bluh

Still making my rounds of the local bio pumps. Skipped a doctor’s appointment and went in late to work, but swung by the Road Ranger B10(?) pump at 909 E Roosevelt Rd in Lombard today. Nice. Didn’t notice the blend posted but filling up was easy easy easy. Ventectomy halfway thru the last tank allowed me to put in almost 13.5 gallons! In my departed Volvo, the same miles on one tank (458.1) would’ve made me put in at least 17 gallons, assuming I made it that far. I left the receipt at work, but I believe it was $2.559/gal, less than PUG.

Just as I was leaving, some old coot pulled up behind me in an older Mercedes diesel. Unfortunately, he saw the price and decided to go to another station east on Roosevelt… he drove off before I could pull around and talk him out of it!

On a side note, I also have a chipkey coming from the Al Warren Oil Co that will allow me to use their pumps at 43rd & Knox in Chicago and their B11 pumps in Summit & Channahon. The lady I’ve been talking to – Sue – says their Summit pump currently does not accept credit cards but due to public interest in B11, they should have it accepting cards again in a week or so.

It’s no suprise I traded in my 1995 Volvo 850 for my shiny new 2006 VW Golf TDI (this is for me – engine: BEW; transmission: 02J), but i neglected to post the finale to my ethanol madness.

Turns out it wasn’t the fuel filter. Nor do i think it was solely the ethanol. It was the air intake hose between the mass air flow sensor (MAF) and the throttle body. Specifically, it was the 20 or so small holes and the 5 or so big ones in that ducting.

See, ethanol has a higher oxygen content than unleaded gasoline (which is one of the reasons it has better emissions than RUG). My hypothesis was that since my car was naturally aspirated, the air being sucked into the engine was being split perhaps 10% through the holes in the duct and 90% through the MAF. The MAF corroborates data with the oxygen sensors and the engine computer ciphers up how much fuel to use. Since i had extra oxygen coming in from two sources – 1. E85; 2. holes in the air duct – the oxygen sensors detected more oxygen in the exhaust than what would be possible with the amount of air the MAF said was flowing through. So this was actually a problem for several years, but using a higher ethanol concentration pushed the problem to the point where it would trigger a CEL.

So at lunch one day, i drove to my local hardware store and bought a roll of black duct tape. I wanted the shiny aluminized duct tape that’s actually used for sealing ductwork (unlike the cloth duct tape, which is shit) but ended up buying a roll of black Gorilla Tape brand, mainly because it was less expensive than the other duct sealing tape they had in stock.

One razor blade and 20 minutes later, the ductwork was fixed.

Drove it home that night and no CEL. Fixed.

So if there’s an E85 pump nearby, try a lil extra alcohol in your gas. My car ran smooth, strong and cooler on it.

Then again, the thermostat was stuck open so the lower amount of wasted heat was a curse. The temperature gauge would often be pegged out at the low end of the gauge while driving home on the interstate.

I have filled up my car exactly twice and topped off once since I bought it almost 2 weeks ago. Once with straight D2 at some random Citgo the night I bought it. The second time with B11 biodiesel at the JR Fuels, 1100 N Ellis St, Bensenville IL – near O’Hare. They only have biodiesel at pump #11. It’s an out of the way station, the pump is dirty, mislabedel (has a “Premium Diesel” sticker on it) and generally not a great experience. The pump must’ve clicked off early, as I calculated 52 mpg from the first tank. I then went ahead and using the venting instructions i read at the TDIclub forums put in another couple gallons. If i used the average 1.5 gallons extra space when venting, i should’ve been able to fit 8.5 gallons in before the pump normally shut off, yielding 43.5 mpg. Nice.

Topped up at the Al Warren Oil Co‘s pump at 7625 W 59th St in Summit, IL. This one was properly labeled, clean, and despite a confusing credit card swipe machine, worked great. Topping up here with B11 a day after filling up in Bensenville yielded a more believeable 43.4 mpg, far closer to what the first fill up should’ve been. Nice.

Man, this is a sweet car.

it’s past midnight and i’ve spent the better part of the evening at a car dealership. the short version:

traded in my 1995 volvo 850. bought a 2006 vw golf tdi (manual transmission, of course).

nice.

Ganesh willing, I’ll be coming back ot sweet home Chicago tonight via a big silver pinstriped dong. In the meantime, you can read the crap I wrote last year in India. Obviously, it’s unfinished, has poor grammar and even worse punctuation. Shut up.

