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How cold are we talking? It routinely falls below 0F where I live in the winter. Are we talking anything below 32F (0C) requires more than 15 seconds?
I've heard mixed information from the car people in my life.
There are no hard rules, cars are different and so are oils, but I personally would give it a few minutes under 0F and maybe up to a minute if it's just a bit under the freezing point, but not too cold.
Of course, something like a 0w30 oil will get pumped around the engine much faster in the cold than a 10w30 or 10w40 and therefore won't need as much time.
Also, idling isn't terribly good for your engine either, you should only do it enough to get the oil flowing and the blower to start putting out a tiny bit of warmth. Then you're better off driving, because that warms up the engine faster.
Everything I've read says that newer engines (like last decade or two) only need a couple seconds. All the warming up for a minute plus advice was literally from carburator-era engines. Newer engines will be damaged from running cold far more than anything else, so it's best to give them a second or two and then drive to get them warmed faster. That DOESN'T mean to push the engine or red line it, but easy driving.
But I'm not a mechanic, just a super type-A scientist that looks into things at a semi-ridiculous level for the sheer joy of knowledge.
The few seconds is bare minimum, but you can improve on it. Again, if you live in a warm climate, this doesn't apply. I give my engine a maximum of 5 seconds of idle time in the summer too, because I know the oil isn't too viscous at those temperatures and I don't need to demist my windshield. But in the winter, you can tell from the sound the engine's making that it's not happy at -30C, even in a fairly new car with good oil. So you start off idling a bit and then start driving gently. I let it idle till I can see the mist starting to disappear from the windshield on its own, then drive real gentle - luckily I usually drive on low-traffic roads in the morning, so I don't have to gun it to the speed limit in one second to keep everyone else happy.
There is truth to the damage from excessive cold idling, which is why I don't recommend doing it too much on newer cars either - in direct injection cars in particular, I believe you can wash oil film off the cylinder walls with excess cold idling. But a minute or two is fine. We're talking about temperatures that people from warmer climates might consider deadly cold. Not just mildly freezing temperatures
Right. When I wrote my comment I just took -15C winter temps as normal. That's cold. 0C is a warm day half of the year.
Mine takes 5w20, so probably somewhere in between then. I usually let it idle for about a minute in extreme cold, but sometimes for several minutes if it's super, super cold outside.
Sounds completely reasonable to me. 5w20 is pretty thin, which is good for winter driving. Again, don't idle too much, but a little bit is good.