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Originally Posted by BLSTIC
Correct, I don't have them any more. The Mighty Boy was at 300,000km or something equally ridiculous for a carburettor equipped 800cc vehicle. The engine had a blown head gasket that entire time and may or may not have had a gearbox that did 5500rpm at 100km/h (no tacho). That car had no emissions standards. The Swift weighed in at 1000kg and was modern in every way. It's important to note that both cars were driven almost exclusively for short trips on a tight schedule in what was effectively the city and the driving was not particularly economical. The Swift could get as low as 5l/100km when I was on a road trip, with AC and lots of overtaking. This is about 47mpg.
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I see, that makes a lot of sense. Over here for common cars that's affordable (under $5k), getting 35mpg+ isn't too common. The typical mid size car I'd say is around 30mpg or a little higher. The prius and some others would clearly be an exception, there's a whole social thing around the prius, I don't really care either way though. Kind of like the social pressure for a guy to own a truck, I don't have one for show, it's more about function, but a lot of guys buy trucks just for the appearance. The 2001 truck was clearly owned by a person with that kind of focus (20in rims, super wide tires, etc). It's not my style since I don't really see any benefits to it unless a person liked that style. I'm hoping to sell those rims and get enough money to buy replacement rims and a new set of standard tires for the truck. Of course that would be after I get it running and decide where to go from that point.
I wish there was more cars over here that were under 1.5L, the smallest toyota I'm aware of is the Yaris, I think it has a 1.5L, but the automatic transmissions had an issue, some plastic gear or something like that. Manuals are a dieing breed here too, most people that buy a brand new vehicle wants automatics even though there's a fair number of people in the used market that would rather have manual. Like the Ford I got, I'm pretty sure there is no manual option anymore. Here's what google tells me
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2008 was the last year of the manual transmission for the F-150. Only available in the 4.2L V6.
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@freebeard
That's an interesting point of view. Using my numbers (12 face cord per year), google says 20m btu per full cord, so 4 full cord would be 80m btu.
For diesel, 1 gallon = 137,381btu, or 582.3 gal of diesel to equal the wood (not counting burning efficiencies or anything for just raw/simple math). Using the lowest price on the website I found for diesel prices (I don't normally drive one so not sure what the typical price is), it shows the 12 month low was in oct at $2.36/gal, so $1374.28 for the heating bill. I also burn propane some, but not looking at that, the $ for btu isn't as good as fuel oil (similar to diesel). Anyway, the cost of me getting the last wood I got (around 2 years supply) was a trip of about 6 miles and a week of cutting and hauling. I didn't track fuel costs, but we burnt probably 15-20 gal of mixed gas for 3 people to have wood (the property owner is my uncle and he got 1/3 the wood), so that should be roughly 15gal of gas. We buy rect fuel for the chain saws, so it's expensive, about 3.60/gal, and the oil we got super cheap, I think it was around $2.50 for enough oil to mix up 5 gal, so overall around $4.10/gal and my wood took roughly 15gal, $61.50, plus fuel for the truck to haul it, let's say 1 gal per direction to include moving the truck and all the non-efficient uses of the truck. 2 face cord each load = 6 loads or 12 gal at around $2.50/gal if I remember right. That comes up to around $91.50 out of pocket cost for a year of home heating, or about $1282.78 out of pocket savings.
I used to burn purely propane for heat, it has came down a lot in price so that should be interesting to check too since the 1/2 week of work counts for something too (remember I got ~2 years supply for 1 week of work). My last fill up was about $1.45/gal for propane, it's a 250gal tank but they fill to 80% so 200gal. I burn around 3 tanks a year. That's $870 which is quite affordable for this year. I've been more lazy and have been letting the propane burn more because I figured it wouldn't be too bad of a trade off since hauling wood is a lot of work. Still though, the wood source is close and the week of effort saved me around $1500 worth of out of pocket price.
Another figure to look at is the price of wood. I looked at a few listings and it appears to be $60-70 + delivery charge per face cord. So $720-840 plus delivery. Pretty on par with propane prices, except the fact wood stoves require actually attending to them and such (I'm almost always home, so that's not a problem, and the propane furnace fires up if I leave).
In a world where the only thing that matters is money, in theory the propane would probably be the best option, or start a wood processing business to pay for the propane and sell wood to other people.
