First of all!
1) why is it necessary for the vehicle to be up to temp before it'll switch?
2) Is there an infrastructure building for the fuel?
3) oh and Range!
What is the best range you've all been able to achieve on LPG?
Thankyou
H
1) Because the LPG system (assuming a multipoint, a singlepoint is stand alone) slaves off the petrol system which needs cold running enrichment (choke) but LPG doesn't so if it switched immediately it would be running too rich until warmed up.
2) if you mean a fuel map, not exactly. The petrol ECU still controls the fuelling based on the normal sensors (Lambda, MAF, TPS) and the LPG system slaves off it, but there is correction programmed into the LPG ECU. So, if at a particular load and revs the petrol systems needs the injectors to open for 8mS, for the same load and revs the LPG injectors may need to be open for 11mS. The LPG controller intercepts the pulses to the petrol injectors and is programmed to add 3mS to the injector pulses at that load and revs. The amount it needs to add will vary at different load and revs so the LPG controller contains it's own correction map.
3) Best I've managed on a run without a trailer is 231 miles on a 65 litre fill. Worst was 145 miles on the same 65 litres with a sodding great, fully loaded, trailer on the back.
Ah cheers.
Is there an increase of interest in LPG as a fuel do you think?
Best I've ever had out of my 4.6 Thor on LPG is around 200 miles. That was almost entirely motorway miles and was the first tank of LPG after having it fitted.
Every tank after that has been fewer miles. I usually get around 160-180. I think the worst I've had was around 120 miles. I've never towed anything.
I have a wheel well tank which takes somewhere around 65 litres.
I don't know if there is increased interest but my local supplier recently put their price up. It's now 65p (or 67p, I can't remember) and I've stopped using them. There's a Shell station on my commute that has LPG on their price board but it never has a price. I think they've stopped selling it but haven't replaced their board. I read somewhere recently that BP have stopped selling it too. The BP I saw that had it was very expensive though - IIRC it was something like 79p.
Makes me think there's not enough interest to make it worthwhile for them to stock to it.
I fill up at Morrisons in Coventry as it's 55p there. It's inconvenient though as it's over 20 miles from home. I have to plan and schedule quite well for fill ups. Sometimes I don't plan well or have an unexpected journey that throws the plans out and I have to fill up at the expensive local place. Another inconvenience is my local place also doesn't open every day of the week and is only open during business hours in the week. They also closed for just over a week around Christmas leaving me running on petrol (I was off work and not in Coventry for closer to three weeks).
It's made the car cheaper to run but it does come with its own drawbacks - availability, convenience, having to plan my life around my more frequent fill ups and my partner won't go near it or fill it up. If she's driving it and it needs filling up it ends up running on petrol.
BP withdrew LPG from their forecourts, or at least the ones they own (the ones with M&S and/or Wild Bean Cafe) rather than the BP signed ones that are independently owned, some of whom still have LPG, whereas Shell are increasing the numbers with their tie up with Calor and promoting the Autogas brand. Morrisons and Asda commonly have LPG (and are usually cheap), but Tesco no longer do it and a lot of Sainsburys withdrew it too. If I can fill up at my local Flogas depot at 57p per litre, I will but otherwise I fill up wherever is most convenient. 70p a litre is still a lot cheaper than £1.25 a litre for petrol.
Not sure there is an increase in it, although it has had some very positive feedback recently (Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, is suggesting that taxis are converted to LPG to improve the air quality in London) but the increased use of direct injection engines (which are much harder, if not impossible, to convert) hasn't helped. The biggest problem is that DVLA only show something like 150,000 converted vehicles so it is considered a minority fuel yet of the 5 LPG converted cars I've owned, only 2 have had LPG shown on the V5. So the actual number is likely to be nearer 500,000. A much bigger market that the filling stations think.
The fuel type on the logbook is a very unreliable indicator, I know of a p38 that belongs to my mates boss that says its a 4.6 diesel. Its actually a 4.6 petrol/gas, but certainly not Diesel.
Even the factory fit i had only showed petrol, I've only had 1 out of 4 vehicles on gas that have actually shown Gas on the logbook.
Theres no real harm in actually getting the petrol injectors to work when its started from cold - It does tend to stop them playing up from lack of use at least. You should be able to get away with a fairly low switchover temp - 30c is usually enough for it to be off cold start, and provided you have a decent flow through the vapouriser at that point it won't freeze up.
