Daox's Grey 2004 Prius

[Weather Spotter]

if i remember correctly you Prius and my matrix both can take 0w-20. less friction for cold starts and less at normal operation levels.

I went with Ams oil 0w-20 and loved the cold weather starting benefits. MPG gain is lost in the background.

[Cobb]

Yeah, the newer insight and most Hondas also recommend 0w20 oil. Since I live in a warmer part of the country and use a block heater and lack of supply I went with slightly heavier oil. My mpg went up vs down, which is typically for an oil change in the insight. Still it is synthetic oil.

[Xist]

I used to make some corners pretty hard, but figure that if I squeal, then I waste energy, but I have had so much unwanted attention lately that it gets depressing.

[Daox]

Dang, its been a while since any updates here. Last night I got a good deal on and ordered two LED headlight bulbs for the Prius. These will replace the OEM halogen bulbs and are rated at 1.5A and 2400 lumens.

More info in my other thread here:
http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...cle-31942.html

[Daox]

Well, galvanic corrosion finally kicked in fully on the Prius. The aluminum heat shield above the cat gave away last week. This is my quick (and hopefully permanent) fix. I also did a very similar fix to the heat shield above the muffler way in the back as the exact same thing happened, corrosion around the washer holding it up.





The fix was to drill two holes in the heat shield and just wire it up tight. I do wonder how long it'll last. I guess we'll see.

[Daox]

The first real part replacement was done on the Prius last night. Over the weekend, my wife was on the way home when the car started misfiring. The engine light turned on and it turned out to be a P0301 code (misfire on cylinder 1). Thankfully she was able to make it home. I checked it out, removed the coils and plugs. Most everything looked good, a bit of white/foamy gunk on 2 plugs (the top, not the business end). So I may have a bit of a gasket leak. I reassembled it all and went for a quick spin. It seemed fine... until it warmed up. Then it started doing it again. No engine code was set, so I ordered 4 new plugs and one coil pack. Last night I got the parts in the mail and went to town on it.

At first, the plugs appear to be pretty buried in there. But, the first step is to remove the 'relay' box. Two 10mm bolts and you can swing it out of the way.




With the relay box moved, you can actually get a wrench in to remove the coil packs.





And then its just a matter of removing the plugs. A 6" extension works well here, though there still isn't an over abundance of room.





I started with replacing all the plugs. They are the original Denso iridium plugs with 145k miles on them. They came out nicely and they all looked to be in good shape with a nice tan tip. This is one of the ones that had the stuff on it.





With the new plugs in, I buttoned it back up and went for a quick spin. It got up to temperature with no hiccups at all. So, it seems like it was a bad plug. Not too bad for 145k miles!

[ar5boosted]

Nice idea with those flaps.

[Daox]

Just a quick little updated. My wife drives this car and noticed some vibrations a few weeks ago. I drove it and verified it. I thought it lost a wheel weight or something. Well, a few weeks go by and I get to looking at it. I replaced all the tires with my set of snows for trouble shooting, and the last one I pulled off looked like this:





Thankfully, I have a spare tire handy and I'll just have it mounted on the wheel. I wonder how much that effected gas mileage? It did get significantly worse in the two weeks that she was still driving it. In my testing the other day, I ran it up to 45 mph and it was vibrating the whole car pretty badly. Its so nice to have it driving smooth (on the snow tire for now)! These tires are pretty old, cracked, and have been run at fairly good pressures. They're also at the end of their life and this was going to be their last season no matter what.

[mechman600]

Now you have to nerd out on figuring out FE savings from running ultra-high tire pressures vs. The tire it ended up costing you!

[Xist]

There was a thread entitled "I did the math!" where someone calculated how much faster high pressures wore out his tires and that he still came out ahead.

I think that I ran sidewall maximum on my Forester until I realized the center was wearing out faster than the edges.