How to Change Oil

Briggs & Stratton demonstrates the annual tune-up process for changing engine oil on a walk mower. The tutorial covers using a traditional drain method or a cleaner oil extractor kit, along with how to properly fill and check oil levels using a dipstick.

Oil change is another very important step for the annual tune up. Clean oil is going to ensure that all your engine components are protected and running optimally. So we're going to take out last year's old engine oil and replace it with some fresh clean oil. You got a couple options here. The first one being the more traditional method where you might tip the engine over on its side, put it up on some cinder blocks, find an oil pan drain out the old oil and hopefully find a place to recycle it.

We've got a little bit of an easier method now with the oil extractor kit which I'm going to show you how to use. Today makes the job really fast and really clean and easy which is nice. To get started I'm going to take out my oil dip stick here just remove it from the oil reservoir clean any debris that might be around the neck of the engine here or the oil neck. Set the dipstick to the side and then I'm going to use my oil extractor kit to take out the old engine oil. Just insert it all the way into the bottom of the oil reservoir and then begin pumping and you can see the engine oil is starting to come out and I can set this to the side. The great thing about this little oil receptacle is you can take it to any Briggs and Stratton dealer. There's 12,000 of them around the country and they'll recycle that oil for you which is a great little convenient transportation device. So we'll set that to the side and we'll add in some fresh oil. 

Always best to check your operator's manual to determine which oil is best for your engine. For my engine, that I've got here, I'm going to use a Briggs and Stratton SAE 30. Pretty typical for small engines particularly on walk behind mowers like this one. So I've got a bottle here and I'm going to open it up and start adding in my oil. You don't need a funnel but a funnel makes the job a little bit easier and cleaner. The trick here is to add your oil in slowly and then checking the level throughout because it's important not to overfill the oil reservoir. That could be just as damaging is not having enough clean oil in there so we'll take it a little bit slow here and add in our oil and show you how to do a check in just a second okay. So I put about half the bottle in there that's usually a good starting point. I'm going to take my funnel out here and then grab my dipstick that I had before and we're going to give it a cleaning and then insert it back into the oil reservoir. So we want to give one final check to make sure that our oil level is proper what you're looking for on the dipstick is to make sure that your oil level is between the two Arrow indicators on the end of the dipstick and this is looking pretty good right now so it looks like our oil level is just right. I'm going to put it back in and our oil tune or our oil step is complete.