is happily being the wheel rather than a rusty old spoke
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Oh, that. After I implement the checksum cookie. I'm hoping to do that after the close today. Was so sick Monday I didn't even go to the office and only felt marginally better yesterday and went home shortly after the close. Feeling better still today, so am optimistic I'll be up for an hour or so of code-banging today. And think time will allow, since I got caught up with the advertising workload only about 4 hours into the day yesterday. After a 3-day absence, that's pretty good.
That makes a lot of sense. I'll try that next time. Only downside is that in the summer, it's not unusual for it to be in the 90's at night.
But if a separate but similar cooler were made, with plentiful fins on the tubing, it could be very effective if it's cool enough out. Or a separate cooler that's buried.
The ML downgrade is a non-issue. They've been downgrading it since it was $3 a share. They have yet to be right on it and the market ignores them.
CITI's another story. When was their downgrade?
I very seriously doubt we'll hear FDA approval of Tysabri before Christmas. The FDA doesn't move that fast, even when something's fast-tracked.
I'm expecting March.
And if you're in ELN for trading, I'd put a stop loss at $12.74. If it loses $12.75, it could tank big. But if it does, watch for a bottom because when it hits them, it reverses big and fast.
I'm committed to my position, though. I trade a few shares here and there but the core position won't be for sale until March, if then.
Regarding ELN not being green despite the Dow being green, it rarely moves with the Dow. SANM, however, used to move very reliably with the Nas. Hasn't in a long time, but it used to be that it'd move the same direction as the Nas and trail it by enough minutes to profitably trade off of knowing that.
A lot of those were me. I see I'm not the only one trying to buy them at that price.
No, I can't direct my trades as far as who handles them.
Huh? What's needing fixing?
Most of my time lately is spent working with the bookkeeper and ad-related stuff.
Out of CIEN for a nickle gain. Typical of my trades. Just grabbing small profits and doing it a lot.
Bought SANM @ $4.25 and have a limit order in to sell at $4.33.
Bought ELN Jan15 calls at 40 cents, limit order to sell some of them at 55 cents, GTC.
I really like ELN here. It showed strong support at $12.75. I think anything less than $13 is a good price on it.
It's a POS site and every person who has ever been involved in its design and creation should be lined up in the street and... hang on. Someone's at the door. BRB.
Someone with an Uzi wants me to join Matt and Gary, who're standing in the middle of the street. No idea what's with the blindfolds.
Of course, we can't post here what I always say when you call me to tell me the site's down. Especially at 7 in the morning. But I suppose it could be paraphrased as "Go know yourself, in the Biblical sense, you person whose parents weren't married when he was born."
The only thing more pleasant than hearing your voice at 7 am would be hearing your voice saying "Urgggghhh. I can't breathe. You're choking me."
Fixed.
Good thing we were running the profiler so I could see which query was freaked out. It was the one that tells you on the homepage how many messages the site has.
I'll have to remember to always have the profiler running. Costs a little in overhead but it sure was worth it. Without it, it could've taken forever to figure out what needed to be done.
Out of SANM for a small loss @ $4.19. Bought CIEN @ $2.73. PFE puts and ELN calls aren't gonna hit my new buy prices.
Well, my *market* order for SANM placed at the open just now filled. My sell price has come and gone, so I'm stuck with it. Maybe tomorrow will bring another selling opportunity for it.
Trying to buy more ELN Jan15 calls right now at 40 cents a pop, which is the current bid. It'd take a pretty strong pullback from here for that to fill, though.
Edit: Got rid of the last of my PFE puts finally. Plan to ride them as frequently as I can whenever the stock tries for $25.
There's only one part of your post to which I might have some useful input. I have many of the same questions...
Also would like to get a simple design for solar heating for pool water if anybody has one or a link to one.
A few years ago, I built a 4-foot by 8-foot by 6" box with a clear plastic cover.
Inside this box I put a 4x8 sheet of galvanized metal, painted flat black. On top of this sheet, I put a bunch of 1/2" copper pipe, running from one end of the box to two 90 degree elbows, then another pipe going the opposite direction, until I reached the bottom of the box. I ran the bottom (input) and top (output) parts of this tubing grid through the sides of the box, then painted all the tubing flat black.
