Great deal there. If it is from Citgo, or Warren Oil, etc., it almost doesn't matter, since all those companies just buy a pre-engineered elixir additive package from Lubrizol, Afton, Oronite, or Infineum to combine with some GroupIII base oil they get as cheap as they can on the open market. I doubt if they create their own additive package, as they save a bunch of $$$ by purchasing dexos1-qualified additive packages ready-to-mix with base oil.

The big players like SOPUS (Pennz, Shell, Quaker) and Mobil do their own additive packages and base oils in most cases, but not the smaller cheaper players.
 
Originally Posted By: nsargeant
I just bought a couple of jugs of it myself. Although I believe Citgo does make this oil I could not correlate the dexos licensing number listed on the HK 5w-30 syn to a Citgo syn as mention in some post before. I found the numbers to be close but they are definitely not the same numbers.

Nathan


Hey Nathan,
First Post ..... Welcome !!!

HK full synthetic, good choice. And. checking Dexos licence numbers, you are definitely among friends and like minded people here.

Edit: First post, but joined in 2012. Let's not rush in now ...
 
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SR5,
I have been an active reader on Bitog since 2012. Took me a good 5 years to get through all of the good info on the site. Do you run HK syn in your yota?

Nathan
 
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