Chain Wax vs Chain Oil

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You find loads of videos about whether chain oil or chain wax is better. Since I have got my gravel bike (roughly 3 years now), I used wax on its chain. I never really had any comparison, as I only have this one bike and am using wax.

Yesterday I got my new daily bike, a Rose Sneak 2 and typically chains of new bicycles come with an oiled chain. So did this one and I thought “Well, give it a try and drive this one with oil”. I drove about 8km yesterday, from the store to where I live and today about 6km with the dog and now have a look how this oiled chain already looks like and how the sand and dirt sticks to the oil.

A collage of two photos showing the chains of my two bicycles as close up. Left chain is from my old gravel bike and the chain is waxed and clean. Right is the new bike with an oiled chain and sand and dirt sticks to it.
My gravel bike with wax on the left, my new urban bike with oil on the right.

If you imagine that on the image above, the chain of my Specialized Diverge is roughly 3500km old and I re-waxed it about 150km ago. The chain might be a bit old and could be replaced, yes, but no dirt or sand sticks to it.

I definitely will degrease the chain of my new bike as soon as I have a quick link and will also use wax on that one. The wax I am using is from Optimize. So far I never used hot wax, but only the fluid wax and am super happy.

Oh … and here is my new birthday-bike ☺️

A photo of my new bike, shot in my garden. You see a light grey urban bike with black tires leaning against a wooden terrace, standing on green lawn.