Thread: Hood Insulator
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Old 12-28-2012, 01:03 PM   #26 (permalink)
NoD~
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Join Date: Sep 2011
Location: USA
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Frogger - '00 Honda Insight Gas Only (unHybrid)
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I think something you are missing, ctgottapee, is that I never claimed great numbers. I charted A/B testing for a few days, each day after work, parked in my garage, and came back after X amount of time and charted my findings. In the end, it was only ~10*F difference after an hour or two... small gains. (I'd have to go see if I can find my experiment sheet. I did a few days of A/B testing with every 15 minutes recorded changes, but the immediate changes were so little, I started doing 30 minutes).

Given that, it proved it was doing SOMETHING. Properly sealing my hood, putting a belly pan together under the engine, etc. would definitely make larger gains there, as stopping the flow of air is going to make the greatest of differences. Not much different than a house, other than the walls are metal and the wind is almost always blowing on them! Killing the drafts would easily make the greatest of differences (though, while in motion, one would have a hard time doing so, but parked... whole different ball game)

what I'm getting at is that most people have these materials laying around (the cardboard at least). It's easy enough to cut out and simply throw under the hood. Results will definitely vary, but given the positive results here on the forums, I think we can all agree that nobody is regretting this mod, despite how mild the changes come out to be.

As for my current vehicle, I have a lot of work to do. I took the hood insulator I build for my last car and slapped it in w/o any other changes. Once I seal up the hood properly, I expect much greater results all together.
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