High oil consumption?
 

Quick question, is a litre per 1000 miles excessive for a KV6?

Thanks

Yes that level of oil consumption is way too high

Even at 10,000 miles per litre and I would be alarmed at that :eek:

Given that level I would be looking seriously at bore to piston ring wear or breakages due to gumming up or overheating. Unless of course you have a leak somewhere ?

I'm currently working on rebuilding my sons KV6 (ZS180) that we removed along with the knackered gearbox last weekend. This vehicle has been absolutely ragged and neglected in its past life, including severe overheat in its 130k miles and was run on dirty oils with big end bearing on cylinder 1 completely goosed. However despite being worn on the bearing surfaces, I would have expected the piston and bores to be in poor shape too the engine has not burnt any oil over the last 30k miles in his ownership, which to me is testament to engine robustness which is allegedly fragile.

…….And maybe blocked breathers / cam cover filters leading to high sump pressures , or oil cooler leakage :shrug:

There is no visible leakage, you'd expect to find a couple of litres worth pretty easily. I think i'll try some engine restore to see if that helps.

If the engine has been lying around unused for a number of years it would not be unrealistic to consider that the piston or oil control rings are gummed up allowing compression and oil to leak past. Perhaps an additive and just general use might revive it eventually?

No engine should consume oil and I hope someone from Vauxhall reads this. Your piston rings are designed to prevent this from happening.
The only car designed to burn oil and that is a shade over a litre and a bit over 200 miles. Is Red in colour and takes part in F1 races, their reason for doing this is Petrol has a maximum amount of energy it can produce when combusting, which means that on 110kg of petrol there is a limit to the total amount of energy that fuel can produce. If however you add some oil to the petrol you can achieve a slightly higher mount of energy being produced.
The Red cars did have in 2017 a top off oil tank for this very reason. Though this year the FIA have banned this practice. So you just use a slightly larger sump and over fill the engine before the start of the race.
In road cars this practice is not used if during an oil change you add say 6 litres of oil to fill your engine with oil, you should be taking the same six litres out of the engine some 10,000 miles later.
Hopefully it is just sticky rings. But I would carry out a compression test anyway just to make sure there are no surprises you don’t want to know about.
Alan


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I would argue that all engines burn oil but the amount is miniscule especially compared with Old Rover engines of the 1950/60's which were virtually designed to burn it.
Surely if the oil control rings scraped off all the oil on the bores the engine would seize up . What does vary greatly is the amount. Modern engines are designed to use the minimum amount necessary to provide boundary lubrication to the bores. Any more and they fail the emission regulations apart from anything else. Also owners now expect to not have to "top up" between oil changes.
Back to the initial question , 1000 mile per litre is high but not in my opinion indicative of something drastically wrong. If the vehicle has been left unused for a while it could be as suggested gummed up rings or possible valve seals also could have stuck and torn slightly allowing oil past. I had that happen on a Land Rover and the oil consumption shot up to about 700 miles per litre. New valve seals & it dropped back to virtually nil.

Hi P-Nut
did you resolve the oil issue? If you used an additive wthat worked to free the rings which one did yo use?
I've had the same problem with my 07 connie that I rested from coparts (no history or anything) I've now done 17k in it and have to check the oil every couple of days.If additive works/helps I'd like to try that before going the new valve seal route - or worse.
Thanks

Thanks will do