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Message: <blockquote data-quote="shovel" data-source="post: 1578045" data-attributes="member: 29855">When you explode a hydrocarbon in air you get co2 and h2o. exhaust is mostly la croix and nitrogen.  That's why cold cars blow a lot of visible steam and why oem exhausts have weep holes.    Once the exhaust pipes heat up enough the steam becomes transparent for the same reason your breath is transparent on warm days and visible when the air is very cold.  If you've ever had a cold glass of tea outside you know water condenses on cold surfaces and if you've ever boiled water in a pot with a lid you know that even if the lid is hot to your touch steam will still condense on it because it's colder than the steam.  Steam will condense on liquid too, like the surface of your ice tea where you don't notice it or on the surface of your motor oil inside the engine.  Water isn't a great lubricant and water mixed with co2 is an acid.  That's why oil has a TBN that gets reduced over time,  the B in TBN means base and it gets degraded over time by contact with carbonic acid from combustion blowby.   To spell it out when gasoline burns inside your engine some of it gets blasted past the rings into your crankcase in the form of carbonic acid which dilutes the oil and slowly turns it to cottage cheese. It's your PCV loop's job to evacuate blowby from the crankcase and slow this process.  The hotter the oil gets the more rapidly the co2 falls out of suspension from water and the more rapidly the water boils off the oil and gets drawn into the PCV loop & sent out the tailpipe.  So since engines and oil are engineered to operate close to the boiling point of water there's no advantage to running them colder.  If your cooling system can't keep up with the engine's heat output a colder thermostat will not prevent it.   Any open thermostat is allowing the same amount of coolant through it whether it opened at 195F or at 100F</blockquote>