Plug Woes

The last few weeks have been a bit frantic with the Pathfinder. What started off as an occasional misfire that wasn't even detected by the ECU quickly became an AA recover and a few days at the local Nissan dealership in Sheffield. At one point I suspected a blown Head Gasket as the smoke being produced when I started up from cold seemed indicative.
As it turned out, thankfully, it was only a failed spark plug. The resulting unburnt fuel making it's way to the Cat and as that heated up, being burnt off.
I've since put a new set plugs in and gone for the next coldest temp rating to try and work better with the higher burn temps of LPG.
This failure was at 42000 miles and the plugs were only due for changing at 54000. Having done 9000 miles on LPG they had clearly expired before time. The gallery below shows the condition of the plugs as they came out

Pathfnder Spark Plugs

Copycat?

Anyone wanting to follow me down the Pathfinder route?
The V6 Petrol model is quite rare but one has just come up for sale on Autotrader for £15k on an 06 with 34k miles

Pathfinder 1st Update

I've been running the Nissan Pathfinder 4.0 V6 Aventura now since mid May.

From My Cars

The first two weeks on petrol only to ensure all was well and then during a weeks holiday it was converted to LPG by Ray at Northern Autogas.
As with my previous vehicle, it's been fitted with a Prins VSI-LPG system. Just sneaking under the requirement for only a single reducer with the V6 running at just under 300BHP.
The first 1000 miles went very well before returning it to Ray for a visual and pressure check. A slight tweak to the static pressure and I was on my way.
During that initial 1000 miles I'd noticed a hesitation misfire on medium to hard acceleration and on some long hill climbs, particularly just after switching over to gas. That has improved but it's still there. I hope a further tweak to the pressure is all that's required but finding the time to get the vehicle back in to Uncle Ray is the biggest issue for me.
The performance of the Pathfinder is great. There is a noticeable change in the power delivery when on gas but with those sorts of figures it rarely presents itself as an issue of note in normal driving. Smoothness is improved and it runs a lot quieter. Considering the size of the aftermarket exhaust, this is a very good thing.
The increased tank capacity of the pathfinder, a 95 litre donut tank underslung in lieie of the spare wheel, gives a working capacity of 75 litres and a range of around 280 miles during the normal commute. This makes a big difference as I can pretty much do 3 days commute rather than in the previous vehicles' 2 days. I also makes the search for LPG Filling stations in unknown areas a lot easier.
With an average MPG of around 17 and Cost per mile at 16pence we're currently seeing equivalent running costs of a Diesel car that can do 41.5mpg as an average. Pretty damn good for a big 7-seater 4x4 with 300BHP.

the graph below shows the MPG since conversion. You can see the ping pong during the early fill ups as the pressure system balances out but since then it's been a lot more consistent than the Outlander used to be.

From LPG Motoring

I created a Wordle cloud of my blog content. Thankfully the key words of LPG running cost are large.

Pathfinder power

We recently said goodbye to the Outlander and hello to a Nissan Pathfinder 4.0 V6 Aventura. It's currently being converted to LPG. I plan to write a review of the last 12 months and then detail the conversion of the Pathfinder.

How to rate our efficiency

An interesting discussion started today following on from a tweet from @bobbyllew (of scrapheap, red dwarf and Carpool fame) on the best method to demostrate just how cheap it was for him to run is Mitsubishi iMeiv. MPG doesn't apply unless you make some strange calculation of power so he stumped for Cost per 100 miles driven. I suggested Pence per mile, a figure I often use when comparing the relative costs of running a vehicle. The subsequent twitter stream made interesting reading with many pro and counter arguments.
The bottom line is that you're trying to compare apples and oranges between Electric and fossil fuelled cars. The costs per mile is a relative figure but is impacted by the changing costs of the respecting 'fuel' and so it's merit as a published figure is useful but time limited.
Perhaps we need a traffic light system to be introduced.

The costs go up

There's an awful lot of talk currently about the price of Petrol hitting an all time high of £1.20 per litre (almost £5.50 per Gallon). Obviously this is making LPG an attractive alternative. However, LPG drivers are included in the price hikes. Over the last 3 weeks i've seen prices rise at my local Morrisons from 53.9 ppl to 58.9 and then 60.9. That's a 13% increase in less than a month. Hitting my personal pocket to the tune of £49 per month, So while LPG is great, the garden in this case is not always rosey and in percentage terms the current inflationary increases have hit hard.
This graph from whatgas.com shows the story.

25K Miles and counting

Having now got more than 25,000 LPG miles under the tyres of the Outlander it's time to look at the numbers again.

So, since the 21st May 2009 i've been recording all the LPG fuel used, the cost and the mileage. The result shows two consistent periods of average MPG running with some explained spikes. Firstly, the original install was not fuelling properly for two reasons. 1) there was an installation error meaning that one of the fuel pipes from injector to manifold was pinched and couldn't flow at full rate and 2) fuel trimming was too high and needed a software change. It took a long time for these tow issues to be resolved because my initial trip to thinkgreencars didn't find anything and then it took a couple of trips to Northern Autogas who are more local to me before they found the problem. Having had these two issues fixed the car drove a lot better with no noticeable power difference from petrol. However, this was at the detriment of the now free flowing fuel so the average MPG post fix was and is 1.5 mpg worse.
This graph shows the mpg, overall average and moving 10 fill average for the last 25k miles.

Click for a larger view. Two other points to note are the significant low spike in early December 09. This was our trip to Scotland and we spent a lot of time on minor roads compared the normal 90% motorway commute. Also, during Jan and Feb 10 there were a couple of low spikes. These coincide with the worst of the snow and the extra gas required to drive in very tricky conditions and with lights and aircon on all the time.

What this did to the cost of running the vehicle can be seen in the following chart. Here you can see that the cost of running per mile has increased steadily from 11ppm to 14ppm. This is a combined result from the change in economy and increasing fuel costs. again, click for larger view.

Other figures of note: Average cost of fuel 53.7 pence per litre with a high of 64.9 ppl. We also run a diesel car and comparing the cost of running that the Outlander started of with an equivalent mpg of around 46mpg and has now fallen to 37mpg.

All in all, thus far, the running costs have been as expected with a lower variability than running a petrol or diesel car due to the greater consistency of fuel prices. As we approach the 12 month anniversary it's time to start thinking of a replacement vehicle and again an LPG powered car is on the cards. More details next time.

Twitter Account Live

I've created a Twitter account for the more immediate ramblings
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