I should mention, the wood we get is standing dead ash, it stands for several years and is effectively ready to burn when cut down. We have a LOT of wood land in the area, so finding trees to harvest for fire wood generally isn't too hard. I knew a guy down in Detroit and he said the firewood prices down there was $140 per facecord. I guess there's some limitations on how far wood can be hauled, so it has to be atleast source from the same county, not sure if that's a state law or a local law. The standing dead ash trees are from ash bores (beetle) that killed them. I still have standing dead trees on my 5.75 acres that I need to finish cutting down. Just have the very back section to clean out, but it's right in the swamp too. We recently had the local dam wash out so the water table seems to be lower than normal.
I also have a bit of the mpg go in me for the firewood stuff to. Besides the gas powered chainsaw, I have an electric one too since the running cost is much cheaper. It works well for cutting up stuff from my own land, but the batteries don't last super long when I'm at another location. Besides that, the chainsaw I have isn't a little play toy, it's a serious professional model that gets the job done right away. Long ago we used to run farm use saws and sometimes home owner grade saws, and most of the day was spent cutting wood. With these professional saws, the wood cutting time is cut atleast in half, maybe even less time cutting.
Even though the wood hauling is work, it's also pretty fun, plus it saves money so it works out alright. The whole reason for buying the Ford is that I'm planning to buy a skid steer and besides the ton of work on my property that needs to be done, I'm sure there's other people in the general area that would pay to have similar work done. It's kind of a new branch for my business, but first I want to do the work on my own land to get used to the machine and make sure it's within line of what I enjoy and that I can learn to control the machine well before trying to do something for someone else and find out the machine can't do it, or my skill set isn't good enough to finish the job. Worst case, the skid steer should resell for about the same price I paid for it plus get work done with it (renting one is quite expensive plus you still need a way to haul it), and the truck should sell for as much or more than what I paid for it.
Also on the wood usage, I'm in the middle of re insulating my trailer house since they are known to have poor insulation. It wasn't horrible but it's going to be better than new. It might not be an amazing house, but it's mine and paid for (no debt). How it got it is a whole story, but simply put, I worked with the last owner, and he gave me a deal I couldn't pass up including effectively 0% interest.
It's kind of weird pretty much being encouraged to do math, one of the other site's I'm on generally people comment about not following the math (atv related stuff, generally electricity, watts, amps, volts etc related).
It's nothing special, but I built my own thermostat using an arduino, basically it controls two fans, the wood stove fan to push heat into the house, and a fan that blows under the house to ensure the pipes don't freeze (-10f nights for a week and my pipes can freeze even with the fan on 24/7 so I need to rework that system a bit). I'm thinking to take it a step further some time and add controls for the wood stove too, air adjustment, and monitor the heat output and burn time etc. Maybe would be neat to set it up for fall/spring to auto start (like a wax based fire starter wrapped with a restive wire that gets red/orange hot when powered).
I've also thought about attempting to convert the wood stove to also burn waste oil (used motor oil, fryer grease, old fuel oil, etc). There's a lot of fuels people use, and a lot of them are switching to natural gas as the piping gets installed and expanded out from the city. Used motoroil goes for about $1/gal if the person charges anything at all for it. Old fuel oil was going for around $0.50/gal last I checked (few years ago). Fuel oil is like diesel, if it sits long enough it can have algae grow in it. I've read it grows in the moisture since water will sit at the bottom of the fuel.
@me and my metro
Thanks for the numbers, it's interesting to see what other people get with atleast similar trucks and their gear ratios and such. I suspect one of the biggest upgrades you could do with that truck would be a turbo for power and fuel econ. The cost of the turbo I'd guess is more than what benefits it would give for short term though (say ROI of 2 years).
I knew a guy way south of me (like 3hr drive) that had a GMC diesel. He wanted a truck box off one of my parts trucks, but he couldn't make the drive with his truck because the fuel cost would kill the deal. I recall it was a military truck, around the same era as yours. I remember him saying the top speed was pretty low so 4.56 or maybe something like 4.88 gearing I'd guess. I didn't give much thought on it. I never got to sell him the box even though I had a couple times I would be in his general area for other deals. I'm not scared to travel for the right deal, like my dad's T100 we went something like 1500 miles to get his truck, but it was rust free and locally it was worth about $4000 more than the asking price at the time for our local market (rust free vehicles have a huge inflated value when they are older). Like my F250 box, there's ones listed from Texas for $2000, I paid $3400 for the whole truck just because it had a little rust which is repairable and quite minor vs other trucks I saw priced for more, and the guy was a bit hard to deal with so I suspect he lost some potential buyers from that too.