I set the box up so the clear side was facing the sun, then took a pond pump and connected it to the input and dropped the pump into the pool. Then I ran an outlet hose back into the pool.
I took copious notes during this project (until the rain took its toll on the box, which was just a test-of-concept prototype anyway) but doubt I could lay my hands on them right now. But I'm thinking the water at the outlet was 40 degrees warmer than at the input.
Commercially produced solar pool heaters are pretty easy to find and work like the setup I built. I felt I could improve on their efficiency, though. Especially because the ones you can buy aren't sealed up in a box. My version let me capture some of the very high ambient temperature inside the box.
I later built a copper tubing heat exchanger to go in an old wood stove and routed the output of the solar collector to the input for the wood stove, then out to the pool.
The heat exchanger in the stove kept coming apart because sometimes the water flow would get interrupted and the solder on the fittings would melt.
But when it was running, the output was extremely hot. Scalding if touched directly. I ran the stove outlet into the skimmer so it could be mixed with the colder water going into the big pump before coming out the main pool outlet. Was fun standing in front of the outlet in the pool because it was so much warmer than the surrounding water.
I did this experiment at the beginning of May and we were swimming in the pool before the end of the month. Usually the pool isn't warm enough until July.
I was able to raise the temperature of 20k gallons of water 2 degrees per 8 hours. I'm sure there's a formula for calculating the BTU's that represents, but I don't know the formula. I just know it was a bunch.
The downside, and why I haven't made another heater, is that instead of the pool being warm enough from July to September, it was too hot. Upper 90's and no way to cool it down. Not at all pleasant for swimming.
Someday we do plan to enclose the pool, though. And once we do, then I can fiddle with neat, green, ways to not only keep the pool warm in the winter, but harvest heat out of it for the workshop.
By my reckoning at the time, if I had a blanket to keep over the pool at night, I could've taken the water from 60 to a swimmable 80 degrees in barely a week. With the only energy used coming from my plentiful trees. Especially Osage Orange which I think has the highest BTU output of any wood available and is plentiful around here.
With only the solar heater, it might've taken a month. And if I didn't get the pool into the mid 80's in May, it likely wouldn't have been too hot for swimming in July.
If one were in toofuzzy's situation, having to fork over a lot of money just to get the power lines run a long distance, the payback would come pretty quickly.
For the rest of us who are already on the grid, I'd think that the payback would be > 15 years, especially with the panels more expensive now than when that 15-year figure was the rule of thumb.
And I've never been sure about the 15-year figure. That's about when you're probably going to have to replace your batteries.
I need to read up on those since I've fallen out of the loop on them. I'm thinking the old Subaru Justy used a belt running on a pair of pulleys that'd open/compress to change the circumference of the part the belt ran on.
My daughter's Civic also has a CVT. But I wouldn't think the belt/pulley thing could handle 118 horses. And do so without huge power losses. Belt would have to be pretty darned tight to not slip and that would mean a lot of friction.
It's pretty cool, though. You can be at a stop, hit the throttle just enough to get up to 2k rpm, then keep the tach needle there and it'll go from zero to 60 (eventually) without the tach moving and no perception of any kind of shifting.
It's about time we got some competition in the solar cell market! Panels have been prohibitively expensive in terms of cost per watt and I'm told they've recently gone up about 50%.
I just can't make myself fork over about $8 per watt when grid power cost me 6 3/4 cents per kilowatt hour. At 46 years of age, I probably wouldn't be around long enough to get my money back on the panels.
I like Howard Stern alright, I guess. Have seen his show on TV a few times. But I definitely wouldn't switch out my XMSR for SIRI just to hear him.
There are only a few stations on XM I listen to much. And I do hate that they don't have NFL. I listen to a few music stations, but most of the time I've got it on 150, the comedy channel.
If I were driving an older car that didn't have XMSR as an option, I'd be hard-pressed to decide which route to take. But since XMSR was an option on both of our newer Chevies, that's what we got.
Unless SIRI gets good uptake with the car makers, they're destined to be a footnote, I think. I would strongly suspect that most of the satellite radios in cars are factory-installed; not aftermarket.
I call it bedrock, but in reality it's just a very big chunk of sandstone. I'm told that if one bores deep enough through it, one will encounter lots of coal, and if one goes even further, there's lots of natural gas to be had.
