This practice is intended to help users, particularly power plant operators, maintain effective control over their mineral lubricating oils and lubrication monitoring program. This practice may be used to perform oil changes based on oil condition and test results rather than on the basis of service time or calendar time. It is intended to save operating and maintenance expenses.

This practice is also intended to help users monitor the condition of mineral lubricating oils and guard against excessive component wear, oil degradation, or contamination, thereby minimizing the potential of catastrophic machine problems that are more likely to occur in the absence of such an oil condition monitoring program.

This practice does not necessarily reference all of the current oil testing technologies and is not meant to preclude the use of alternative instrumentation or test methods which provide meaningful or trendable test data, or both. Some oil testing devices and sensors (typically used for screening oils which will be tested according to standard methods) provide trendable indicators which correlate to water, particulates, and other contaminants but do not directly measure these.

This practice is intended for mineral type of oil products, and not for synthetic type of products, with the exception of phosphate esters fluids used typically in power plant control systems.