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Old 12-20-2009, 05:22 PM   #19 (permalink)
Allch Chcar
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Location: North Coast, California
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Cordelia - '15 Mazda Mazda3 i Sport
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DeserTBoB View Post
Then, after hearing the baloney that ETOH has a higher octane than regular gas, I switched to 87. The car barely made it to 18 MPG, as the knock detector was working overtime retarding the timing under load to prevent ping. Disconnecting the sensor yielded dangerous levels of detonation. For further runs, I switched to 92 octane, and ping is STILL a problem, which it never was before. Only by using premium E10 and jacking the basic timing up to 10° was I able to get up to 22.5 MPG average, and detonation on a dry day is a continual problem. That goes away for the most part on more humid days, proving that the fuel is the problem, not the engine.
87 octane is still 87 octane . It sounds like you're running junk through your engine. Just to be clear they don't sell E10 they sell G90/E10 and some places sell E85. If you're getting ping on cold days it's probably running Lean and as you probably know you need to run richer during colder days. Your ECU is running out of spec. Have you checked your fuel filter? I'll bet you're still running a mix of 87 and 89 octane in your fuel tank, unless you drained the whole thing.

And Ethanol is much higher octane. Get your facts straight. The fuel requirements are different, ethanol requires more fuel to maintain stoichometric.

Mkrusz, mechanics ain't what it used to be. Ethanol and Gasoline doesn't evaporate out of the tank like that in newer cars. Although I can only imagine how long you left the vehicle sitting to let the fuel evaporate.

If you think Corn ethanol is bad, imagine trying to drill for more oil and building more refineries. I used to live in a town that had a plastic plant and an oil refinery, Cancer levels were much higher than normal! Then they built an Ethanol plant.

pgfpro, how close did you get to gasoline mileage? The only way to get better mileage is to up the SCR drastically. If Scania is using 29:1 in their CI bus engines you should know 9:1 in a SI doesn't cut it.

Old Tele man, unless you increased the fuel flow I'll bet it lost power running lean. But how do you figure it lost power?

The big benefit to ethanol in a turbocharged car is the cooling effect it has on the intake, I understand the effect is bigger when dealing with Multi Port Fuel Injection or even Direct Injection. Gasoline has a cooling charge but not nearly as much as Ethanol or even Methanol.

I haven't seen any "real" food shortages. The rice shortage was due to a rapidly jumping price on the market for speculative rice so the farmers held their crop till it calmed down. The corn shortage was due to poor harvest in Mexico and a drought through the country. Food Corn is just a small portion of grown corn and I didn't even know they grew corn in Cali . BTW, the actual water usage for corn is very small. Some dork inflated the number with Zeros awhile back and it was a phony. Corn Ethanol takes less water than Oil. There's a lot of Propaganda going around. Oil is still the biggest Bizness in town. You have to apply salt to just about everything these days. Most of the Pro-Ethanol stuff I've seen has been truthful but the price and distribution are still it's biggest problems.

Yes, an Ethanol Engine can get the same mileage as a Gasoline engine. But they are designed very differently. Ethanol loves compression and works very well with a turbocharger. If Ethanol engines became popular they would have to be built stronger to handle the higher pressure that is more suited to alcohol fuels. Ethanol can run leaner and richer than Gasoline. A Prius with it's 13:1 SCR gets a big power boost just from running Ethanol. Imagine an Insight with a much higher Compression ratio and the ability to run lean!
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