Many's the time I wish I had the funds to find out for sure. But that's one *expensive* roll of the dice.
Nice kitty.
You know, I'm already eagerly looking forward to my next trip to RA. Gonna see if I can just swing through Omaha and pick up Gary and Sheridan and have them leave their cars at home and share mine and truck-driving duty. That drive was definitely the worst part. Sheridan's little 318ti wouldn't be happy on that track and no reason for Gary to bring his WRX if I'm already trailering mine up there.
Think I mentioned I'm contemplating (pretty much decided on) semi-retiring the Mustang. Figure I might use it once at MAM for the Mustang Club event, and at BIR (if I go again -- definitely a big-car track) and RA.
The Mustang/RA combo has to be about the best time I've ever had on a racetrack. Now if it didn't have the infinity-to-one 5th gear......
What positive things about SIRI aren't priced in already?
If Matt buys it, I might just short it to spite him. <g>
Edit: Too bad Dave's not around and probably completely unable to get quotes. His PFE did nicely today. But I bought Jan22.50 puts, so it'll likely do even better.
How do you make a million dollars playing options? Start with 10 million.
Edit 2: As I often do, I put trading profits into more ELN. At $13.36. <sigh>
Glad you mentioned SFCC to me. It's been berry, berry good to me. Both directions.
Looks like a lot of the volatility is gone now, though. In checking it all out, I'm finding more to like than to dislike, though I'm finding stuff to dislike. But at a PE of about 9, I plan to eventually keep some of it. Especially if I can do so with the house's money.
I'd always suspected that a clean, polished, waxed car would get better fuel economy and reach higher top speeds, and may've mentioned it at some point. The idea that if water doesn't stick to the surface as easily, air would also stick less.
Here's the first time I've seen someone else say it.
http://www.edmunds.com/reviews/list/top10/103164/article.html
Think Clean
Keeping your car washed and waxed improves aerodynamics and therefore affects fuel economy. Engineer Tom Wagner, Jr. reported to Stretcher.com (as in stretching your dollars) a 7-percent improvement in fuel economy, from 15 to 16 mpg, during a 1,600-mile road trip.
Not what I'd call empirical testing (too many other variables on such a long trip), but it's something anyway. Wonder if this has ever been tested in a wind tunnel.
Might I suggest that in a friction free environment two identical trucks,
one with an empty cab, and other lead bars to double gross weight coasting up
a hill might reach the same distance up at same time?
I would agree that that's likely true. For the most part. If by "friction-free" we're only talking a vacuum, the heavier truck won't make it quite as far, but it'd be close. More friction at the tires and bearings.
I'll guessing your example of a heavy truck will coast further than
same truck carrying less weight on a flat road with strong head wind.
Yes, the momention does it, but getting that higher "stored" energy ain't free.
There's no doubt the heavier one will use more fuel to reach 70 mph. Once they're both up to the same speed, on level ground, both will use nearly an identical amount of fuel, with the heavier one using a tiny bit more because of greater rolling resistance at the tires and axle bearings.
I think it's safe to assume that, given a steep enough grade (which wouldn't be much, I'd think), if you put both trucks in neutral, the heavier truck will be reach the bottom of the hill first.
Of course, if both trucks start an uphill run at the same speed and from the same point and maintain the same speed, the lighter truck will use less fuel.
But I think that if you put both trucks at the top of one hill at 70 mph, the heavier one will likely use less fuel by the time they both reach the top of the next hill. Especially if I were driving the heavier one. <g> If you ignore the speed limit, there's probably a hill/weight combo that'd have the heavier one doing, just for the sake of using round numbers, 90 mph at the bottom of the hill with the other only reach 80.
Of course, gravity will work harder against the heavier truck on the way up the next hill. But there are a lot of things in its favor. Of course, the greater momentum it's carrying. But also the fact that the difference between full throttle and half throttle isn't twice as much fuel consumption. Peak torque isn't, as most people think, necessarily where the engine consumes the most fuel. It's where it uses the fuel most efficiently. Efficiency and power go hand in hand.
I've heard it often said that using the cruise control is the best way to get the best fuel economy. I agree, but only on level ground. I saw someone else say the same. Actually, at the above link.
