Sustained Hill Climb Strategy
 

My house is on top of a hill. It is great leaving, I can just leave it in gear and coast down the hill to warm up my engine without sacrificing gas consumption. On the way home its a nightmare, I get about 13 mpgs over the 1.6 miles. It just murders my average mpgs, and today I lost .5 mpgs on a 225 mile tank :mad:

The hill is steep and curvy enough that I can't get out of 3rd gear without bogging way down, and the speed limit is 30 and then 40. I have tried going 30 the whole way, I have tried going 40 the whole way and my mpgs are stuck. Do i just need to accept defeat from gravity or is the a hypermiling technique that might net me even a little improvement.

This is a topographic map of my route from the bottom to top of the hill, courtesy of Google, it is about a 750 ft climb.
http://i1152.photobucket.com/albums/...psb6abefe7.png

I regularly drive a route of about 60 miles with a net elevation change of 800 feet. My trip average mileage is about 5 MPG higher downhill than uphill.

This thread is a discussion on driving uphill: http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthrea...ear-23957.html

Bottom line is that it takes a lot of fuel to climb 750 feet.

I think it's time to move.

Have you tried hitting it at a higher speed, like 60+ and then winding it down as you go up?

If you can get away with it, maybe if you tried 3rd gear at a lower speed - however low you can take it without it bogging down. Whenever I have to downshift to go up a sustained hill, I'll drop the speed down to lower the revs. Seems to help - not much, but a little. So maybe try it at 25? Or even 20 if your car can pull it in 3rd. ???

lighter car, lighten the load, don't gas up on the way home, use the washroom at work,

Take a guess at bsfc peak rpm and load (say 2300 rpm and 3/4 throttle) and keep the car there with the gear selector (disregard the speed limit at your own risk).

Coast the very last part.

I don't think it is so bad.
So you just get 13 mpg uphill, but infinite mpg down, and you warm up the engine to boot.
The whole stretch up and down combined gives you 26 mpg overall.
Considering the weight of your car and the cold start, that is quite good actually.

Maybe instead of warming your engine downhill, you EOC. Another idea, strange and the opposite of Pulse & Glide, you EOC until you are doing the max speed for the road, then 3rd, 2nd, 1st, EOC to terminal speed, 3rd, 2nd, 1st.

It doesn't really help with your problem, but as mentioned, it seems like you have covered the basics on getting up their as efficiently as possible. And it makes sense you can't start out at 60 and coast it out if the curves can't handle it, especially if it starts at 30. I have not found a good way to get up extended hills without building speed and letting it slowly fall off.

The good.
The balance.
The truth.

I live on a hill also. My 120+ mile commute MPGs will be 40 at the bottom of the hill, and under 39 at the top. Yes, it's annoying to watch those hard-won tenths of MPG tick away. But the fact is that I would not have been at 40MPG at the beginning of the climb had I not gone down the hill in the first place.

So: smile, shrug your shoulders, and enjoy the view.

What goes up must come down... and vice versa. You don't need to admit defeat so much as admit that there's a hard stretch in your commute. Other than weight reduction, I can't suggest anything.

thanks for all the responses, you have confirmed what i suspected... that gravity is a b*tch and there isn't much that can be done about it. lol