...clean/oil it ASAP! I picked up the recharger kit and was amazed how much crap came out of the filter. The side facing the ground was nearly black, but the side facing the throttle body was spotless, so props to K&N. The car does feel noticeably more responsive now. They recommend you clean it every 30-50k miles; mine had about 20k kilometres since I installed it. For $15 bucks it is definately worth cleaning it a bit earlier.

 

k&n says a little dirt helps the flow

 

For crying out loud, saying that a little dirt help flow from a company that is trying to promote more flow is quite a contradiction by itself.

I, personally, would shoot or physically beat to death anyone who would install a K&N product on my car.

They are flowing more air because they use a more open filtration media that let more dirt into your engine, period!

 

Best after market filter made is the Apexi "Power Intake" cone-shaped dry element filter. These are expensive (as in $75+ each), but are better than K&N filters in two ways. They use a dry element (not paper) which means no oily residue to get into your intake stream or to have to periodically clean. And they flow more air than the K&N and have shown between 1 and 3.5 HP gains over the K&N (depending upon type and application).

I have a short ram (WAI) home made set up I tried for my '04 TL using this filter (I still have two in my basement). However, I decided to keep my stock setup because I am reluctant to mod my TL (I did mod my last car - a 2002 Altima SE and one of the mods was a Frankencar/Apexi intake).

 

I don't want to hijack the tread, but if we had one of these two stock replacement filters available for out TL I would be a happy camper.

Purolator Pure One and AMS Oil Ea

These have that new synthetic media that has great filtration capacity with excellent flow characteristics! But they just don't make them for our cars.


But yes, on my last car I found that after a good 20K miles cleaning the K&N was a good idea. I'm debating if I should put one on my TL, I live in Miami now and there isn't a lot of dust floating around in the air heres it might be okay.