If the speed limit is 70 and you limit yourself to 70 (even using your brakes downhill as I've seen many people do -- usually right in front of me and my truck/trailer in the passing lane) and force the car to hold 70 up the hills, that's extremely inefficient.
You'll often seen really heavy semis picking up a lot of speed going downhill so they aren't doing 20 mph by the time they reach the top of the next hill.
I do the same, but for a different reason.
The trip between Omaha and KC is mostly long stretches of going up and down hill.
When I'm going down a hill, I don't get all the way out of the throttle. I give it just a tiny bit of throttle so it can build up more speed for the attack on the next hill. Then as I'm going up the next hill, I keep the throttle steady and low, gradually feeding in more throttle as the speed comes down, but only to a point. I try to time it so that the truck has come down to about 55 or 60 by the time it reaches the top of the hill, then start the cycle all over again as I'm going downhill.
That is, if traffic conditions allow. I don't think speed kills. I think differences in speed kill. So I try to make sure I'm not part of a >20 mph speed difference.
I really wish I had a hand throttle in my truck like I do in the dumptruck and backhoe. I'd love to see what kind of fuel economy I could get on that trip if I just locked the throttle in one position and then compared that to the same trip using the cruise contol. My approach is very tiring. I have to watch my Edge monitor pretty closely so I can see throttle position. What it displays as "% Load" I've learned is really nothing more than the reading off the throttle position sensor. If I keep my foot in the same place uphill and down, that number doesn't change, though the load on the engine certainly does.
If you have a back-hoe and can dig deep into ground and lay them copper pipe
with a pump for water flow, then do that storage of summer heat into an
under ground pond to warm cold winter concrete floor.
Unfortunately, not an option for me. When we were getting ready to finally put central HVAC in the house, test digs confirmed my suspicion that we're on about a foot of clay covering bedrock. So a heat pump was out of the question. I shopped around for rock hammers for the backhoe, but they cost nearly as much as the backhoe itself.
My property is very hilly. It took a long time and a lot of work to move soil to the site for the workshop to get a large enough level surface. And even doing that, one corner of the building doesn't have dirt under it. Instead of pouring a footing there, we simply drilled into the bedrock and put the rebar into the rock.
BTW, might've inadvertently cured my bird problem last night. While also accidentally proving that my efforts this year to seal up the building a lot better worked.
When I came up to the house to watch the Chiefs lose, I left the wood furnace and a 150k-btu kersone heater running. When I went back down last night, the building was filled with smoke. I'd forgotten that this particular kerosene heater has problems. It apparently had gone through a very long spell of blowing a lot of smoke.
When the lights finally came up to full strength (about 5 minutes), I couldn't even see my truck parked about 80 feet from where I was standing. It was nice and warm since I'd had the heat running all day, but I had to open the overhead door and turn on the big fans to blow all that smoke out along with the hard-earned heat. <sigh>
But before I did, I went outside to see where smoke was coming out of the building, and it was only in a few places. Explains why I was able to heat the building more successfully than usual yesterday.
One of my projects today is to try to find a block heater in my pickup. Surely it's got one. Diesels without block heaters in this clime are unheard of.
A key part of that project is that I would want to use an electric motor to help move the vehicle along. Just a 5 or so horsepower assist only at highway speed.
High-voltage motor/generators are available. And they're very expensive.
One of my ideas is to replace one of the trailer's 3 axles with a similarly sized one from a truck and attach the motor/generator to that axle. And cover the entire 48x8 roof of the trailer with solar panels, though this is currently (pun intended) prohibitively expensive. That's enough room for 30 of the Sanyo 190-watt panels. At a cost of between $25k and $30k. And power output of about 6KwH. Far more juice than the average home consumes even in the summer.
Definitely couldn't do the whole project unless I were so wealthy I could waste $50k modifying a $20k trailer to where it might give me a few extra mpg out of (relatively) inexpensive diesel.
And where to dump all that juice would be quite a problem. The trailer currently has 8 marine batteries in it to run the inverter, but I'll soon be taking delivery of 12 of the huge (150-lb) 2-volt batteries phone switching offices use. But even those would top off pretty quickly when getting hit with that kind of juice. I don't remember the formula, but am pretty sure that even with the motor taking all it can, 6KwH being consumed by a 5-horse motor would leave some left over. If memory serves, my daughter's car uses a 20-horse/15Kw electric motor. Might need to go with a 10-horse motor so I can be sure it's always using more juice (when in motor mode) than it can get from the panels, so that the batteries aren't ever completely topped off.
