Lawn Mower Fuel Brand Experiment

[GasSavers_Ryland]

ok, I have to comments about what is being talked about on this page,
first off, there is alot of corn that is grown around here, and yes, you can grow corn in a sustainable healthy way, but how corn is grown it errodes the soil, and poisons the ground water from all the chemicals that are used in growing it, and in killing pests, and if your tax dollars were not subsudising the production of ethonal it would cost something like $3.50 a gallon or more to produce, and it also only is a net loss of energy to produce ethonal, in otherwords if you were to try to run a ethonal factory on ethonal you would run out, sure some of the facory could be run off renewable energy, but NO ONE in the country is doing this yet on a large scale.

but my main comment is about the lawn mower exsperement, I've worked on small engines enough to know that a carburator puts a set amount of fuel in to the passing air, and lawn mower carburators do not, and can not self adjust for differnt fuels, motorcycle carburators are more adjustable, and much more advanced, but they still can not self adjust for differnt fuels, some of the last honda car carburators had a solinod that would adjust to a point the fuel/air mix, but even those had their limitations, and required a o2 sensor, and I have yet to see a lawn mower with an o2 sensor.
with all of that said, all that is happening is each rotation the engine sucks in air, and a mesured amount of fuel, if you filled it with water, and pulled the starter cord, it would suck in the exact same amount of water, lawn mowers don't care what liquid they have intheir fuel tank, the carburator will let the same 14:1 mix no matter what, the only thing is they will not run on water, so you would have to keep pulling the rope.
with a lawn mower engine the things that are going to change are the engine temp, the power produced, and the exaust, unburnt fuel, and other polution, and most of all the amount of power that the engine is producing is going to change, so to really test the engine it should be a generator, even a simple one with a car alternator and a light bulb as the load, set up so the engine is alwas producing the same amount of electrical power, just like you want the same amount of power from your car engine to propel you down the road, if the power is not there you press the gas pedal a little more, and your fuel ecconmy goes down hill, we did a test with one of our cars, a Geo-prisem and found that one gas station gave us 36mpg, and the other gas station gave us 39 mpg, same type of use every time, same grade of fuel, we would switch every other fill up useing the other station, and you would see the numbers in the log book change.

so I have a hard time taking this lawn mower test serusely because there is no real load, all that is being showen is that the engine is running about the same speed, so it is sucking in about the same amount of fuel, and with the govener that is on a lawn mower engine you could even lean out your fuel air mix, and it would self adjust the speed, the only self adjustment is speed on a lawn mower, and that is most likely what the mecanic was thought he was talking about.

modern cars with fuel injection self adjust fuel for all kinds of reasons, engine temp, o2 sensor readings, air temp readings, knock sensor readings, lawn mowers have non of these, but fuel additives affect alot of the engines sensors in their own way, either by fooling the sensor, or affecting how the engine runs and affecting the sensor in that way.

[n0rt0npr0]

You said it yourself, the engine is self-adjusting for speed. If that fuel is better, again, that mower will gain speed. It "sees" the additional speed, and self adjusts. Air is not what is adjusted. The fuel metering is adjusted. Better fuel = more speed = less metering = longer run times. Those differing times have allready shown themselves.

[n0rt0npr0]

Originally Posted by SVOboy

Is there any way to compare a few generic brands that're local versus the big ones (you've covered them I think), just to see a general difference? I imagine all generic local stuff uses roughly the same business strategy when blending the gas to make it cheaper, might not be exact, but just for idea's sake.

Well I WAS going to resume testing today, but I asked the managers at the local cheapy stations(firebird and Miejers), and they said they just get whatever brand is cheapest.
One could conclude that there will be huge differences between these no-name cheapy brands because one may have found shell gas at a cheap price and the other may have found speedway at a cheap price.
The ONLY major brands that are left are MArathon and Sunoco(E10)

What should I do GasSavers?

[diamondlarry]

I vote for Marathon. I started using that Saturday. It seems to be the lesser of all the evils out there. It could also be interesting to see the difference between E10 gas and regualr gas.

