Oil Cooler Impacts to Temperature Gauge

I'm on a curiosity voyage and hoping everyone here can help provide me some paddles.

I have the HKS oil cooler installed on my FK8 and have been wondering if it makes an impact during normal driving (which is hard to do empirically since we have no oil temp sensor.) Something that has been bothering me is I feel that my temperature gauge for the coolant seems to be reading a hair lower as compared to before the oil cooler. It's bothering me because I didn't pay much attention to the gauge level prior to the install. So while I feel that the gauge settles at a level maybe 5-10% lower than without the cooler, I can't rule out the fact that I may be imagining the improvement because I want to see one. I wondered if anyone without an oil cooler would be able to post a picture of their steady state temperature gauge reading - I posted my gauge with the oil cooler here. I need my paddles.

i don't have an oil cooler yet but CTRs do have a water cooled oil "cooler" stock so i can see adding an oil cooler lowering the temps of the coolant.
Factory gauge isn't really a good way to check though cause the bars themselves usually have a large range.

boosted180sx said:

i don't have an oil cooler yet but CTRs do have a water cooled oil "cooler" stock so i can see adding an oil cooler lowering the temps of the coolant.
Factory gauge isn't really a good way to check though cause the bars themselves usually have a large range.

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Oh I completely agree - this is a terrible way to "show" how much impact an oil cooler has. I was just genuinely curious because I didn't watch my temp gauge prior to the install. Figured this would be more of a "huh, that's interesting" kind of a conversation. I'm just used to coolant temp gauges stabilizing at about 50%, and my photo makes the reading appear more at around 40% or a little lower. That is literally all I am basing this conversation on.

TheShadow said:

Oh I completely agree - this is a terrible way to "show" how much impact an oil cooler has. I was just genuinely curious because I didn't watch my temp gauge prior to the install. Figured this would be more of a "huh, that's interesting" kind of a conversation. I'm just used to coolant temp gauges stabilizing at about 50%, and my photo makes the reading appear more at around 40% or a little lower. That is literally all I am basing this conversation on.

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ah ok.

The oil temps would usually be more hot than the coolant temps which is how the stock oil cooler works to try to cool down the oil. Takes heat away from the oil by having a "cooler" coolant running through it. The side effect of that would be the increase in coolant temps. By eliminating that I can see the coolant temps being lower than factory by adding an aftermarket oil cooler. I'm surprised it makes that much of a difference to show up in the factory coolant gauge.

I too was curious about how much lower the coolant temp is with the oil cooler.

The coolant gauge seems to be running 5 - 10 % lower vs stock to me, mine consistently pegs the gauge at 50% on normal road use and 100% on hard track use, even had the ECU overheat warning come on once at the Nurburgring.

With this kit, can you use other oil filters or only the HKS brand filter?

Thank you