Any modern charge controller will see to it that the batteries don't get overcharged. But what to do with all the output potential when the batteries are full? Would be a shame to let expensive panels just sit idly by.
That's where shunt loads come in. Air conditioning. Heating water. And in the long off-season, my trailer is parked right by the workshop. A workshop so massive and environmentally inefficient that there's no such thing as too much power if I want to use it to produce heat. I can't help but think that copper pipe running all around the inside perimeter of the building with one or two water heaters and a small pump pushing hot water through them full-time might make a noticeable difference in comfort level in the winter, even if it's an inefficient conversion of electricity to heat. Much of the heat would go into the concrete floor, which would take forever and a week to heat up beyond outside temperature even just a foot away from the pipes, but with incredible thermal momentum. Get 5000 cubic feet of concrete up to 70 degrees and even in the absence of further heat input, it'll take forever for the concrete to come down to 60.
I'm still kicking myself for not running water lines through the concrete when it was being poured. I had the funds. I was just impatient and didn't want to wait the extra time. That would've been the most efficient way to use hot water to warm the building. I do have some ideas that are variations on the copper-tubing theme, though. Like running the water through large panels in areas in which I spend a lot of time.
But I'm getting way ahead of myself. This is the kind of stuff I'd do if I had huge funds to play with and a similarly huge amount of time to devote to what I'd rather be doing than even this job. As I told my office neighbor last week, who runs an alternative energy company and drives a Prius, "If I can ever get decent money and get out of that office, I want to go home, hug my trees, and start in on about a year or so of projects that currently only exist as ideas."
I couldn't get into those particular projects unless the money supply were really large, though, because the ROI is worse than penny stocks.
For the short-term, forget the solar panels. I'd just use the motor/generator on the trailer axle to power the axle and charge the batteries (along with the alternators in the truck) and use a manual switch in the truck to control whether it's motor or generator.
The weight of the batteries is immaterial, especially on the highway. Not only am I already dealing with about 24k lbs of truck, trailer, and contents, making nearly a ton of batteries relatively insignificant, I think I've read and it makes sense (but would have to learn more before conclusively believing this) that weight is actually your friend on the less-than-level ground I deal with. Something to the effect that a light car going down a steep hill and up another can do so more efficiently if it's got a lot of ballast because the heavier version reaches a much higher terminal velocity on the downhill run and will make it further up the uphill part before it needs engine power to help.
I think I remember reading that big Class A motorhomes get better fuel economy in hilly terrain than on level ground for this reason.
Anyway, the ideal life for me would be to have someone with deep pockets funding my playing around in the workshop in return for ownership of anything commercially viable I might produce. And employing my son to help since I don't remember the name of his major in college, but accurately call it "making stuff". He's not real big on ideas, but if I describe something to him that I want, he usually shows up a few weeks later with exactly what I described. He's well-versed in all manner of manufacturing methods and loves being able to hold something in his hands that previously only existed as an idea.
So, another 20 years of this and I might just have deep enough pockets for this kind of pursuit, but be too old to do much about it.
now all over the top of the engine.
Bingo!
The engines you mention have something important in common. Single valve covers with volume a fraction of that of the oil pan. After making room for the valve-train, I'm sure the remaining volume of those valve covers is way less than a gallon.
I'd bet money the engine was pumping oil up to the valvetrain faster than it could drain back down into the sump, until it eventually spilled out the filler cap or even out a pressure-weakened gasket.
The oil, especially when it and the engine are very cold, probably moves up to the head in substantial volume and under significant pressure. It's likely the path of least resistance even in a warmed-up engine, but I'd think more so in a cold one. The only other place it's got to go is through the crank and camshaft journals, and the bearings create substantial back-pressure.
But only gravity brings it back down to the sump, through a few smallish passages. And the oil was likely flowing back to the sump about as fast as 50-weight in January. Filling the area under the valve cover faster than it could drain.
Edit: That made me think of something else. Clear valve-covers would be SO trick! I'll have to ask my son about the possibility of him making some, starting with my R 75/5 since it has such simple and visible valve covers. Since it's too cold to ride it, he can just use the existing ones to make molds.
