Maintenance

I stopped bringing my car to the dealer for oil changes because they kept overfilling the oil (my other dealer kept overfilling our Subaru too). That's particularly harmful for hybrid engines as explained in the video below.

 

As a data point, when we added an attached garage to our N GA home, the contractor only ran one hot lead to it from the main panel, so such a situation is conceivable.

As a side note, I doubt he was either certified or qualified to do electrical work. When I later went to add a circuit, it became clear that the large, white neutral wire he ran ran to a bus that wasn’t hooked up to anything!



The right 50A breaker was tasked as a service disconnect. How did our outlets work at all? They were using the relatively small gauge ground as a return - a potentially hazardous situation. Plus, all the garage outlets were wired “backwards”, with the hot leads going to the wider slot on the receptacles. Since fixed, but wow!

 

As you are running the car as a gasoline car change your oil as recommended by the car.

 

The Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act ensures you can perform your own maintenance, but save your receipts for the oil just in case you need to file a warranty claim. [Thanks to @KentuckyKen for telling us about this Act.]

 

Let the Maintenance Minder be your guide, with some oversight. It is fairly common for modern ICE vehicles to have a recommended oil change interval of 5K-10K miles or 12 months. So, if you drive primarily in HV, an oil change at 6K-7K miles would be a reasonable interval.

Many owners drive primarily in EV, but the MM will still call for an oil change at ~7500 miles, even though there may be only a few hundred miles on the engine. This is when a human intervention needs to be implemented.

 

My last 2 years of ownership have been with very limited mileage, and I let my oil change go for 18 months because of it. Didn't see any reason to dump basically new oil from the crankcase. Just reset the MM when it started whining.

 

That’s a choice. But why not 24 or 36 months?

 

Generally I plug it into either the washer/dryer outlet or the kitchen fridge outlet, though I prefer the former.

 

Why would you opt for either of those options?

 

In most residential buildings (that I've been in, anyway), these will typically be slotted with 20a breakers rather than 10a or 15a ones. Although this will dramatically reduce the probability of tripping the breaker, please do still note that the 120v charger technically specs out to 25 running amps (AFAIR, off the top of my head); this means a 20a breaker is just barely rated to handle the charger, on paper. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about this, it's been about two years since I looked this up.

 

OEM charger is 12A.

Every house I’ve owned has had the refrigerator on a 15A breaker with other outlets on the same breaker. Modern refrigerators only draw an amp or 2 when running. Washer and gas dryer are also, typically on a 15A breaker. Haven’t run across too many 10A breakers.

Any 15A circuit is sufficient for the OEM charger. Ideally, with nothing else on the circuit.

 

I think the major concerns to extending engine oil changes for folks who are mostly in EV are issues like gasoline and water contamination. If you regularly run your engine without warming it up fully, there's slow accumulation of gasoline and water in the oil. Gasoline contamination is a major issue for direct injection engines like Honda turbo engines. The Clarity engine is port injected so it should be less of a problem. Nonetheless, the common occurrence of the ICE running on its own in EV mode (going downhill with fully charged battery, hitting the go pedal hard, etc) and shutting off after a few minutes will be hard on the oil if this happens regularly over a span of time. That's why it's prudent to change your oil at least once a year, no matter how few miles are on the ICE. I suspect the oil is good for longer (if very low miles and no gas/water contamination) but manufacturers say no more than 1 year to be conservative.

 

I get all that, and I’m in favor of following the 12 month oil change interval, regardless of ICE mileage. I wasn’t really expecting an answer as to how one would determine an appropriate service interval that is outside of the manufacturers guidance.

There’s fluid analysis, but the cost is nearly equal to that of an oil change. If the results come back indicting a change is necessary, more time and money has been spent than if the oil had just been replaced.

Thanks for the info.