Quote:
Originally Posted by Havens78
If you want to experiment, hho4free is a good place to start. I'm not promoting them but they have good info to start you down the right path.
Is it worth it? That is a loaded question, but let me ask you another one. What is 20% improvement worth to you? is it worth 4-6 months of trial and error in tuning your vehicle? 30 hours of installation time? $1500 to $2000 in parts? That is what i've found to be more true on some vehicles, every vehicle is different and has to be treated as such. There is no one kit fits all and a $400 dollar kit won't do it, if its cheap there is a reason.
I would suggest implementing aero mods and driving habits from this site first and if you're still interested see how the hho suits you. I am doing this in the opposite fashion but I believe it has merit to change the way your vehicle moves down the road. I have personally seen it work, but only in providing more horses to push me down the road and thus I need less foot action.
my 2 cents
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20% is pretty big. If I could get 20% more out of my Insight, my list trip back from Jacksonville would have been over 100MPG, and saved me $1.14. Skeptical would be putting it mildly, though, because switching over to 10% ethanol can cause a 5-15% loss in economy in my car, because the engine is tuned to burn
petrol and
not ethanol (in addition to the lower energy content of ethanol, though the losses are greater than the lost energy content). Why would switching over to a hydrogen mix + added parasitic losses, which is probably farther from pure petroleum combusion than petrol + ethanol, result in better mileage out of an engine that gets worse mileage when burning something other than pure petroleum due to its design and tuning?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Ecky
Probably redundant, but why should we expect HHO systems to do anything?
1. Our engines and computers should be designed to be optimal for burning gasoline, not hydrogen. If they were better at burning hydrogen, why wouldn't manufacturers realize this and redesign engines so they're actually best at combusting gasoline and not hydrogen?
2. As I understand it, this idea is this: Combust gasoline -> mechanical work -> electrical energy -> break chemical bonds in water -> reform chemical bonds to create water in the combustion chamber -> mechanical work
Every step added will have losses involved, why not just take the mechanical work you get from burning the gasoline and cut your losses?
3. HHO systems that are available make minuscule amounts of hydrogen. Unless there's some weird chemistry going on in the combustion chamber (see #1), any gains or losses should be small enough to disappear into background noise.
Maybe there are engine designs that would work better with a hydrogen-gasoline mix, but current engines were designed to burn pure gasoline. In the case of those hypothetical engines, you probably still wouldn't want a HHO system because of the conversion losses, you would want a hydrogen tank filled at home where energy is relatively cheap.
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