Edit 2: I really wish it'd warm up because I've been dying to use something he built for me recently. A 40-square foot (4x10) welding table. This thing is seriously massive. Everything about it. He said it weighs a little over 700 lbs.
I've set it pretty far from the welder and want to run power over to the table for plugging in the welder and other things and hit auctions to pick up a massive vice. Finally have a table that can handle one.
Unfortunately, my son likes to throw away really wasted rotors when he's cleaning my workshop, even though he knows I never turn them. I don't think he knows I'm keeping batteries and rotors for ballast for an alternative energy idea. And I like to keep my most-ruined rotors as keepsakes. Had one from the Mustang with two beautiful huge cracks but can't find it anymore. But I think I've still got one from the Subaru that was not only cracked but has a chunk broken off the outer edge.
More seriously it would be neat if you could control how much resitence the regen brake had so that you could use it to actually come to a stop.
I think you can.
I'm pretty sure it's a two-stage thing. Light regeneration when you're barely on the brake, then more regeneration with more brake pedal, then if you push the pedal down more, the pads start doing their thing.
And I don't think the regeneration stops until you take your foot off the brake.
I'd really love to have a comparable setup on my truck and/or trailer. About 24k lbs rolling down a hill really likes to pick up momentum, wind resistance be damned. Would love to dump that energy into batteries rather than having to brake to avoid the disapproving attention of the local constables.
If I could ever retire or at least get myself to where I'm not as needed day-to-day, one of my first plans is to spend a lot of time in the workshop rigging up just such a setup and seeing what kind of fuel economy I could get out of it and a roof full of solar panels on the trailer.
Re: Engines barfing oil at startup.
I can only make an educated guess on this one.
For reasons I don't totally understand, colder oil yields higher oil pressures. My ancient tractor makes great pressure when it's first started in cold weather, but once it's really warmed up, it's doing good to make 10 PSI at full throttle.
I suspect it has to do with tighter tolerances between cold parts (which is why high-performance 2-cycle engines like those in motocross bikes have to be gradually warmed up or they'll "cold seize") and the increased thickness of cold oil more completely filling those tighter tolerances, and its greater resistance to being pushed around. And into small passages like those in the crankshaft and the ones running up to the valve train.
My suspicion is that these factors combine to make oil pressure extremely high in the crankcase on startup.
Just a guess, though.
I did learn the hard way years ago to make sure to have a good, clean oil filter in cold weather. I had a Pinto ages ago that was extremely neglected and as soon as it got cold, it spewed oil from the base of the oil filter on startup until the oil was thin enough to flow through the very restricted filter.
Have thought about it for convenience, especially for my truck, which uses extremely little fuel when idling. But it also takes something like half an hour for that thing to warm up when idling.
I've got a bit of a fundamental hangup with fuel being burned and the vehicle not moving as a result.
I forgot to comment on that.
I always eventually get around to replacing my air filters with K&N's on everything. Though I haven't tested them to see if they improve fuel economy. On motorcycles, I've found that they often increase airflow so much I need to increase jet sizes to prevent them from running lean, which also results in more power.
Running lean isn't an issue with modern fuel-injected cars. they "see" the increased airflow and add the appropriate amount of fuel.
Another benefit of K&N's is that you never need to replace them. You simply clean and re-oil them. And the maintenance interval is pretty wide.
I personally consider them a requirement. And when available, I also like to get any kind of better air intake system that's available. I always remove the air silencer from any car, while taking care to make sure that the intake air still comes from the fender well rather than the engine compartment. The cooler air from the fender well is far better for economy and power.
I flipped SFCC several times today for modest gains here and there. But I missed more trades than I caught. In one instance, I hit the "Ask" button to set my limit order at that price, and the darned thing went up 30 cents in the few seconds it took me to decide to hit the "Buy" button.
What's the story on this one? I was just trading the swings today as nothing but a random ticker I saw moving a lot. This evening I'm starting to poke around under the covers. After about half an hour of digging, I picked some up at $13.25 in afterhours to have for Monday, based on my opinion of what I'd read so far.
Tiny float. So small that it traded most of it in EACH of the past two sessions. Down huge from where it'd sat complacently on low volume for a whole year (or more?).
