Alpina Oil usage

Slamby · Post by **Slamby** » Thu Apr 20, 2006 10:17 am

Charles wrote:Slamby,

I assume that you used about 6.5 - 7 litres of the SLX on the oil change.

If that is the case, then you have had to top up between 1 - 1.5 litres after 10k miles.

I generally have to top up with a litre at 10k miles and this doesn't quite take it to full, so your usage is about the same as mine.

This, of course, is based on my initial assumption about the oil change.

Otherwise, a litre every 1000 miles or so is not that good. What were you getting with TWS?

C

Charles,

The 8 litres doesn't include the oil change on the Inspection 1 service: All 8 litres were used in topping up only.

No idea what it's like for TWS, as I had the service done a few weeks after buying the car, and requested they use SLX.

The seller did state that oil usage wasn't bad though, so I'm hoping it will drastically cut back on the frequency of top-ups.

Castrol have two (new?) 10w-60 oils in the Edge range, one for M engines, and a standard motorsport one. Anyone know anything about these, or what Alpina think of them? A better option than TWS? Who could we ask? [hint mode]Slamby looks at Charles and his Alpina contacts.[/hint mode]

Post by **Charles** » Thu Apr 20, 2006 3:19 pm

Slamby,

That's not very good at all - no wonder you are annoyed.

Contact Axel Rimpler (a.rimpler@alpina.de) for a chat about this and see what he suggests.

ALPB1033 · Post by **ALPB1033** » Tue May 02, 2006 5:04 am

When I first Got my B10 3.3 the oil usage was not that bad (I bought my car From Sytner with about 35,000 mile on the clock) not until I went to Europe last year. It consumed about 1Litre/1000 miles. After I came back to UK I came across Castrol RS 0W/40 which is a fully synetic oil. Then I put about a litre or 2 down and it stops the heavy oil usage when I check the engine after about 3000 miles. Then I discuss the situation with a BMW specialist and he said that is OK. When I checked the Castrol web site, they stated that all BMW engine should be using 0W/ synetic oil.
So when my car Inspection II come I already decided to take the RS 0W/40 along and tell them to use 50/50 in my car. i.e. 50% SLX and 50% RS0W/40.

Alpina B10 3.3
BMW E34 520i

Sunnyville · Post by **Sunnyville** » Tue May 02, 2006 10:15 am

Hi Guys,
It will be interesting to see what happens with your car Slamby?? Have you contacted Alpina to see what they say.
I have been watching the oil usage of my car very closeley, I have been putting 1Ltr of SLX in mine every 1000mls for the past 6 mths. Just recently this dropped to 500mls per ltr. I do drive hard sometimes and the guys at BMW say that it is normal and inline with the M cars???
They had also run out of SLX and advised that i topped up with TWS to see if this helps. The last two top ups i got around the 900mls per ltr with using the TWS. What they recomend is that i should change my oil to TWS with a full oil change & see if the situation improves??
What do you guys think about this??
My B3 is also a 2000 car. I do hope i dont start hving troubles as i love this car, cant imagine a week without it

PS when i say drive it hard i normally average about 27mpg. But this can go down to 21mpg if I have a heavy right foot for a while

Slamby · Post by **Slamby** » Tue May 02, 2006 12:51 pm

Sunnyville wrote:Hi Guys,
It will be interesting to see what happens with your car Slamby?? Have you contacted Alpina to see what they say.
I have been watching the oil usage of my car very closeley, I have been putting 1Ltr of SLX in mine every 1000mls for the past 6 mths. Just recently this dropped to 500mls per ltr. I do drive extremeley hard and the guys at BMW say that it is normal and inline with the M cars???
They had also run out of SLX and advised that i topped up with TWS to see if this helps. That last two top ups i got around the 700mls per ltr with using the TWS. What they recomend is that i should change my oil to TWS with a full oil change & see if the situation improves??
What do you guys think about this??
My B3 is also a 2000 car. I do hope i dont start hving troubles as i love this car, cant imagine a week without it
PS when i say drive it hard i normally average about 20-21 mpg due to a heavy right foot

Sunny,

As has been discussed in the past, Alpina seem happy enough with oil usage as bad as 1 litre per thousand kilometres. If people are happy to keep topping up with that kind of frequency, then fair enough I suppose, but a litre per thousand miles is a little too much usage for me.

The TWS is thicker, so I expect to get more miles for my litre of oil, at the expense of a little power I guess. Sorry to hear your usage is high too. If it carries on at the rate you're at now, you'll have done a full oil change soon anyway!

I thought there was little point in asking Alpina about whether the usage was considered "normal", as I already knew the official response, but I was interested in their take on the new Castrol Edge oils.