[n0rt0npr0]

Just to recap for this page; When I did Mobil VS Speedway...Speedway has 10% Ethanol or E10 blended into ALL of their fuels all the way across the board! Every location that sells Speedway is E10.
Results of the E10 VS 100% Gasoline which was speedway vs mobil...
Mobil Average=1393.70 minus
Speedway Average=1331.92
=61.78sec difference / 1331.92 * 100 = 4.64%

Mobil does 4.64% better than Speedway(E10) fuel in a carburated lawn mower.

[n0rt0npr0]

I recieved some additive samples from Larry in the mail, so I'll baseline with Marathon fuel and then add FFT to the mix to test.
Thank you Larry.

And the constants in this round are:
-Eight 200ml runs (HOT runs = restarts within 5 minutes)
-Marathon baseline VS Marathon with FFT added
-of course fuel funnel is covered right after fill to control evaporation (like always)


Run #1 Marathon
-Length: 22:25.47 minutes OR 1345.47sec
-Temp remained inside 54°F
-Humidity was 50%
-8mph average windspeed
-30.24 inches pressure

Run #2 Marathon
-Length: 22:37.94 minutes OR 1357.94sec
-Temp remained exactly 53.9°F
-Humidity: 51%
-6mph average windspeed
-30.22 inches pressure

Run #3 Marathon
-Length: 22:52.31 minutes OR 1372.31sec
-Temp remained exactly 53°F
-Humidity was 51%
-6mph average windspeed
-30.21 inches pressure

Run #4 Marathon
-Length: 22:21.41 minutes OR 1341.41sec
-Temp remained exactly 53.2°F
-Humidity was 52%
-6mph average windspeed
-30.21 inches pressure

Run #5 Marathon with FFT
-Length: 22:26.19 minutes OR 1346.19sec
-Temp remained exactly 52.8°F
-Humidity was 53%
-4.2mph average windspeed
-30.21 inches pressure

Run #6 Marathon with FFT
-Length: 23:16.00 minutes OR 1396sec
-Temp remained exactly 52.7°F
-Humidity was 53%
-6.2mph average windspeed
-30.21 inches pressure

Run #7 Marathon with FFT
-Length: 22:12.38 minutes OR 1332.38sec
-Temp remained inside 51°F
-Humidity was 55%
-6mph average windspeed
-30.21 inches pressure

Run #8 Marathon with FFT
-Length: 22:30.91 minutes OR 1350.91sec
-Temp remained inside 47°F
-Humidity was 56%
-4.6mph average windspeed
-30.20 inches pressure

Averages:
-Marathon = 1354.28 seconds
-FFT & Marathon = 1356.37 seconds

FFT does .15% better overall.

Only thing I noticed during this test session was that with the FFT added, the mower started effortlessly compared to without.

I'll test Ethos FR next
To keep things equal, I'll keep running Marathon baselines at beginning of sessions.

[krousdb]

Good stuff! Keep em coming!

So what is the verdict on FFT?

[SVOboy]

Sounds like the verdict, from this at least, is it doesn't do much, who knows in our cars though.

[GasSavers_DaX]

Man this thread makes me want to set up a test engine from one of my spare D15's to run experiments on. Excellent thread nortonpro!

[GasSavers_Ryland]

I wonder what kind of results you might get if you added some isopropyl alcohol to your fuel, the stufffrom a drug store that is 25% water, as they use 100% isopropyl to remove water from your gas, by pushing it thru the engine, seeing how much alcohol/water you can add, I sugest this because I don't trust these results complealy, and it seem that if you get simaler run times running a percentage of water as your fuel then you know that your engine is only useing a small percentage of the fuel to keep running, and that it doesn't care what the rest of the liquid is, because you are not asking the engine to do a set amount of work, you are just asking it to mantain a vauge speed, the more work you ask it to do, the bigger differince it should make, and the amount of work the engine is able to do will varry as well with fuels.