Tell me about: LPG Conversions! :)

mattyprice4004

mattyprice4004

mattyprice4004

Soldato
Joined
24 Apr 2007
Posts
7,562
Location
Southport
As I'm doing mega miles in the Ti, I was wondering if it'd be worth looking at an LPG conversion?

I currently do about 20k a year, but this might increase soon. With careful driving I can hit about 35mpg, so obviously if a conversion is around £1000 it looks like it could save a lot in the long run!

My questions would be:

1. What's the best system to use?

2. Will it work OK with my engine? The car is fitted with a fairly straightforward inline 4, turbocharged 2 litre lump, nothing particularly special.

3. Any extra servicing costs etc?


Cheers!
 
I plan on keeping the vehicle until it needs to go, it runs excellent and I can replace anything that breaks very quickly and relatively inexpensively. A good few years at least :)

Compared to my old diesel 30-35mpg kills the wallet, and I'm hardly on an excellent wage :(
 
mpg figures are useless here.

I know someone with a 3.0L V6 Shogun on gas, it costs as much in fuel as doing over 50mpg on petrol, which it can't get close to. It used to be a lot better but gas is getting more expensive.

I think your Rover is a bit to old to consider it, how long do you plan on keeping it?
 
There's a reason why most, if not all, LPG converted cars are V8s or large engined gas guzzlers. You own neither. The savings will not be worth it.
 
I had my conversion done somewhat on the cheap for £800 but its been fine. Its quite a basic conversion, in that it doesn't change over automatically when the engine is warm, i have a switch to change it over manually, but the advantage to this is i can start the car on LPG if i so wish, not really recommended and it does run rough untill the car is warmed up.

But on the plus side, it cost me £800, I pay 46p a litre (its just gone up, it was 43p) and I have a 60 litre tank in the spare wheel well, of which i can put a max of about 49 litres in, but its usually near 40 as i dont empty it completely.

Costs me £17 to fill give or take a few pence, and i can do anything up to 200 miles around town, and 300 miles on a long steady run. Cant fault it at all :)
 
Too expensive to bother imo, aboard epsilon did a complete rebuild and ran his 420 bubble on LPG but it was far from straight forward iirc.
 
Kits are better and cheaper now than they ever have been. You'll typically lose around 10-15% of your economy on gas, although petrol is just over twice the price of LPG. Type of kit depends on your flavour of engine. For example, I'm going to put my e30 on LPG and all the informed advice says that single point/closed loop is the best choice. If it was a newer engine then multipoint would be the way to go etc. Other knock on effects are if you sell the car you'll get more for it, and it you drive it until it's dead you will easily sell the kit on for a few hundred quid.
 
I've been running Multipoint LPG for a couple of weeks and my experiences are as the dark_side has said. I'm running a 2.6V6 which gets about 30mpg on petrol and about 27mpg (ish) on gas. There is a slight drop in power on gas (but nothing really that bad). However I am having the car remapped at the weekend so this could minimise further.
 
Janesy B said:
How will the chocoate pistons cope with the conversion?
Click to expand...

As long as the engine is running standard boost, and doesn't have any major design flaws, then I wouldn't see this as an issue. Those pistons give up when the boost is increased, but the higher calorific value of LPG doesn't increase the burn temps anywhere near as much as more turbo boost does.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom