Oil Leak
 

Hi There

I noticed some oil had "escaped" the engine the other day and had run down the drive.

I have checked the dipstick level and it seems ok.

The leak appears to have come from the driver side of the engine bay, and appears to be coming from or at least has accumulated around the black box in front of the power steering fluid reservoir. In fact, at first I thought perhaps it was a PS fluid leak.

Have only driven the car since around the house to park it in the garage and there appears to have been no further leakage.

Any ideas gratefully received.

Will see if I can work out how to put up a picture....

Many thanks,

Steve

On further inspection it does appear to have lost about half of its oil, but is no longer leaking.

So is the oil level in the sump off the end of the dipstick? Or do you mean that the level is midway between full and add on the dipstick?

If you have lost half the oil, then the oil pump might be starved and so not maintaining oil pressure which would account for the leak stopping. It might not be a good idea to run the engine in this condition, but if you are running it does the engine oil pressure warning light stay on?

There is an oil cooler on the bottom of the engine which can be a source of a leak. I think it is on the back of the block.

What model of vehicle is this?

Thanks for the reply. The oil level is about half between max and min on the dip stick. No engine warning lights on at the moment.

Car is a 2002 Petrol Turbo V70XC

Going to have a good look tonight to see what I can see with torch and give everything a good clean.

Check the oil return pipe from the turbo as they are well known to spring a leak - Mike

So you lost 0.5 L of oil and still have about 5 L in the engine. You don't need to add oil, there is plenty of oil to lubricate the engine. But you do need to find out the source of the leak.

One thing to check is that the positive crankcase ventilation system is working properly. When the engine is idling the crankcase is suposed to be under a slight vacuum. With the engine idling remove the engine oil dipstick and put the tip of a finger or your thumb over the dipstick tube opening. You should feel very slight suction as you remove the finger.

Alternatively, you can remove the oil filler cap and see if a card is held down to the opening.

OK, so further investigation has revealed a leak of Power Steering fluid, the pipe clip at the bottom of the reservoir needed replacing, due to pressure of the system it made a fair mess hence the initial difficulty in diagnosis.

That said, however, I still have lost some oil which needs consideration, is it possible that these engines naturally burn a little anyway? It has done 150K miles now? I will check the vacuum though useful advice that :thumbs_up:

How long since you changed the oil? The loss of 0.5L of oil over several thousand miles is of no consequence in a car run this distance.

OK, Power steering pipe leak fixed, and had a good clean up of the engine bay.

Regarding the Oil leak, pretty much the entire oil system has been rebuilt (previous owner had not changed oil for a long time) so initially cam belt and top half all sorted, then oil pick up issues surfaced half of oil system worked on, seals were all hard and perished etc. so actually this car had 4 complete oil changes in about 1 month and this was all around 2000 miles ago. I topped up the oil and it actually took around 2 litres, so clearly something is not right.

I checked the vacuum effect on the dipstick and it seemed OK, and there is no obvious evidence of leakage, so I will just monitor for a while. I also had to top up the coolant, always a concern when this is required needed to add about 200ml so not a huge amount. Oil is clean so not concerned that head gasket is the issue here.

Generally a little concerned at the moment :-(