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Thanks for the reply, interesting to see you get similar numbers as what I'm seeing. My trucks at 190k miles too.
I was planning to use the exhaust brake as an actual brake to slow the vehicle/load down, but my area is very flat so big hills are rare. In the 220 mile trip north of me, I think I hit 3 hills I had to down shift on and down the hills in gear 5th gear no throttle would actually slow me down with the load I had. Anyway, the keyword in the first sentence is "was", the valve is leaking oil so will need to take it apart and replace the seals or buy the delete kit. I did unplug it though, it wanted to come on while driving even after warmed up a fair amount.
It kind of blows me away, my dad paid around $14k for his 96 and it had something like 80k miles on it, so probably around 4-5 years old at the time. Today trucks in my area in similar shape are $9k-15k. It's not the same effective price because of 20 years of inflation, but pretty crazy how that one worked out. Not many vehicles you can drive for 20 years and potentially sell for the same price you paid for it.
I let my cousin drive the truck yesterday. He used to drive a VW TDI with the turbo plugged up (never whistled). He had a pretty funny comment when he got done. "So that's what torque feels like". Kind of funny he loved the turbo sound, of course that's probably like liking the loud exhaust on a gas car too, you'll want to hear it sing more.
Anyway, progress has been slow on the truck, but been slowly racking up some miles on it. So far I'm at around 150 miles for 1/2 of the front tank which should be roughly 9 gals. I had the same effect before when trying to estimate mpg off that and it was pretty far off. I suspect once it hit's "E" it has 1/8 or more of a tank of fuel yet. 300 miles per tank would put me around that 24mpg figure again with a lot more shorter trips on it.
Since winter is starting to hit pretty good here now, I've been reading a bit up on fuel gelling. Sounds like general advice is to carry a spare filter, some diesel to refill the fuel filter bowl, and some anti gel. I'll have to stop at the place I've been getting my fuel and see if they can provide any data sheets on what their diesel is rated for against gelling since I don't fill up too often. I wish I had a garage and in theory in extreme cold I could push some heat out there from my wood stove (it has pipes for heating water).
Another thing I could do is setup an electric fuel pump and bypass the stock manual pump. In that case I wouldn't need anything on hand for a road side filter change to keep the air out of the injection system. Just turn on the pump, wait long enough to purge the air out, and start up.
I've read that some bio diesel mixed diesel can gel as warm as 40f and #1 diesel can be good to -40f. Sounds like the more general numbers are around 20f and below for #2 and -5f for #1.
Worst case, I'll have a backup gas vehicle to get where I need to go, but the car doesn't exactly haul much lol.
Also interesting that I read WMO (waste motor oil) doesn't gel. I've been reading up on how to process WMO for running in a diesel and there's a million people with their own opinions but haven't seen much proof of anything bad, just expired uploaded pics at best. It sounds like with my powerstroke, the most wear will be on the injectors and maybe fuel pump, like more wear than normal, but nothing too crazy. Also there's been mention of more carbon build up in the cylinders and injector tips. Sounds like people have good experience running around 50/50 blend of diesel + WMO, and some people run up to around 85% WMO to 15% gas or diesel. Clearly the WMO has to be filtered well and probably best to test the ph level and neutralize it to prevent acidic related problems. Used transmission oil is probably a better source, but not sure how many transmission rebuild places there are around me. People rarely change their trans fluid in my area. Heck I put 80k miles on my corolla and didn't even think about trans fluid till now. I suspect starting a new thread on the WMO/trans fluid would get the best results, not sure if there's many people here that are well educated in that area though. Worst case I do have a spare engine (more like injectors) encase of any issues. I'm sure it's best to start small and work my way up to fine tune the process.
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