E85 Fuel

So our gas station just put in e85, and its 1.00 cheaper per gallon, i had heard that any car can run it with performance losses. Is this true or is that a switch i will have to permantely make and what would that take. Thanks

For What its worth....

E85 is usually used in engines modified to accept higher concentrations of ethanol. Such flexible-fuel engines are designed to run on any mixture of gasoline or ethanol with up to 85% ethanol by volume. The primary differences from non-FFVs(flexible fuel vehicles) is the elimination of bare magnesium, aluminum, and rubber parts in the fuel system, the use of fuel pumps capable of operating with electrically-conductive (alcohol) instead of non-conducting dielectric (gasoline) fuel, specially-coated wear-resistant engine parts, fuel injection control systems having a wider range of pulse widths (for injecting approximately 30% more fuel), the selection of stainless steel fuel lines (sometimes lined with plastic), the selection of stainless steel fuel tanks in place of terne fuel tanks, and, in some cases, the use of acid-neutralizing motor oil. For vehicles with fuel-tank mounted fuel pumps, additional differences to prevent arcing, as well as flame arrestors positioned in the tank's fill pipe, are also sometimes used.

Modern cars (i.e., most cars built after 1988) have fuel-injection engines with oxygen sensors that will attempt to adjust the air-fuel mixture for the extra oxygenation of E85, with variable effects on performance. All such cars can burn small amounts of E85 with no ill effects. Operating fuel-injected non-FFVs ) on more than 50% E85 will generally cause the check engine light (CEL) to illuminate, indicating that the electronic control unit (ECU) can no longer maintain closed-loop control of the internal combustion process due to the presence of more oxygen in E85 than in gasoline. Once the CEL illuminates, adding more E85 to the fuel tank becomes rather inefficient. For example, running 90% E85 in a non-FFV will reduce fuel economy by 33% or more relative to what would be achieved running 100% gasoline. (This example is illustrated above in the previous section - the 1998 Chevy S10 pickup experiment.) Even more importantly, continuing to operate the non-FFV with the check engine light (CEL) illuminated may also cause damage to the catalytic converter as well as to the engine pistons if allowed to persist.

IN THE END.......
To run a non-FFV with amounts of E85 high enough to cause the CEL to illuminate risks severe damage to the vehicle, that may outweigh any economic benefit of E85

It may be a dollar cheaper a gallon but you will experience milage loss due to the lower energy content of the ethanol and may not be worth the switch. USA today put out a story that you use 1.4 times the amount of fuel that means if your XJ was getting 20 mpg on E85 you would get 14.3 mpg. Now there are other experts that have differing opinions on the subject of just how much the fuel economy drops. A good article to read is http://www.agriculture.com/ag/story.jhtml?storyid=/templatedata/ag/story/data/1147098565893.xml
and the USA today article http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2006-02-01-ethanol_x.htm. I don't know what it takes for a Jeep to run on the E85 but my guess is that the fuel delivery system is not made for it. Ethanol is very corrosive and the flex fuel vehicles you see today have the corrosion-resistant fuel systems, special fuel injectors, sensors and computer controls, and hardened and coated engine parts to be able to run on ethanol and my owner manual says do not use ethanol based fuel. So you may be able to run the Jeep on it but will the fuel economy drop make it cost effective and do you want to run it anyway because its better on the environment? It's up to you.

It also has 105 octane and is AMAZING in boosted or high compression vehicle applications.


Jim

StylerG said:

So our gas station just put in e85, and its 1.00 cheaper per gallon, i had heard that any car can run it with performance losses. Is this true or is that a switch i will have to permantely make and what would that take. Thanks

Click to expand...

I suspect that the amount of E85 required to run a FI Jeep designed for use on Gasoline would be outside of the system parameters to actually run.
On a fixed metering system, like a carb, forget it.

Roughly speaking it takes 1.5 gallons of Ethanol to produce the same BTU output as Gasoline. That means, the injectors, fuel pump capacity, fuel lines and computer fuel map would all need to be changed to run on E85. Mother Earth News did a few articles in the 70's on homebrewing your own fuel and converting a pickup (carbed then) to 100% Ethanol. I also saw a conversion done by the University of Texas IIRC, but it was real expensive, and BTW, Illegal.

E10, which is what most folks have been using for years, bumps the octane rating a bit without lowering the BTU per gallon significantly. In IA, E10 (89 octane), costs the same or a bit less, as straight 87 octane gas. E10 has no harmfull effects and most cars handle it well. I had an old Courier Pickup (Rebadged Mazda B2000) that would get 25 mpg on regular and 32 on E10.

Moral of the story, Stick with what your car has been designed for. Unless you have a "Flex fuel" car that will take E85, I don't recomend fudging with it.

We ran E85 in a 95 Chevy pickup, a 97 Monte Carlo 3.4 and my 99 4.0 at work. They all ran fine. In the Jeep, I lost about 1.5 MPG, which is about 10%. I went back to unleaded last month, because here E85 is the same price as unleaded, so it wasn't worth the mileage hit.

For what it's worth, we used it because we started a pilot project to run our county sherriff cars on it. The fleet of 96-05 Fords all ran fine. A couple of the officers said the Crown Vics ran better on E85.

Here is a link to the National Ethanol Coalition. These folks business is to promote Ethanol fuels, AND they not only have a listing of E85 Vehicles, but also answers the question of "Can I convert my vehicle to run on E85?".
http://www.e85fuel.com/index.php

Thanks, quick thought and a subject i wont be touching again....not cost effective and it sounds stupid to me now. Thanks for the info though