Okay, I've thoroughly read my owners manual, but here's the
thing.... (the car is an '09 Accord EX, btw)

This silly Maintenance Minder thing...I'm from the old school,
always have done my own servicing, and keep cars for a long
long time (still have a '90 Mazda that runs and looks great).

Let's say that I change the oil when the thing says 20% oil life
left, and reset the MM. If it also resetsthetracking
of all the other maintenance items (say air filter change, transmission
fluid change, etc., which will not need to be done as often as oil
changes) how with this MM be able to accurately remind me when
these other items need servicing, if they are all reset during the
oil changes?

(Actually, I plan to drain the factory oil at about 5K miles. The
dealership took it upon themselves to schedule the first oil change
at 4800 miles, but I plan to do this first change at 5k, as I said.
But lets not dwell on oil change issues. My question is about the MM
as stated in the above paragraph. Thanks.)

 

Does it actually track transmission fluid and all those other goodies you mentioned? If it does, Honda surely incorporated a way to individually reset the oil minder.

 

Im not sure how it tracks the long-term stuff, but the MM does indicate A1 or B2 or B4. The number represents a list of maintenance items that you do along with the oil change. A is change oil, B is change oil AND FILTER. Whatever they were smoking when they decided you should change oil & leave the dirty filter, well, ????

I havent had my 2007 Civic for long enough to get anything other than A1 & B1.

But I bet if you change oil early;your long-term stuff will come up either correctly, or a bit early. Its probably not a bad thing to inspect brakes or change antifreeze early, just like your oil.

 

I've read that you should change the filter every other oil change because the holes in a brand new filter are too large to trap small sediment or whatever... I don't follow that practice though.

 

The whole system does make me wonder about the accuracy of it, considering that with the MM, the messages to do
other service seems to always coincide with time for oil changes, from what I've learned so far about it.
(IOW, there will never be a message to, say, replace the transmission fluid, or rotate tires, without the
MM also telling me to change the oil.)

E.g., the guy at the dealership said to rotate tires every 10k miles, but if I got the message to change the oil at around
7k miles say, I probably wouldn't get any service messages again for at least another 7k miles or so, which would not
jibe with what they told me at the dealership about tire rotation interval, etc.

Yep, I agree with you about the oil filters. Why would anyone not change the filter every time they changed the oil?
You'd be leaving some old oil in circulation while still using the dirty filter with the new oil.....

 

The reason behind it is that the old filter would have build-up on it, simulating a much finer filter to get out finer particles that a brand new filter wouldn't catch.

 

^^^ Just get the Amsoil nano filter.

 

Hello Member...I moved you to this forum for discussion..make sure you post in a correct forum..

Thank You for joining...

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