The answer, apparently, is that TWS and Edge 10W-60 are the same oil, and it is more of a branding excercise. TWS is mainly available to dealers, and retail outlets are supplied with Edge. I would hazard a guess that SLX and the 0W Edge may therefore be the same oil.

I've got 8 litres of TWS arriving today from Castrol Classic Oils, so I'll keep you all informed of progress.

GAR19GJ · Post by **GAR19GJ** » Wed May 03, 2006 9:07 am

Hi guys,
I queried what oil to use in my B3 with Alpina after a friend of mine had his oil usage rocket to a litre every 400 miles on his 1999 B3. Alpina told him to try TWS first before further investigation. Alpina eventually changed the engine.
This was the Alpina reply below.

Dear Mr. Jones,

thank you very much for your mail.

We recommend Castrol SLX for the BMW ALPINA B3 3,3 when we started the production but since TWS 10 W-60 is available, we recommend that for this car.

Best regards

Axel Rimpler
Leiter Kundendienst / Manager, customer service

Sunnyville · Post by **Sunnyville** » Wed May 03, 2006 10:28 am

Slamby,
I know what you mean about the oil usage, I was considering contacting Alpina about it, but like yourself I am aware of the 1ltr/1k mls. I donâ€™t mind that but it does seem to have increased a hell of a lot if you have a problem with the engine.
I was thinking exactly the same about the oil change. I will change to the TWS on the change, which is due this week. I should see an imprevement then

One BIG question I have though is this. The car is due an inspection 2 now. It does have Full service history (main dealer) usually I would do it and record everything (as I am a fully qualified mech) I also enjoy looking after the car and my last car, an E36 328i sport was probably one of the best kept around. The guy that bought it had looked at a few and thought mine stood out from the crowd by a fair distance. The question being whether Alpina will frown on this in light of the pos engine problem I may or may not have? If the main dealer does the inspection 2 and the engine fails then I suppose Alpina would be happy with the history & there wouldnâ€™t be a problem. What do you guys think?

I am wondering whether to contact Alpina though, just so that they will be aware that there may be a problem with my engine??

GAR19GJ
400mls per ltr wow. That is a lot of oil to go through. Although mine has been at 500mls/ ltr for the last 2 top ups

(
What exactly happened with Alpina after they told him to use TWS?? I take it the consumption didnâ€™t improve? What happened after that? Did they have to strip down the engine to investigate it or did they just swap the engine?

Think I will need to keep an eye on this and change to TWS to see how things go?

Slamby · Post by **Slamby** » Wed May 03, 2006 2:16 pm

Sunnyville wrote:I know what you mean about the oil usage, I was considering contacting Alpina about it, but like yourself I am aware of the 1ltr/1k mls. I donâ€™t mind that but it does seem to have increased a hell of a lot.

Yup. My concern with your car is that it seems to be getting worse. Mine's bad, but at least it's a steady bad. At the moment anyway.

Sunnyville wrote:One BIG question I have though is this. The car is due an inspection 2 now. It does have Full service history (main dealer) usually I would do it and record everything (as I am a fully qualified mech) I also enjoy looking after the car and my last car, an E36 328i sport was probably one of the best kept around.

snip

The question being whether Alpina will frown on this in light of the pos engine problem I may or may not have? If the main dealer does the inspection 2 and the engine fails then I suppose Alpina would be happy with the history & there wouldnâ€™t be a problem. What do you guys think?

I would get BMW to do the Inspection 2. If there are any problems in the future, you don't want to give them any doubt that everything that was meant to be done was done.

It may cost you money, and you may not get the satisfaction and warm glow inside of knowing it was done spot-on by yourself, but it's not worth the risk imo.

Sunnyville wrote:I am wondering whether to contact Alpina though, just so that they will be aware that there may be a problem with my engine??

I don't think there's any harm in keeping them aware of developments. As already mentioned, the problem seems to be getting worse, which isn't good.

I would say I hope you don't need a new engine, but if Alpina swap it out at no cost, then it's probably the ideal solution. It's whether this will happen or not, as the criteria seems to be pretty narrow, and most people with high usage seem to have to put up with it.

