My camry was leaking oil due to a bad valve cover gasket and I recently had it replaced. Today I drove 200 miles on it, with some slight incline along the way and when i got back home, I checked my dipstick and it was almost dry. It was full yesterday when I checked this. It was even doing this when I had the bad valve cover gasket. Any pointers on what this could be? MY camry has 209k on it currently. Should I try using high mileage oil?
Look under the car and see if you can see anything coated in oil.
If you do, it could mean the rear main engine seal is leaking.
Tester
I’m thinking the valve cover gasket wasn’t the real problem. You have the worst year for oil consumption problems.
Google 2007 Camry oil consumption, see what you find.
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I would check to see if the oil losses are due to external leakage, or due to oil being burned in the engine. If there is a significant external leak, even one which is difficult and expensive to repair–such as the rear main seal–I would pay to fix it. If the problem is that the engine is burning a lot of oil, I would spend no money trying to fix it–especially on a car with more than 200,000 miles.
If the engine is burning a lot of oil, I would change the oil, add Restore, and just keep checking and topping off the oil as needed. It does not make sense to replace or rebuild an engine in a non-collectible car with such high mileage. Driving it until it dies, or won’t pass emissions anymore, and then buying a different used car would make better economic sense.
you can do two things. #1 by checking your cars under and try to determine if there are any dirts coming from the oil. I mean if there are some hard dirts or not. If you find any dirts you might need to clear it properly.
#2 if everything is OK unless you are getting bad output. You might consider having one of the oil booster. There are plenty of them available in the market
Restore is definitely worth a try, but I suggest that the OP should not get his hopes up too high about that product. With my friend’s 2008 Rav-4 (the same engine as the Camry, I think), adding Restore “improved” his oil consumption to 1 qt every 300 miles. Before Restore, it was consuming 1 qt every 250 miles. Eventually, he just decided to dump the vehicle.
Hi Jay:
Welcome to the site.
These two TSBs, which go together, may be relevant:
https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/tsbs/2014/MC-10134187-9999.pdf
https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/tsbs/2015/MC-10111356-9999.pdf
However, if your engine did have the problem noted in the TSBs, the engine would have shown problems much earlier than 209K miles.
You’re asking about going to high mileage oil. It might help, but you should first do some diagnostic steps:
-
Is it leaking. If so, find out where.
-
Are you burning it? If so, why:
– Is it your oil rings? (How often have you changed your oil, and how often did you let your oil level run low? -
While worn valve stem seals or PCV valve wouldn’t be responsible for anything close to the consumption rate that you describe, they should be checked as well.
200 miles, 7 gallons of gas and 1 gallon of oil.
I don’t think a catalytic convertor could keep up with that, you must be killing all the bugs behind you in that smoke cloud.
That makes no sense at all . Dirts coming from the oil ?
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If the OP discovers that his problem is the result of “dirts coming from the oil”, it would be helpful if he could tell us which brand of oil he has been using, so that everyone else can avoid buying motor oil that contains dirt.
Dirts coming from the oil = one way a person learning English might describe the oily, gritty deposits caused by an oil leak. They help you find the source of the leak. Sometimes it helps to clean off that stuff, later observe that clean area for fresh evidence of a leak, close to its source.
Hmmm… That does make sense… sort of…
Ryan Miles summary page has a link to a business so I think Spammer .
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Check the exhaust and see what it looks like. By burning that much oil, your certainly leaving a trail of smoke. Now if you don’t see any smoke, then it’s a leak.
Working at Oreillys I’ve seen a few weird things. One of them was actually that the oil was flying out of the oil cap because it wasn’t sealing, so check that as well.
The catalytic converter will conceal smoke from oil burning.
Tester
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Speaking of the Devil…someone just posted a 2007 Toyota Camry for sale on the local Craigslist this morning, selling for $800 as a “mechanic special” because the engine was using a lot of oil and now it started to knock. My point being that if you drive a car where the engine uses a lot of oil, make sure to check the oil level frequently and top it off anytime it looks low. You can buy a lot of oil for the cost to replace an engine.
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If it’s the 4 cylinder engine, the front seal could be the problem. Look out 90 degrees from the front of the engine and see if there is a ring of oil on the hood, firewall, radiator and under the engine. The front seal is not hard to replace.
Also look at the oil pressure sending unit. If it is covered in oil and there is a lot of oil around it, then it could be the issue.
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Depends how much he’s burning really, it would conceal a lot of it but by how he described it, there would be a trail as it wouldn’t conceal that much smoke when he’s burning that much oil.
The catalytic converter will convert hydrocarbons, (burning oil), to water until the catalyst gets so contaminated it can no longer perform the conversion at which time you start seeing smoke out the exhaust.
Tester
I tend to disagree with your front seal idea
Mainly because if were bad enough to account for the amount of engine oil op’s going through, there would be an oil puddle the size of the Pacific Ocean everywhere the car was idling
There’s no way anyone would miss that. Even somebody with absolutely no car knowledge whatsoever would notice a puddle that size and would have mentioned it in the opening paragraph
And we have tons of vehicles in our fleet that leaking or even outright leaking engine oil
None of them go through engine oil the way op’s car does
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