Quote:
Originally Posted by Olympiadis
Nerys, I haven't posted here much but I like your thread and what you are doing so I wanted to jump in.
First I have to say I'd never before tried to imagine the sight of a 380 lb man in a tiny Metro pulling a small trailer. There's just something not so right about that.
Sorry for the long post.
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I LIKE long intelligent informative posts and that was definately a good post.
"I can't say that I like your testing methods as they are no-where near controlled enough to give reliable results"
Like or not they are reliable. My commute is "shockingly" reliable and consistent. So much so that until E10 I saw almost NO difference in winter and summer gas (less than a 1.0 to 1.5 mpg change)
I have 496,000 miles on my cherokee. 300,000 or so miles in its current configuration over 275,000+ miles on E0.
I consistently got 21.5 to 22.5 mpg and that was putting 50,000 miles a year on it.
My Fuel Economy on my vehicles is so consistent that I used it as a Repair Tool. when my FE changes I immediately look for the reason as 9 out of 10 times its because "something" just broke or is starting to break.
Alignment. Tire. Bearings. etc.. etc.. My Mechanic always asked how the hell did you know something was wrong? because my FE went down. so SOMETHING was wrong.
pre E10 I found bad wheel bearings LONG before they were ever audible of felt.
One time I lost .75mpg on "average" ie over many tanks. for such a small drop I suspected either a bubble in a tire or a bearing. so after my drive to work I jumped out and went around to each hum with my IR thermometer. Took it to my mechanic (this was before I was doing all my own work) and said that wheel bearing is bad.
He drove it and said no its fine. i said its bad replace it please. When he got it out he was stunned that it was indeed slightly bad and would have failed in another 5 or 10k miles or so. but in that time .75mpg would have cost me a lot more than a $8 bearing.
When you spend $4000 a year in fuel fuel economy changes become important :-) hehe
You can check my ecomodder results with switching back and forth between E10 and E0.
Then I hit SUMMER gas and was hitting 54mpg on E10 MAN I wish I had the time and money to try E0 then I bet I would have busted 60mpg.
but I was out of time and out of money :-) next summer I will definitely do it again. I might be doing it a lot more if PA switches to E15. :-(
For older consumer cars Ethanol seems to have a pretty dramatic effect.
My jeep went from 22mpg to 14-15mpg 18 if I am really careful and use wawa gas (few percent less ethanol)
My van 19mpg to 13mpg 16.5 on the highway now (used to hit 21mpg on the highway)
My minivan really got hit hard. 28mpg to 20mpg if I am really careful and slow way down.
Tank to tank accuracy is really not that important as discrepancies will reveal themselves as trends or lack thereof.
ie if you "underfill" this tank and get an artificially high mpg reading you will have the "effect" of an "overfill" next tank and be artificially low in your mpg reading. IE it averages out.
AS LONG as you do good full fills IE I tend to not fill at less than 400 miles.
My fuel log speaks for itself :-) very very consistent reliable numbers.
NOW with E10 wow mileage can be ALL OVER THE MAP from gas station to gas station. Until E10 I saw absolutely ZERO difference in FE from one stations gas to the next.
now its huge. I absolutely refuse to buy gas from any "no name" gas station if its E10 because some of them are pushing E12 and E13
the car actually starts to audibly and physically run like crap on that stuff (which is why E15 scares the crap out of me)
I am glad to hear about the Octane thing. I was worried I was going to harm my engine if I ran too low an octane level after removing the ethanol.
My only real concern is what is all that OTHER stuff that I am removing when I remove the ethanol. it looks like little white worms or maggots on the separation line between the gas and water/ethanol. (its not living matter of course thats just what it looks like)
I assume I am also removing some of the additives they put in the gas. Will this harm my engine by having those additives removed?
Will the trace amounts of water that is no doubt left behind during my process hurt my engine in the long term?
I need to find some good GLASS containers though the Ethanol aggressively attacks the plastic containers I am using now. I only get about 1.5 to 2 weeks out of them before they degrade to the point where they leak like crazy :-)