Monday 10 November 2014

Winter is coming

After running the (now) old Yokohama's C.drive 2 for over 61k kilometres (the last 40k were at the front axle), I decided to try something else, one of those fuel efficient type of tire that promise to save you what can be a considerable amount of money.
I had driven Dunlop's before (nice soft and unlucky tire... blew two of them little over 20k) but never tried fuel savers. Crunching some numbers, thanks to the Energy Efficiency page of the European Commission, and they say that I can save up to 195€ on fuel by fitting B labelled tires instead of F labelled. Well, since I paid 199.25€ for a pair of Dunlop Sport Bluresponse (195/60R15), they seem to pretty much pay for themselves if, I drive them up to 60 thousand kilometres... not a problem!
The new tires were fitted at the rear axle, the older ones were balanced and the steering was aligned, this is also included in the paid value.

The glitch is no more!

And the LPG fuel level indicator goes "bip bip bip" as the system switches to petrol as the LPG runs (near) empty.
This was achieved with a new software update made to the system control unit that finally solved the problem. One thing is left to check later, the fuel reserve, to little and the system will not switch to petrol when out of gas, to much and the Corolla will be running to the LPG station far to many times.
Driving home that day, the engine seemed more "smooth" than the usual for the past few months, as I was told by the man that made the update, that was natural since the new software not only had the correction for the fuel level problem, but also had some other minor corrections made.

Thursday 6 November 2014

178947

At fifty thousand kilometres running on LPG the odometer red 178947km, still some 4k short to the break-even point.
Sometime soon the Corolla will have to pay a visit to the shop to try and sort out"the glitch" and check if everything else in the LPG system is in perfect working order.
Valve clearance will be checked next oil service at 182k.