I was just pricing up oil & air filters prior to doing a service & happened upon this one at Rimmers. It's claimed to be not only better breathing but also is cleanable by air or water. At £27.90 it's even more expensive than a genuine JLR filter (£23.49) & much more expensive than an OEM (£6.95) or a cheap aftermarket (£3.15) so would take quite a few years before you saved money with it. Has anyone experience or an opinion?
The main downside with all of these cotton filters is they simply dont filter as well as a standard paper element. They have vastly less surface area and so to achieve the advertised "better breathing" they simply have much larger holes in them. They often try to counteract that by coating the filter in oil, but the oil can contaminate your MAF sensor and causes the element to get clogged up faster.
Stick to paper!
I thought that this might be a solution in search of a problem when paper filters are so cheap.
I agree with Aragom, stick with paper. The service schedule says they should be replaced every 24,000 miles so it's not like you'll save anything over a period.
I also agree on paper. Mine had a 'sports' filter installed and the mesh collapsed and I was lucky it did not disintegrated before I saw it.
I also noticed the OE filter, the paper is slightly oily to the touch, whereas some aftermarket ones are just dry paper. Do not know if is very good thing or not, but for the price difference ...
I have a K&N air filter on my carbureted motorcycle, but I would never use it on an EFI engine. I would never be sparing enough with the oil on the filter and it would contaminate the MAF sensor. As the others have said, stick with a paper filter.
I don't think the V8 is particularly starved of air flow so a high flow filter is not required unless an uprated engine has been installed pumping out lots more horse power. The only time I have ever replaced a paper filter was on a 'sleeper' car I built with very uprated engine and, even then, I didn't use a fancy filter, I just used a small pancake filter filled with gauze atop a large twin choke carbytooter to stop the big rocks getting in the engine! Suffered 30k miles of absolute abuse with no detrimental engine effects. The rest of the drive train though, well that's a different story!