Quote:
Originally Posted by Christian
Thanks for the info, I’ve been looking into the electric power steering conversion, and it seems like a lot of work, and pretty minimal ROI for me. With my short stop & start drives I should be less worried about parasitic losses, and more worried about reducing vehicle weight and achieving ideal operating temperatures faster.
I think you and Ecky both might be right, maybe next winter I’ll have to install a block heater.
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Good point. If you want to see what gains you can get, it's easy enough to take the power steering pump belt off and see how much efficiency you gain. For what it's worth, Honda claimed a 2% fuel efficiency improvement on the 7th gen Civic Si (EP3) just from the EPS system.
There isn't that much room for simple and cost effective weight reduction on these cars IMO, stuff like the interior pieces are pretty light. Taking out the spare tire and jack will save you about 25-30 pounds. Removing the AC saves about 35-40 pounds, I'd be happy to weigh the system for an exact weight. Keeping only as much fuel as you need will save quite a bit too, liquids are heavy. Light weight alloy wheels can easily save 5-10+ pounds of rotational mass each, the stock 15 inch steel wheels weigh about 23 pounds each.
On the topic of warmup, getting the oil warmed up quickly will likely show decent gains for short trips too. Honda used an oil cooler/warmer oil filter housing on just about all their ultra high efficiency engines for a reason. These are easy to retrofit onto your engine if you want it. I went way overkill and got a 30 plate oil to coolant heat exchanger to heat/cool my oil and it works amazingly well, the oil temp comes up much faster and sits within a few degrees of the coolant temp regardless of load or weather. With effective oil temp control, much thinner oils can safely be used too since it won't get too hot and thin out. Then you can get the best of both worlds with a lower average operational viscosity and a higher minimum viscosity, which is a win for efficiency and wear protection.