Check oil on a 2007 Boxster with bad center display.

I have a replacement display but have not installed it yet. Would like to know if anyone has a suggestion on how to check the engine oil. Since there is no dipstick.

Not many options. Drain the oil and measure it? I don't remember if Durametric or PWIWS has a way of reading the electronic oil level sensor.

The answer is replacing the display ASAP. If that doesn't mesh with your schedule I would change the oil, measure what the drained volume was accounting for the filter housing too and replace same volumes with new oil. Upon change note the mileage. You should be able to safely drive at least two thousand miles without thinking of checking it, that will buy you some time to get the display corrected.

I was looking at Durametric but did not see any indication of the tester giving me an oil level value. The only thing that I can come up with is a very long plastic tie wrap . I inserted it through the oil fill port. I could tell there is oil in it. I agree I am going to change the display asap. I just don’t trust using a sensor for level detection. I‘m a retired Electrical engineer and know how level sensors fail at times. Everything has a mean time before failure. The thing is we do know the mtbf for the oil sensor. We could see when a dip stick fails.

On a 2009 Boxster 2.9L - the Foxwell NT530 does have an oil-fill function that shows you exactly how much oil you have in the engine and how much you'd need to add to being it up to full. I is quite useful, especially since it doesn't require X number of drive cycles to occur before it reads out. It does however require the oil reaching a temperature (90C if I remember correctly) before it will allow for the oil reading. Strangely 200 on it's readout is "full" 100 on the readout is 1 liter low. That's a but confusing at first.

I agree with the above. I'd just swap out that display immediately and then proceed from there. Having carefully dealt with an overfill situation last year from the previous owner, measuring oil isn't always ideal and is messy - no matter what you do.

So is the Foxwell a way to get a more granular oil reading? If so, that gives me one more reason to get one. I really dislike the "bar" method on our cars which provides a very crude reading.

Yeah I guess a Foxwell to add to my Durametric is a before the next brake flush grab.

Once you get it you might as well sell the Durametric (assuming it has some vin#'s left on it..) I haven't used mine since I got the Foxwell .

Never thought of that it 100% has vin#'s left on it.

Oh Great. I still have 1 VIN left on my Durametric and I was thinking it would be worth about $100 when it was no longer needed. I have a feeling it's residual value just dropped

A key is the units. It says uncompensated is 169mm. Sounds like a reading of the level somewhere (sump?). And yes, the compensated "displayed" level sounds like a graphical display.

I tinkered with my NT530 on my 2010, to see what I could find. I couldn't find the exact entries you showed (where are they?) but I did find some level-related stuff as follows: This represents 5 bars on my center display: I don't know if your car would show the same behavior, and I don't know what the "current oil level" means (there are no units shown?)... seems like it's percentage. @deilenberger you had mentioned there is a fill-assist section somewhere. Where is that located? I would be curious to see what it says for the level. I figure, if we get a few people to report what their NT530 reads at a few different bar-levels, we may be able to reverse-engineer the mm values?

I will step thru it and let you know. How did you get to yours?

Doh, forgot to detail that! Mine was in Diagnosis/Control Modules/ Instrument Cluster/Live Data. You can see the above two data points in that section, so I only selected those two and displayed them to generate the view photographed above.

Same steps to get to mine. My software ver is Home V2.04.001. BOOT V2.04.007. Under setup/about

That’s a cool reading you can get off that scan tool… coincidentally during my engineering internship I worked for OTC/SPx.. all I did was test software… So interestingly enough the last few times I drove the 987.1 the level showed one block down (roughly 1/4 of qt.) after around 1200 miles over the summer (normal). Can’t complain about that oil consumption . It’s now the end of the season so it’s been sitting for a couple week and I had to push the car a little so I checked the oil level and it’s now on the top mark… my point, the gauge isn’t perfect but my level is one great indicator of no bore scoring..I like that part.. anyway, thought I’d share

Hmm... weird. My versions are: Home V2.01.008 BOOT V2.04.007 I just updated a few weeks ago, so I'm surprised by the diffrence on HOME versions. Maybe this is due to a hardware change or something (ie, you may have a newer handheld versus mine?) Or, the difference we are seeing could just be that 987.2 has different labels/readouts versus your 987.1 ?

My cayman is a .1 yes… my 997 acts similar tho…