wow, picked up 2mpg out of nowhere

[Frank Lee]

Once upon a time I looked into the issue and concluded that a person should really avoid using the heater blower until the engine is fairly warm, but that until then the position of the heater temp control didn't make enough difference to show up on the radar. That seems to be true on all of my cars.

[cfg83]

malibuguy -

Originally Posted by malibuguy

just filled up the Cavy tonight, 11.554gallons, 335.9 miles 29.08 MPG!!!

the car normally averages low to mid 27s with 26s when i goof around

i didn't do anything special, or different then usual, that i know of, tracey thinks it may be because we didn't use the heat as much this time...i don't see how that can make a huge improvement, we don't usually use it a whole lot anyways to begin with

the only thing that makes sense to me, is possibly the computer learned the additional airflow from the ram-air & K&N filter...possibly

Oh, I meant to tell you. That's my two MPG. I left it on the counter at the diner the other day and haven't seen it since.

But, you can keep it if you can maintain it over the next few fill-ups. Keep track of the weather and try to see if something changes. Also keep track of the MPG "bad times" so you know whether or not your subsequent fill-ups are biased against this one.

CarloSW2

[brucepick]

Originally Posted by Frank Lee

"Even having the temp set to heat, without any fan, will take some heat from the cooling system."

I've been told it's not enough to matter. There will be a small amount of heat exchange but I'd wager it's peanuts, unless maybe in something like a Metro 3-banger that has a hard time heating up anyway.

Absolutely it matters. The engine sucks fuel much faster when warming up, due to the richer mixture. Putting heat thru the heat exchanger will make the warmup take longer because that heat's not going to the block to warm it. So your mpg will be less than optimum the whole extra time it takes to achieve warmup. Regardless of what you do with the fan.

Lots of stuff matters now - stuff that didn't matter back when gas was $0.75 or $0.35/gallon. I can remember those days!

[Frank Lee]

IF the heat exchanger is not EXCHANGING HEAT via little-to-none airflow the heat loss is also MINIMAL-TO-NONE.

[brucepick]

Well OK.
Someone could test this with a Scangauge - or we could just let it go and figure that drivers will turn heat on or not, according to their best judgment.

Frank, are you ready to start a gaslog? Or post your ride in the garage so we can see what you're driving?

[malibuguy]

Originally Posted by Ryland

the only part of useing the heat that would affect your gas mileage is the blower fan, a vehicles heat comes from waste heat from the engine, and that is "free" altho running the blower fan puts an electrical load on the engine, not a great big one, but enough of a load that it can affect engine idle speed.

i know that, what i was reffering to was the electrical load from the blower fan, which is why i feel that can't be right cuz, its not that much

anyways, Traceys been doing alot of running around driving on this tank, she does do the neutral costing, but thats about it, we will see what happens, plus, it'll show how she is doing, normally i'm the one driving her car

[DifferentPointofView]

I notice that my engine runs about 10-20 degrees cooler with the heater on... Depending on how high the heater is turned on. They do say when your engine coolant has overheated to turn the heat on high and to the floor. open the windows etc. The coolant is where you taking the heat from, if they could harness the extra heat that's just ambient in the engine bay, then that would be even better since the coolant is actually doing something.

[malibuguy]

i'm actully planning to remove my HVAC in my one malibu & replace it with an aluminum panel...i yanked the a/c out years ago, but i'm somewhat hesistant to lose heat...but i thought, the old corvairs used to grab heat off the exhaust...why can't i?? even tho i get tons of heat from the floor

so maybe i might try to set up a little fan & ducting on the headers for some heat if i'm that desperate, but its a race car & i barely drive it, so its not like life or death

[malibuguy]

well, last tank...26.35mpg...way low, but not bad considering the driving on this tank, still above factory #s

[8307c4]

Stupid K&N dang expensive piece of plastic garbage, because of their in-your-face marketing tactics it took more than a few months to find the OEM one for my antique car!

Everywhere I looked K&N's plastered theirs in my face and I couldn't get around it just to find the normal one, but if K&N thinks I'm sticking their mod on an original antique they are dreaming for sure.

Washable filters, in what, cold water?
How is cold water going to get rid of road grime?
If dust was the worst that got on a filter we could just shake the paper ones clean.
And just how safe is it to throw the K&N thing in either the dish or the clothes washer, is it all right to do that? Because by the time I hand wash it with warm soapy water I could've just got a $5 paper one and been done with it.

So since I buy all my cars used the first thing I'll be sure to do is look under the hood, make sure it's got an OEM filter, and if it doesn't I RUN!