Range is really limited by the amount of space your willing to give up - At least you have the wheel well on a p38 to use, but additional tanks can be fitted if you desire/require them, though you'd be looking at either underslung tanks, or replacing the petrol tank with a smaller one and using the space you free up to add tanks (not a cheap option!).
BP wise - some of the stations they supplied (the BP connect ones mainly) ceased to have a supply when BP stopped supplying LPG about 2-3 years ago due to low sales (because they overpriced it like everything else they do). The local one at Linford wood here when it changed ownership got the lpg back again on the same pump, now supplied by Flogas (with 15p a litre price drop at the same time). The other BP station that did it took the pump out, but they seem mostly to be geared towards people buying overpriced M&S branded food and expensively priced coffee to go.
www.Filllpg.co.uk will show pretty much all the stations in the country - elsewhere is slightly more patchy as its updated by users, but you can add stations to improve that if you know of or find any that are missing.
I fill up in London if I can, there’s only one very expensive shell just off the m11 that sells lpg round here, in London I’ve found a BP that apart from being increasingly cheaper, also gives a penny a litre off ( with every £30 spend) going up each time to upto 10p off every litre,,
It means I can have a difference of nearly 20 quid with a full fill..
Cheapest I've found in London is the Sainsbury's at Becton by the A406 North Peculiar, A13 junction.
Getting the equivalent of 29mpg 4.0l Bordeaux 2001 - Converted last year by Simon
Price in Gaerwen - Anglesey 58 per itre
As for fuel economy, it's a bit worse than petrol (about 10%) but it generally costs half as much.
I'm a bit grumpy about LPG at the moment. The garage which is literally round the corner from the new house stopped doing LPG as we moved in. Apparently this is due to a till upgrade that didn't work with their old LPG pump. The next nearest one was bought up by BP and stopped doing LPG for a variety of reas.. excuses which basically ended up with "we don't know, I just work here".
Anyway, if you have access to LPG - it's a great option for any suitable car. The best one I've had so far was a E46 BMW 330i which worked out about 11p per mile if you flogged it mercilessly. Not bad for a 155mph estate!
My P38 gets between 2.3-2.5 miles per litre in normal use on back roads and short trips and closer to 3 miles per litre on the motorway.
Our nearest ASDA is selling at 52.7ppl, Petrol for 123p so to fill the LPG tank from empty costs £37.95 but the same amount of petrol costs £88.56!
Gilbertd wrote:
Cheapest I've found in London is the Sainsbury's at Becton by the A406 North Peculiar, A13 junction.
The one I mentioned, was at 52p a litre, after your 10 th visit it’s down to 42p, when I asked why they said that hopefully I’d be buying something else, UNLUCKY, Lol
Bit irrelevant but here in Spain LPG fluctuates from about 68 -71 cents a litre -that is about 59 p to 61 p and is not very common in use. LPG stations are about 20 -30 miles apart in built up areas like the Costas but many hundreds of miles when far from major cities. Many taxis seem to have moved onto LPG. Not many normal cars use it but I have been surprised to see some modern ones that you would not expect on it. Camper vans and Roamer homes often stop at my local LPG garage to fill their gas bottles for cooking and heating. I'm not sure that they are supposed to do this but apparently it is much cheaper.
It depends on the bottle and the station - If its what we know here as a Calor bottle (one you pay a deposit for with a basic valve with no shut off) then no your not supposed to fill them. If its a safefill or similar bottle (where you buy the bottle outright and it does have a fill limiter inside the bottle) then you are able to refill it. If the filling station lets you fill it can be another matter entirely though. You can also have a LPG tank fitted to the vehicle in the usual fashion with a valve to supply vapour rather than liquid (pickup pipe is at the top of the tank rather than bottom) there shouldn't be any reason for a problem with that.
Its bound to be cheaper filling from the pump, as the cylinder suppliers (at least in this country) can be overpriced - Example of this we use 19kg cylinders of propane for a space heater. Prices below are for a refill beginning of Feb this year collecting from store/depot (so you'd already have a cylinder)
One from Calor just for the refill is £48.42 but I can get those easily within a mile of home
One from Flogas depot in Coventry last time i was there was £33
One from Birmingham Autogas was £17 - With the £30 deposit on the bottle, still cheaper than a refill from Calor. And I try to fill up there whenever I'm up that way, as they are a few pence cheaper than the local garages here that do autogas.
