> At that point, the difference between re-oiling every other year, and every 10 years feels pretty academic. You missed some stuff. It was one oil change for

> At that point, the difference between re-oiling every other year, and every 10 years feels pretty academic. You missed some stuff. It was one oil change for 50 years, not 10, and second, whereas the old fan would stall and heat, but not burn out, when it failed, the new fan would fail irreparably if oil ran out. And it would fail without warning. The type of failure mode is important here. And that's just if the oil runs out. Of course, being crap in an egalitarian way, it is designed so that the capacitor would fail, or the fuse would blow, or the IC's would short, or the windings would burn out, all at precisely the same time. It's mean-time-between-failure engineering.