HELP! Wrong oil

[CherryVimto]

I need a little practical advice here...

I own a 2003 VW Golf with a PD100 ATD engine.

I had it serviced at a local garage earlier in the year and they did a 'longlife' service on it... oil, filters etc.

The car recently failed the MOT due to an oil leak which I have found and rectified. The MOT failure had an advisory for low oil.
I used the owners handbook and looked on the internet to find and buy the correct oil for the car... 5W40 fully synthetic to VW 505-01.

Before I was going to top up the oil I check the invoice for the service the local garage did and it states they used 10W40 SEMI synthetic oil, which as we can see isn't the oil I bought and am now unable to top up the oil.

Everything I have read online states that the VWs fitted with the PD engines MUST use the correct grade of oil due to the high loads and friction on one of the cam lobes that operates a very high pressure fuel pump.

I contacted VW this morning and they have confirmed that the oil for my car is indeed 5W40 fully synthetic and they said that the 10W40 oil should only be used in cars that are a LOT older than mine.

So, should I contact the garage that did the last service and complain about them using the wrong oil? The issue is that I can only drive the car in a few days time when taking it directly to an MOT station for a test again... and I have very limited funds to buy some 10W40 oil to top it up... which i don't want to do as it's the wrong type!

Advice welcome...

 

[ArtfulHussy]

My golfie is a 2005 PD105 BKC engine, it has been on 10W40 for the last 12 years of it's life. Your car will be fine.

Edit: Golfie is sitting on over 180k miles on all original engine parts, including turbo.

 

[zinc2000]

Also adding "top up" amounts of different grades although not recommended will do no harm in the short term, the oil will mix in with whatever is in there, and any oil is better than no oil
Given the age of the car I would doubt if it has always had the "correct" oil anyway.

Once you can afford it do a complete oil/filter change, until then your engine will be fine, sleepless nights are not needed :grin:

 

[G-Bob]

agreed with everyone.

Top it up with whatever you have. It will be fine.
The only difference between the 10W and the 5W is the viscosity and essentially the lower operating temperature. The UK has very rarely hit the low temperatures that you'd ever notice the difference.

Semi-synthetic and Fully-synthetic have to meet the same standards, but the semi has slightly lower grade base oil and topped up to standards with additives. The fully starts with slightly better base oil and has less additives to get to the same standard but in the end they are pretty much the same.

The whole thing around brand names and super-performance is just marketing pish. As long as it has the correct ACEA codes on the bottle then it's essentially the same oil.

If you want to know more then there was an excellent impartial post on the vx220 forum from a guy in the industry here:
http://www.vx220.org.uk/forums/topic/102625-engine-oil/

 

[CherryVimto]

Thanks for all of the replies.

I booked the car in advance for an MOT today and asked for them to top up the oil with the same as what is already in there with a view to changing it myself afterwards. I also asked for them to replace the front door mechanism as the current one had deadlocked and refused to unlock/open.
I took the car in at 08:00 this morning and was checking on/off all day on the .gov website to see if the MOT was good or not. The MOT hadn't updated by 16:30 today so rang them (1hr before they closed) to be told they hadn't touched the car. As I can't drive it I had to leave it there until they hopefully work on it on Monday... Not a happy bunny