If you add those up (approx 38 litres for 19KG) the price they are charging is the equivalent of £1.27 a litre from Calor, 86p From Flogas 45p from Birmingham Autogas (they were selling Autogas for 54p a litre at the time,so bottle in their case is actually cheaper)
Didn't realise you used 19kg Calor bottles Bri.. You could fill them without raising forecourt staff eyebrows by attaching another fill point to the car and running pipe to the 19kg bottle in the car, suppliers sell fill fittings for the portable bottles. Potentially unsafe but not for you/us because we know to always run the bottle completely empty and then only put 38 litres in. Probably save around £17 on each refill plus have the convenience of filling the car and bottle on the same visit ;-)
But the real reason for me coming back to this thread was to ask Strangerover how much it will cost an 18 year old to insure a V8 P38? No wish to put a dampener on things but interested to know. I used to run V6 stuff when I was around that age a lot of years ago when insurance was a lot cheaper but even then it cost me an arm and a leg to get insured.
I bought it as a restoration project to complete over the coming years..
Insurance isn't an issue yet..
Just curious about LPG ;)
Lpgc wrote:
Didn't realise you used 19kg Calor bottles Bri.. You could fill them without raising forecourt staff eyebrows by attaching another fill point to the car and running pipe to the 19kg bottle in the car, suppliers sell fill fittings for the portable bottles. Potentially unsafe but not for you/us because we know to always run the bottle completely empty and then only put 38 litres in. Probably save around £17 on each refill plus have the convenience of filling the car and bottle on the same visit ;-)
But the real reason for me coming back to this thread was to ask Strangerover how much it will cost an 18 year old to insure a V8 P38? No wish to put a dampener on things but interested to know. I used to run V6 stuff when I was around that age a lot of years ago when insurance was a lot cheaper but even then it cost me an arm and a leg to get insured.
Don't use enough of them for it to be worthwhile - Since finding Birmingham Autogas do those so cheaply its actually cheaper to buy a refill from them than it is to try refilling it anyway (even at their pump price). Only use them in the winter for a bit of heat inside the workshop (when we can get into it of course!). but yes, that would be the obvious solution for any campervans that wanted to fill off a pump as well without the difficulty you can have (very few forecourt staff would realise even if it was a diesel engine on the vehicle than was filling that way).
On the insurance front, it helps a bit to have some no claims/years driving behind you, though as Simon said its gone up somewhat now from when I passed my test as well.
Just saw someone say it's possible to have an LPG station fitted at your own property so long as it's taxed and meets Regs? .
Would this be possible for someone with enough "land" ?
I know, weird things that go through my head ;)
StrangeRover wrote:
Just saw someone say it's possible to have an LPG station fitted at your own property so long as it's taxed and meets Regs? .
Would this be possible for someone with enough "land" ?
I know, weird things that go through my head ;)
I've never heard of this but I know people do have onsite tanks to use for heating their homes.
It would be good to know how it works for home filling a car and how much the set up costs. It would solve one of the biggest drawbacks (IMO).
Possible yes, but you will struggle to find anyone offering a price that will save you money unless your doing a lot of miles (or at least using a lot of LPG).
Bear in mind you'd need a suitable power supply (240v 16A I think is the spec usually given), a suitable location for the tank (has to be certain minimum distance from buildings, and has to be accessible for filling/use and would suspect it has to sit on a suitable hardstanding, I'm fairly sure it also has to have some sort of approval from the local council as well).
Tax wise, easiest bet is to pay the supplier when its delivered at the appropriate rate for road use.
Have a read of this thread
It's entirely possible but as mentioned the tank must be at least a certain distance (I think it is 5m) from buildings and the property boundary. Not that much of a problem if you live out in the sticks and I see tanks in people's gardens quite regularly in places like Norfolk where mains gas isn't available. Gas for home use such as heating and cooking, requires vapour so comes off an outlet on the top of the tank but to run your car you need liquid so you need a tank with a bottom take off too and then a pump to get it into your tank. You buy the bulk gas from your preferred supplier (although a lot won't fill a tank that they didn't supply or you don't hire from them) and use a meter to accurately inform HMRC how much you are using in your car so they can send you a bill for the Road Fuel Duty. If you can get it at the right price, it's worth doing but it isn't cheap to get set up in the first place, you're looking at around £2k for a suitable pump to start with. I came across a rural taxi company a few years ago that had 5 cars all running on LPG so the owner had his own tank and filling point for convenience. Due to the amount he was using he was getting a good deal on his gas too.