Thread: Petrol v diesel economy

Got dragged over to New Plymouth on Monday by my son to collect a 1.8T Dear John wide area mower. A short 13hr day.. Took my Ranger and he hired a big tandem car trailer. The mower juuust fitted on the trailer after removing two dolly wheels off the side decks. Anyway, enjoyed a solid 2.5hrs heading back fully into a head wind, averaged 18.3 l/100k consumption. Once we were out of the wind and cut inland, big improvement, got down to 12.7 l for the final two hours in the dark. I think the final gas bill was about $400 incl RUCs.

My son was going to take his '99 Expedition and I'd guess the bill would have been double that.

That's the thing with diesels, cost doesn't go up that much with the increase in fuel consumption. Petrol going up from 8.5l/100 to 18l or more like it can with a bigger petrol towing is just cost prohibative. Mate's big V8 petrol used to get up to 35l/100Km on the napier-taupo, on 96 too. Around $115 every 100km... Ouch!

Yeah, it seems that diesel economy can be counter intuitive when asking a ute sized wagon to haul heavy loads. Happens all the time in the Aussie outback. Take a 2.5T Landcruiser, put 1T worth of kit on it, then haul a 2T trailer/camper and be sucking 30-35L/100km. Put all that weight into a 5 Tonne Unimog with a 5.9L turbo intercooled donk and find it returning 25-30L/100km

Originally Posted by 300winmag

..
30 odd years ago there was a Shell service station in Blenheim Road Ch-Ch ..
Shell spent thousands trying to track down fuel losses on the site,... an additional suction line was pulled up which went under the back fence into the neighbours property, attached to the other side of the fence was a semi rotary hand pump with 3m of hose..

Here's what my mate down there had to say about it. He was in fuel distrib'n:

That would be the corner of Middleton Rd and Blenheim Road. Was a Shell servo opposite as well. That would help explain why they said it was ‘uneconomic’ to keep them open. The one on the other side has been a car yard for many years. I guess opportunity and ability are always incentives to be creative.

Originally Posted by XR500

Yeah, it seems that diesel economy can be counter intuitive when asking a ute sized wagon to haul heavy loads. Happens all the time in the Aussie outback. Take a 2.5T Landcruiser, put 1T worth of kit on it, then haul a 2T trailer/camper and be sucking 30-35L/100km. Put all that weight into a 5 Tonne Unimog with a 5.9L turbo intercooled donk and find it returning 25-30L/100km

A mate has the 4 door v8 landcruiser towing his horse float around the south island with two Clydesdales in the back.
Fully loaded ute and getting 18l per hundy.
That was the average for the whole trip .

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I'd be pretty happy with that!

Originally Posted by andyanimal31

A mate has the 4 door v8 landcruiser towing his horse float around the south island with two Clydesdales in the back.
Fully loaded ute and getting 18l per hundy.
That was the average for the whole trip .

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I tow pretty much all winter with my 200 series. My average fuel consumption for the last financial year was 14.7 litres/100km. That’s about 40% Highway, 40% gravel logging/country roads and 20% proper off road. Running 34 inch mud tyres, tuned with a 3 inch exhaust. A huge part of that is how you drive them. They’re not as thirsty as people think, given the work mine does anyway. Still makes the eyes water when it costs $300 odd to fill up at least once a week


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My daily work hack is a Late model VX Ltd 4.5 ltr V8, it has a 138 ltr fuel tank. Generally run it from full until the fuel warning light comes on, then look for a gas station, preferably Mobil as I have a Super Card which gives you 16 cents off per litre, only problem is the price of diesel can vary that much from one end of the street to the other in Auckland.
As for a work hack they are bloody comfortable vehicle and have a heap of snot. I don't tow a lot in it, have just clicked over 100k in 3.5 years so it will see me through until I check out.

Up until recently I never use to worry about fuel costs but now we pay a little more attention to it.
When the guys get the mini tanker in to fill the excavators and other equipment on our construction sites we get them to fill the utes as well, it's generally well below gas station pump prices.

Should have installed a 50kl tank in our yard 2 years ago and filled it, it would have outperformed any sharemarket investment.

Or become contaminated with diesel bug...

Few years back we were doing a job where we had to renew some underground diesel tanks, we had to remove the diesel and temporarily store it and put it back into the new tanks after they were installed. Some bright spark of an engineer thought it would be good to take a sample of the fuel for diesel but, got us to take the sample and sent it away to the lab, result came back all clear with a comment that there diesel was the old high sulphur type. The client was turning a little green and decided that it would be better for them to pay us to dispose of it and fill the tanks with new diesel. We clipped the ticket both ways and ended up with a shitload of the stuff, our modern diesels seemed to run on it ok.

Diesel bug is easily controlled, it loves moisture, there’s many ways to keep it out of your storage system.

Yeah, one way they do it locally is turning over the entire tank every 2 or 3 days. That way it gets sold to become someone elses problem I think - very weird how no one from the companies gets back to you when you query it!

A few options - dose the tank with toxic chemicals which kills the microbes, get inside and clean the tank, circulate the fuel thru UV filters but ultimately you need to stop the ingress of water/moisture. It's all doable, just all depends on how deep your pockets are and how many end users you want to piss off.

Companies with standby generators have this at the top of there hit list, especially data centers.

I've done several marine cleans with an economy sized 1 mic filter and chemical treatment - the biggest problem there is some of the prickiest bugs will pass through a 1mic filter, uv doesn't kill it off fully and chemicals the same. I had one that we finally got after two polish cycles vacuuming out the bottom of the tank and on UV cycle as well as several chemical treatments, the one that sorted it finally was the Wynns EDT. I've kept using that one ever since and it seems to work reliably although I've had one failure with my own ute where it was discovered to have bug through the fuel system from tank, lift pump and filter and we assume all the way through everything else...

I will say though that we still aren't 100% convinced that it was actually a 'diesel bug' species and not some other sort of contamination, mechanic never kept the sample and without getting it tested you just can't be certain. It was really light and fine and stayed in suspension in the fuel which is a little unusual. No water present either... Seems like injectors and high pressure pump are fine as well which is unusual for these and bug - the issue that I have with the limp mode coming on and which kicked off the fuel system cleanout appears to be related to the suction control valve not opening quickly enough as you come over the top of a hill on cruise control and the injector duty cycle drops right back to idle. That's giving a pressure spike in the fuel rail which is tripping the 'fuel rail pressure out of specification' DTC and limp mode coming up. Fun and games, combined with the fact that I'm not using the thing in favour of the petrol car which is cheaper. Need to do some long trips and get some diagnostic data recorded!

Diesel vs petrol
They both drive totally different. I choose Diesel for towing heavy loads. Asides that and deep river crossings there is no no advantage cost wise

Originally Posted by Gkp

Diesel vs petrol
They both drive totally different. I choose Diesel for towing heavy loads. Asides that and deep river crossings there is no no advantage cost wise

The latest diesels with auto trans are no different to the petrols, they even turn off at the lights and restart when you hit the loud pedal. The last one I hopped into I had to check it had two labels... Bloody awful to drive to be honest, the aircon system had half of the buttons on the dash and the rest buried in bloody menus in the touchscreen. Prick of an idea.