Let my truck sit for days and decided to check my oil level and noticed the dipstick to be dry. I had done an oil change 1000 miles prior so I'm pretty sure there should be oil in there. Also there has been no signs of overheating. Is this normal? Or should the oil level be checked when the engine is warm?

 

Oil should be checked with the engine cold when all the oil that will drain back to the oil pan has drained. You might have some oil leakage or burning going on. How many miles on the engine?

 

You are burning or leaking oil, or it wasn't filled to spec to begin with. 5.4 3 valves take 7 quarts with a filter change.

 

No obvious signs of leakage since there's no trace of oil coming out of the gaskets or onto my garage floor. I had purchased the truck when it had about ~189k and now it has a little more than 190k on it. So about ~1000 miles of driving since I had the oil change done. I put in 7 qts of Mobil1 5w-30 and a Motorcraft Filter because everyone swears by it :-). If I'm burning oil what's one way to determine that?

 

Blue smoke coming out of you exhaust system.

 

If oil is disappearing and the engine isn't leaking, it's burning it, either from oil getting past the piston rings or being blown into the intake from too much blowby, or getting past the valve seals. How much is it burning? If it's a qt every thousand miles, I'd just keep it full and keep on trucking. If there is blue smoke coming out when it is first started, that is an indication of valve seal leakage.

 

A dry dip stick doesn't mean empty, just means too low to reach dip stick. I haven't tried it, but very likely dip stick only reaches top couple of quarts.

 

@tbear853 Your theory could be correct. I had just recently did a fresh oil change and now my dipstick isn't "dry" anymore. When i drained the pan I had only about ~4qts. With 7qts + autoRx the dipstick is now "wet" :-) .

 

what is autorx? some kind of snake oil I have never heard of?

 

https://www.auto-rx.com/

It's the only "engine flush" that's safe and works well.

 

i'll try and update this thread when the time comes for my next oil change and report the results (which may take a while since my truck is more of a weekend warrior than a daily driver). So far, it is running much smoother knowing there's enough motor oil & "snake oil" flowing through the internals....

 

Really? You were 3 quarts low? Almost half your oil disappeared?

 

If you were really going through 1-2 qts in 1K miles, I'd be looking at doing a rebuild/reman engine. Burning that much oil in 1K miles means you are probably getting close to fouling spark plugs, caking up valves/heads, and coating the catalytic converters/O2 sensors making them worthless. I have two GM vehicles with the LS-series 5.3Ls and they each burn about 2qts in between 5K mile oil change intervals. I consider that excessive personally, but it's just due to GMs ****-poor design on the active cylinder management (displacement on demand). My '08 F-150 only burns about a quart in between 7,500 mile oil change intervals @ 140K miles, which I'm fine with.