I’ll get around to writing more about India when I get back. Swear to Shiva. It’s nice, but seeing as it’s business travel I’m insulated from the rough edges of the country I so desperately want to explore.
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Gents & Dames –

Let me apologize for being such a zealot. I got all worked up into a froth over ethanol and my burgeoning petroleum guilt that I gleefully made the short drive into Indiana and grinning like an idiot, began to indiscriminantly fill my 850’s tank with E85. It worked beautifully for the first two tanks and I was understandably ecstatic – Hell yes, I’m helping local farmers! The environment! National Security! Pride! My wallet! Huzzah, tiny flags for everyone!

But this last top-off with pure E85 started making my car act a bit funny. Hesitation at low RPMs. Shifts weren’t as smooth. I simply thought the ethanol was loosening junk in the fuel lines and being clumsy with the clutch. No big deal. But on the way home last night, I got the dreaded Check Engine Light, an unholy amber rectilinear eye, staring me in the face with the truth. Three possibilities immediately came to mind:

1. I had loosened enough junk in the fuel system to clog the filter and the injectors weren’t getting quite enough fuel. No big deal.

2. The reduced amount of BTUs available in ethanol were finally catching up with me with this higher concentration in the tank and I either needed larger injectors or slightly more gasoline in the mix. No big deal.

3. Three tanks of elevated concentrations of ethanol had suddenly and irrepairably damaged my entire fuel system, all the way from the filler neck up to the injector nozzles had begun leaking, corroding and disintergrating. My car was completely ruined and I was completely boned, all because I tried a fuel the car was not designed to run on.

I got home, pulled out the bible, turned to the book of Fuel, chapter Fault Codes and read the code set in socket A2: 1-1-3 (bka 113 or 1 1 3). Temporary fuel mixture too weak. I immediately suspected the fuel filter being clogged and called around to find a new one. This morning, my Fram G7736 arrived at the local Murray’s Discount Auto Parts (kudos for them for ordering it arrive the next morning first thing), I quickly replaced the old filter and was on my way to work. And I’ll be damned if I didn’t get another CEL on the way to work.

Stopped off and topped up the tank with as much 87 octane gasoline as I could fit, read the same code from A2, reset it and went to work. At lunch, channeling that Bill Cosby skit (“You gotta drive it at about a hundred miles an hour to burn all that gunk out.” “Where am I gonna do that?” “Any side street.”), I took half an hour of hot laps around town and much to my delight, no CEL. Car isn’t hesitating anymore and is back to shifting normally. I think #2 was the culprit. Just for grins, I put in a bottle of Techron (on sale at Pep Boys) and one of Lucas’ Fuel System Cleaner.

I pulled out my propeller hat and slide rule and worked up some concentration figures:

Tank 1: ~25% ethanol. 25.22 mpg.
Tank 2: 46.40% ethanol. 25.33 mpg.
Tank 3: 73.46% ethanol. Set CEL, pulled 1 1 3 code from socket A2.
Tank 4: 63.81% ethanol. No CEL.

So somewhere between 63.81% and 73.46% ethanol, my engine couldn’t tolerate the lean mix and set the 113 code. I’m sheepishly eating crow already on the subject of ethanol, but I’ll wait until the drive home to find out if I’m done or I have another helping on my way.

The short version is this – despite years of folks thinking the contrary, it turns out ethanol is better for us and the environment than gasoline. End of story. I have read enough studies and papers on the Net Energy Value (NEV) of ethanol and the benefits it has for the environment, local economies, farmers, the atmosphere and reducing our dependence on oil to argue all goddamn day if necessary and cite articles, perform feats of thermodynamic calculations and berate you with facts and figures until you give in or run away screaming.

This plus a nearby E85 filling station means i will be burning at least 50% E85/50% E10 unleaded until further notice. Info and links follow.
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Of all the things I don’t worry much about with my car, number one on the list is how it looks. It has its share of dings, is missing the trim pieces on the passenger side and three interior door trim panels, the glovebox lid was crudely drilled through to gain access and I don’t remember the last time I waxed it, much less vacuumed it out.

Over the weekend, I went and got a medium stuffed crust pie from my local pizza establishment – greasy food is the best hangover cure ever. On the short drive back to the house, the containment vessel was breached and an ounce or so of pizza juice was leaked onto the passenger seat. Last night, I got around to cleaning it up with the extraction cleaner The Girl gave me for Christmas a few years ago. After getting rid of that spot, I went ahead and cleaned the rest of the passenger seat cushion for shits and grins. I was absolutely horrified by the putrid effluvent it was removing from the upholstery – the waste tank of the machine (a Bissell Little Green Deep Cleaner, if you must know) was slowly filling with a dark brown fluid.
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had to tighten my belt a notch today.