With my car being over 125K miles now, I wonder if I should give synthetic a try.

My oil changes are free thru the dealer, but I get the sense that if the fiancee finds an apartment out her way that it will be dumb to drive over an hour one way and more than 130 miles roundtrip for a free oil change. When I end up living with her, it will be time to either find a shop that has good coupons or sit down and figure out the cost-benefit of doing it myself.

A Civic, right? Nah. I often refer people to this well written (but longish) article. My wife has a Civic and we feed it mineral oil. My Subaru gets synthetic.

Yes, until you consider that you can get 15,000 miles on a good oil and 7,500 on a good filter... :-:

Or, in my case, I just change my oil twice a year on my car, since it gets driven infrequently. My car is a 2006 (bought in January 2006), with close to 14,000 miles on the odometer. Oil changes every February and August. I could just swap out the oil filter, but with the humidity here, I'm guessing the oil has some moisture in there I do not want by the time I do change the oil.

I sold my Civic with over 1/4 million miles on it ...

I let mine go 5,000 (Ford's recommendation); the car does have a fairly hard duty cycle for a compact - used as a truck for Lowes, will sit for days because I can walk to work, then does 80 on the Interstate. 5,000 miles is also about a half year ... And even at 181,000 miles, not an oil burner (and this is a Ford made in the U.S.). This car starts its 12th year of service on August 9.

Good morning Box.

Same thing here! Our 3 cars all get < 3k miles per year. We don't need 3 cars, but after my brother passed, I couldn't turn down a free car (even if it is a purple PT Cruiser... it makes a great luggage hauler to the airport).

I read about the A/C system in the Civic and had no idea that it was Freon-based. I thought that stuff was gone by now. Anyhoo, there's an article I found that told me what to look for to have some idea of the problem. I can add troubleshooting the car to my list of things to do, which also includes deducing why the home theater system from last night worked and then didn't when I cranked the volume. I guess I should quit posting for a while and get some stuff done. (Post 9900.)

Hello, and welcome to Car Talk. :-:

A lot of people refer to the refrigerant generically as "Freon". I think all cars starting in teh mid 90's use HFC-134a. Maybe some now use something else, but the older freons were banned back then. 134a is ok, not great, but works well for me because our work has tons of it sitting around (we use it in foam insulation). What works much better is butane, but the government doesn't want us all driving around with a few ounces of butane in our cars in case it were to leak, especially right next to the engine...

TGIF!

A couple nights ago, there was discussion about running out of passport pages - apparently (some) US Embassies will still add pages while one waits.

Isn't an oil change like $29.99 at the various quick lube places? Why change your oil yourself when it is sufficiently cheap to have it done at a shop while you sit in the car? I would never waste my time doing that sort of minor (and dirty) car task when I could pay $30 to have it done (and only have to do it twice a year).

+1, and you can often use a coupon to get it down to under $20.