cheap/easy ways to get a lil more mpg from my civic?
 

Hey guys, I am new here, and new to economodding. I drive a 94 civic ex coupe with a 1.6l sohc vtec engine with aem cold air intake, holley 4-2-1 header, stock cat, 2.25" catback exhaust and a little suspension work resulting in a 1.5" drop from stock ride height.

I do plan on getting rid of a little weight like my large speaker box and amp, and getting a good alignment plus filling my tires up to almost the max psi on the sidewall. I have always heard a good intake and exhaust setup should yield slightly better mpg as long as you still drive like its a stock civic, not a race car.

But my questions regard the mods I allready have on the car. Intake, what is the best intake design for MPG? A long tube like my AEM cold air intake? A short tube like an AEM short ram intake, or "whale penis" intake? Or an airbox style intake like Mugen or Comptech Icebox? What would be the best exhaust manifold/header for mpg? A stock exhaust manifold? My 4-2-1 header? Or a 4-1 style header? Should I keep my stock cat? Get a highflow cat? Or a testpipe/straight pipe? And what would be the best exhaust size? The stock 1.75" or w/e, a 2" exhaust or my 2.25" exhaust?

I've heard a mild cam can also help as long as you dont drive like its a racecar, is that true?

Ive also heard that lowering the car like I have should help mpg as well. Is this true? What other free or cheap or easy mods can I do to my civic for a little better mpg?

Also, do you guys think getting my ecu chipped and tuned could help with the mpg as well?

Search on this forum for exhaust sizing and you will find it talked about 100's of times along with the math to back up sizing your exhaust for the size and RPM of your engine.

The question about the cam, the cam is the big difference between the cars that get 50+mpg and the cars that get 30mpg, of course you it helps if you have gearing that takes advantage of the high torque at low RPM's.

Top left hand corner is the search. Start searching CAI and WAI. Then search exhaust. you can also hit the low hanging fruit in the to lists at the top of EM. So search, read search, read and then read some more. Start a fuel log and start paying your self in saved gas monies.

Instantaneous fuel consumption instrumentation. Build/Get yourself an MPGuino.

I will def look into one, as well as a good vacuum gauge and wbo2, plus getting my ecu tuned.

Yes it works on OBD1. It directly monitors Fuel injection and vehicle speed sensors and calculates consumption directly from that. I got my VSS signal from the back of the cluster, the injector signal from a wire at the computer (I vaguely remember it being a brown one but there was a diagram somewhere on the interwebs) and the 12v + and ground from the clock.

Would a set of lightweight aluminum underdrive pulleys help with mpg at all?

And I know not to replace the oem crank pulley/damper, im just asking about the alt and ps pullies...

The alternator has a minimum speed it needs to spin to charge the battery, the stock pulleys tend to give you that alternator speed at idle so under-drive pulleys will spin the alternator slower and not produce the voltage needed while at idle, it's also going to produce fewer watts over all, so if you do a lot of highway driving in the day time you might be ok, but if you do any cold weather driving, night time driving or short trips, then your battery is going to wear out faster, a few people on here have installed on board battery chargers so they can pull off the alternator belt all together and just charge the battery at home, that works for short trips or if you install a larger deep cycle battery it can work for longer trips, but it's also an added cost.

Yeah, Ill probably skip the pulleys, thanks !