How to Oil Your Air Filter Properly

00:00 so the first thing that happens when you buy a cold air intake you’re given two options you can go with a dry filter or you can go with an oil filter what’s the difference a lot of people love dry filters because they think it’s easy to maintain they’re

00:11 convenient you just pick them out kick them a few times run some water through it a lot of the old people they swear by the oil filters because they have long life they’re exceptionally good at catching dirt and they actually flow a little bit better

00:23 but what’s the difference one’s red one’s black a lot more than that let’s get into it so how do you know when it’s time to service your filter sometimes it’s super obvious this one is real dirty you can tell other people might say check every 5000 miles 10000

00:46 miles but the easiest way just check your filter every time you’re in for an oil change now depending on where you live and how you drive your filter will get dirty faster or slower if you’re out on a farm or a ranch with a lot of fine dust in the air your

00:58 filter is going to get a lot dirtier a lot quicker so we recommend you use one of our pre-filters these go over around your filter and they’re very easy to clean just rip them off throw them in the wash and these can be used on an oiled or dry filter so this is our

01:12 dirty oil filter but I’m going to show you how to clean both an oiled and a dry one let’s go so the first thing you’re going to do when you’re servicing your filter you’re going to find a hard surface you’re going to try to tap out as much dirt as you can out of these pleats

01:29 now if you look at our dry filters the pleats are a lot farther apart easy to clean but on an oil filter with the pleats so close now if you had to you could use a soft bristle brush to gently sweep out the debris but be careful you don’t want to put more dirt inside your

01:44 pleats now the next thing is to get yourself a K&N recharger kit now the recharge kit has the exact kind of oil you will need for an oil filter but the cleaning solution that’s inside works both on an oiled or a dry one so take your kit take your filter let’s go clean it

02:03 after knocking out the loose debris take your filter cleaner and spray your filter liberally saturate the outside and the inside of your filter allow the cleaner to soak in for about eight to ten minutes but don’t allow the cleaner to dry on the filter

02:23 detergents cleaning solvents or high pressure nozzles to clean the filter element these can cause harm to the filter media as well as shrink and Harden the polyurethane end caps using a low pressure water source rinse from the inside outward rinsing from the inside out helps

02:40 push particles out of the filter media rinsing from the outside in lodges debris deeper within the filter which is bad rinse until the water runs clear through the filter you can wash the oils

02:50 and dry filter this way you can always repeat the process until your filter looks grit and dirt free and once you’re confident you’ve gotten all of your cleaning solution out and you’ve gotten all

03:00 the water out in the pleats the best idea is to put this out into the sun to dry you cannot rush this process you try another technique like say a hair dryer for instance you could potentially damage the filter itself and if it takes way too long to dry in one day just buy a second filter

03:15 that way you have one on hand when you need it and you’ll let your old one go out in the sun a lot of people are intimidated about oiling their air filters because they think they’re gonna put too much oil too little oil well the truth of the matter is that it’s really

03:30 easy to do and I’m going to show you so because um every filter is basically a different size a different breed count different heights we came up with banks re-oiling calculator I am going to show you how this works so first off we have to look at the we have to do the pleat depth so to

03:51 do the pleat depth you can use a piece of paper or business card or something and you go in the pleat and you put it all the way in and then you mark it so that you have from the outside to the inside now you have the pleat depth so we’re gonna put the pleat depth in here

04:13 and then you need to look at what’s the exposed pleat height so we are going to measure the pleat height and then the bleed height from here to here and it’s 9.75 so we got 9.75 inch of exposed pleats and then we need to do the pleat

04:37 count we need to count the pleats so to do that we’re going to locate the clip because that’s your reference I will be your zero and all right so we have 60 pleats on this filter all right so the amount of oil needed for this filter is 4.88 ounces almost

05:01 five ounces or 138 grams so in order for us to do this um we are going to use the k n oil and oh very conveniently it has the marking on the side of the bottle so now it is time to actually oil the air filter so for this we will use the K&N oil so on the can or bottle it’s very user

05:28 friendly you actually have the ounces there so for our 4.88 it’s almost five ounces so we will eyeball the uh quantity of oil we are going to put there and if anything you want to be on the conservative side you do not want to over oil your filter and also what you can do instead

05:47 of using this you can just pour it into a a glass measuring cup like a pyrex that has the lines on it and then you know exactly what you have what you did all right when it comes to oiling the

06:01 air filter there are many companies out there that tell you to oil the filter in every which way the fact of the matter is that the material itself is very forgiving you can pretty much all only

06:13 any which way and it will even out just perfectly so some of the companies you there are people that are showing you that you can oil your filter like this and it’s going to take forever pretty much and you can see already it’s wicking or you can oil it like this

06:37 I mean obviously you don’t want to put all the oil in one place so we recommend to just go around go one first round and put some oil as evenly as you can around the air filter and then when we are going to get near the end we will just check that we have put

07:01 the amount that’s closest to the mark on the bottle we have to do 4.88 ounces but if we do 4.7 or 4.6 it’s it’s good we we are better off having less than having too much I mean look already how much has wicked out of how it’s wicked so as long as it’s evenly distributed

07:30 the oil will absolutely wick perfectly and then we keep on checking because we do not want to over oil if anything it’s better to handle oil even by like 20 it’s not going to be your problem all right so once we are finished with oiling the filter we just have to let

07:50 it settle so that the oil homogeneously Wicks everywhere and within half an hour it’s going to be ready to go all right so now this filter has been oiled and you must have noticed that I was only oiling the filter from the outside because you should not oil on the inside

08:13 of the filter you’ll you’re gonna drop some oil on the on the lid you don’t want to do that you want to oil from the outside and everything will wick from outside in which is already uh something that

08:26 has already happened when it comes to the wicking on your oiled air filter of course you could wait 24 hours you could wait six hours but four hours is plenty of time to allow a good wicking on your

08:42 oil throughout across all the pleats of course after four hours which is what we recommend you will have a perfectly homogeneous wicking of the oil throughout the filtering media so on this air filter I am going to only oil a ring around the air filter and then we will show you how it wicks

09:03 out evenly I guess if you were to do it this way you’re going to have to wait like 24 hours for a week to properly weak but in 24 hours for sure it will be perfect so I’m going to show you how that happens so now I’m saturating the air filter at the very top it will homogeneously weak

09:24 down to the bottom and this is the exact amount of oil before we started we checked that this filter needs exactly the second half of what the bottle has in there all right so now we’re going to set the filter this way and you’re going to see the wicking happen over a time lapse video

09:55 for more information visit bankspower.com/reoilcalculator where you can find the exact amount of oil you will need for your filters