Makeing an efficent freeway flyer.

[Xist]

AlmightyBMW estimated that converting everything but your headlights to LEDs would save 160-200w, but then your alternator would be oversized: http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...tml#post122646

Can anyone review his math and\or tell me how much of a difference that might make for fuel efficiency? DonR said that at idle, turning on his headlights boosted GPH from 0.31 to 0.36, stated that his car used 1.8 GPH at highway speeds, so that was a 2.2% difference, which sounds reasonable.

I just replaced my dome light and have another nineteen bulbs. I like the swap and would like to replace more, but the dome was only important because I accidentally leave it on when the car is parked. Which lights have the largest overall draw? I would think that headlights would have the highest consumption, but LED swaps are illegal, right? Then I would guess tail lights--we try to minimize braking, but if our headlights are on, our tail lights are on, too. Then, when we do brake, we do so earlier and longer than others, right? Wouldn't our tail lights be on the entire time?

Of course, the brake lights are unique, I definitely cannot use the ones that I already have for those. You can swap the turn signals, but what would be the point, and how much do you actually use those, anyway?

Well, my dash uses one #194, so I would need to purchase the #74s for the other four. I should probably do that, I think that the low fuel light is out.

I guess that if you are trying to do everything that you can to make your car more fuel efficient, you do the things that have immeasurably small returns.

I guess the real question is, has Basjoos converted to LEDs?

Aerohead?

[dirtydave]

if the leds are good quality you basically just bought a light that will outlast the vehicle.
mpg`s don't hurt

I need to do this is my car too all kind of lights everywhere on the kick panels under the glove box under the shifter behind the hvac controls ect ect ect

[dirtydave]

I have the almost the same plans for my car as well 40MPG @ 65MPH

[H-Man]

I'm reluctant to switch to LEDs if the config isn't strictly legal.
ECU is currently on my desk with a wire running from the injector pin.
Word of advice: Only resort to tapping at the ECU if you cannot deal with having to replace the harness since it is hard to make a good connection (I put my 50k resistor for the MPGuino's injector monitoring inside of the ECU so that if the wire shorts to ground somewhere, it won't cause half the injectors to stick open).
EDIT: ECU back in car. I'll put radio back in later. In other news, my car goes FULL BMW when I unhook the hazards button (I lose blinkers).
I need to tap the VSS and power now.

[H-Man]

UPDATE: MPGunio is in but LCD making every dot on top row black and every dot on bottom row transparent. Any ideas?

When the display was working, I was getting occasional fuel usage spikes but doubling up on the number of pins used by ground and injector sense on the RJ45 I use for a connector to the car seemed to cut down on the spikes significantly.

It tracked milage acceptably and my butt dyno turns out to be quite good at telling when the car kicks into DFCO. AC: 50% more idle fuel use, headlights 10% more idle fuel use. Cold engine: 100% more idle fuel use.
EDIT: I flashed a modified version of the basic blink arduino sketch that blinks every pin and I found that pins D10 and D11 are dead (I used D10 and D11 in place of D12 and D13 since I'm using a arduino nano which has a LED on D13 and thus I seem to have difficulty getting it to output data fast enough) judging by how they are the only output pins that don't blink the LED I hook up.

I'm using the nano so I have extra pins that I can remap things to (D2-13 and A0-A7 gives 20 pins vs the 18 the uno has)
Not worried about the microcontroller frying anything because I have 100k ohm between it and the car on input lines (VSS, injector) and a diode on the power supply line, plus I wired the RJ45 so even if someone uses a crossover cable and plugs a laptop in, nothing will happen.
EDIT2: Not even worth the effort to fix seeing how I can build a new one for under $15 and fix my previous mistakes.