Sunnyville · Post by **Sunnyville** » Wed May 03, 2006 5:59 pm

Slamby,
Many thanks for the info there. I think i will get intouch with the dealers tomorrow and find out just how much the inspection 2 will be. Bearing in mind though that i have already changed plugs, air filter, belts, aircon filter, discs n pads & i have the oil (TWS) and filter ready to go in.
The main reason that i dont use dealers, or any garage come to that, is that they always seem to break or scratch something

apart from that my dealers tried to charge me Â£201 for a set of front pads recently lol. Going on that price the inspection 2 will be about Â£4k he he

I will get intouch with them tomorrow to find out how much to get the inspection 2 done and a rubber stamp in the book??
I will then watch the oil and hopefully it will stay at 1k/ltr If not then

Real Thing · Post by **Real Thing** » Thu May 04, 2006 1:40 am

Sunnyville wrote:Hi Guys,
It will be interesting to see what happens with your car Slamby?? Have you contacted Alpina to see what they say.
I have been watching the oil usage of my car very closeley, I have been putting 1Ltr of SLX in mine every 1000mls for the past 6 mths. Just recently this dropped to 500mls per ltr. I do drive extremeley hard and the guys at BMW say that it is normal and inline with the M cars???
They had also run out of SLX and advised that i topped up with TWS to see if this helps. That last two top ups i got around the 700mls per ltr with using the TWS. What they recomend is that i should change my oil to TWS with a full oil change & see if the situation improves??
What do you guys think about this??
My B3 is also a 2000 car. I do hope i dont start hving troubles as i love this car, cant imagine a week without it
PS when i say drive it hard i normally average about 20-21 mpg due to a heavy right foot

Hi Kev
When I owned your B3 I noticed a considerable increase in oil consumption when I was doing very small journeys (about 2 mile a time)
Didnâ€™t seem to bad (about 1000/litre) when the distance between runs increased Hope you've not got a problem but probably worth keeping the service history up to date just in case.

Sunnyville · Post by **Sunnyville** » Thu May 04, 2006 11:53 am

Hi Chris,
Yes I totally agree about the service history, just wondering now whether to let my Indy do it instead of the Main dealer (who I donâ€™t trust one bit!)
I drive about 40 miles each day, 20 each way. This is made up of 50 - 50 motorway and A roads.
She was using the same as what you were getting, a constant 1000m per ltr top up. I would always know when the light was due to come on. All of a sudden the next month I got to work and the light came on after switch off. Looked at the counter 480miles

I then went and bought some TWS to see how that went. To be honest I wasnâ€™t expecting too much difference as the TWS would have been diluted down in the SLX.
I will change her over to the TWS with the oil change and see what happens?
Out of interest are there any other symptoms that I should be watching out for?
Will keep you all updated.

Kev

Alan · Post by **Alan** » Thu May 18, 2006 2:34 pm

Don't know if this will help or not.

B3 part 2 service at Sytners last April - they put in Mobil 1 - car was doing approx 800-100mls / ltr - Didn't really worry about this too much as I was aware of the "norm" from statements made on this site

Oil Sevice at local Dealership Feb 06 - They put in Castrol TXT softec which they tell me is the same product (with different name) as Castrol TWS - car now doing between 1500 and 2000mls / ltr

Driving style and road type not really changed that much over the past year, i.e. drive pretty hard and usually 50/30/20 split between Motorway/A road/Short Distance.

Petrol consumption averages at between 22 to 26 miles per gallon.

Al

Alpina Jim · Post by **Alpina Jim** » Mon Sep 11, 2006 11:13 pm

I have just completed a massive 3k.....yes 3k miles in my B10 in just under 12 months and had to top up with less than 0.5 litres of SLX.

As you can imagine I am more than happy with that and again it suggests the 3.2 engines do not suffer from oil burning problems.

Jim

ALPB1033 · Post by **ALPB1033** » Thu Sep 14, 2006 6:39 am

Hi Everybody,

I had just put in a liter of Castrol 0W-40 oil in my B10 3.3 for about 3500 miles since the Ins. II service. That included a run in Aston Martin track during the Gaydon meeting and a trip to Paris recently. Some of the trips I drove the car was quite hard(eg. AMT run) and a high speed run on the A road in France. Other journey including a test run for a potential buyer(whom I told him I am not going to sell my car at least for the next 2 years) in future during a recent meeting.

James

sherlock · Post by **sherlock** » Wed Sep 27, 2006 9:41 pm

I experienced over the last year an increasing consumption of my B3S (now 86,000 kms). When new, the oil consumption was marginal (1l/9000 kms). It increased progressively up to 1l/ 2000 kms . I have always followed the recommendations of Alpina, i.e. Castrol SLX 0w-30.
I have recently changed the oil for the Castrol TWS 10w-60 (the new recommendation of Alpina).
I'm happy to testimony that my car did 1600 kms without any drop of oil (jauge still at the maximum level).

I must say that my old B7 turbo does not show these symptoms, with 104,000 kms on the clock. It has Castrol 15w40 semi synthetic, and the oil level remains unchanged between services (every 7500 kms).
Don't know my B10 BT for long enough to tell, but in 2000 kms the jauge did not seem to drop.
So the issue (sensitivity to oil quality) seems to be specific to the 6 cylinders used in B3/B10 3.2; 3.3 and 3.4 .