The only thing not to like that I've found so far is what I think is very poor choice of wording in their PR's and especially the headlines.
I got into ELN because I thought it was over-punished. But it was easy to see why ELN had gotten smacked so hard.
I'm not finding similar justification here.
So what gives? Anyone?
Down here the diesels usually have block heaters. I couldn't find one on my Chevy the other day, though.
And I've learned the hard way that the diesel fuel delivered to the gas stations is a bit different in the summer than in the winter.
As I've mentioned before, whatever truck I have usually stays hooked up to the car-hauler during warm weather and is only used for towing. Then I'll usually take the trailer off of it later in the winter to drive it occasionally.
The fuel left over from summer has the annoying tendency to change viscosity pretty dramatically. Think candle wax. Unlit candle.
So I've learned to use up as much fuel as I can before cold sets in then refill it in late fall. That wouldn't normally seem like a big deal, but the tanks in these trucks are large enough and my commute so short that I can literally drive the truck for a month or more before I need to fill it. So I've also started keeping fuel conditioner around.
Just the other day, the Chevy was acting like the fuel was gelling, though. Ran fine until anything past half throttle, at which point it'd shut down like I'd turned the key off, then come back to life after I let off the gas.
Another thing about coasting to help fuel economy (or was this on the Alt Energy thread?) is that all modern cars completely shut off fuel flow under this condition. Infinite MPG. And as much as that momentum costs in terms of fuel, I'd rather give it up to wind and tire rolling resistance than convert it into heat to throw away with the brakes.
Good point and one I hadn't considered.
Not an issue in my case because of the rather extreme nature of how I maintain my vehicles. Since I've got a lift, tire checking and rotation is a routine thing for every car and while the tires are off, I usually bleed the brakes and always check their condition. Usually taking off all the pads and giving them a quick cleanup on the wire wheel on the grinder since I use high-friction pads and I'm the only one in the family who doesn't mind their eventual noise.
Another caveat about topping off is that if your master cylinder reservoir is full when you replace your brake pads, and your brake pads were pretty thin, you're going to overflow the reservoir as you clamp the pistons down to make room for the new pads.
Ax me how I know. <g>
Speaking of damage to brakes, a track friend told us that he stopped to help a woman who was stranded at the side of the road with a locked up front wheel. The brake pedal was going down to the floor and a puddle was forming by one tire.
He pulled off that tire and couldn't figure out what he was looking at for a while. Said it was like looking into a cut-away of a turbo-charger.
Then he realized that what he was seeing was the inside vanes of the rotor. The woman had driven the car so long on no brake pads that it'd worn off the rotor surface (sounds unlikely, but perhaps they'd been turned pretty thin) and eventually the piston had come out of the caliper and gotten jammed in the vanes.
45 mph was the threshhold in my F350 with 4.10 gearing. It's more like 50 mph in my Cheby with 3.73's.
It's really pretty frustrating in the Chevy because it takes FOREVER to get things warm enough for the torque converter to start locking. And until it does, fuel economy sucks worse than it does when it is locked.
Which reminds me. The 5-speed automatic in the Chevy truck is effectively an 8-speed. The TC will lock in 3rd, 4th, or 5th.
We're both right.
With a manually tranny, if you lift the throttle, the rpm's will come down slowly as the car slows down. But with an automatic, the rpm drop is immediate and typically large, whether the car has slowed down or not.
True. As the vehicle slows down (with a manual tranny), so will the engine revs. Direct correlation. With an automatic, it's an indirect relationship. The revs will typically drop the instant you let off the throttle.
Not sure what can be done to speed up interior heating.
My truck has heated seats, but they take forever to do their thing. And being a diesel, it takes forever to get hot water from the engine.
The Subaru's definitely good for quick interior heat. Once I feel that the engine oil is warm enough to make it alright to safely give the turbo a workout, I just flog it. That thing makes incredible heat, and the heater's blowing hot air in 2 miles or less.
We went out for dinner the other night and she drove us to the restaurant, and I drove back, getting 51.7 mpg to her 38.9. Showed her my tricks and hopefully she's applying them. Coasting is definitely a biggie. As is using the brakes only enough for the regenerating effect. I bet I could get 100k miles out of a set of pads on that car.