The Spring
18 March 2007, 77,000
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T |
he price of diesel has started ticking up and just to prove a point to myself,
I filled the car up at ASDA. The point I
was wanting to prove (or otherwise)
is that diesel is just diesel for the vast majority of engines. For my driving, the TiD spends most of its
time at a steady cruise, so presumably whatever fuel it would be burning, it
won’t matter to a degree what it is burning.
I may have been wrong all along… but before I discuss this, a few words
on fuel brands and grades to bolster the separate article elsewhere on the
website. I’ll start working on this, but
it’ll take many thousands of miles.
Many fuel providers want the motorist to use their particular brand,
which is driven by increasing their profits.
I’ve nothing against this, hey, I’ve traditionally used Shell 
because
there were two Shell fuel stations on my most frequent commuter routes (one has since defected to Total). To pick just three brands, Shell, Total and BP dedicate a lot of website
space to tell the (potential)
customer just how fabulous their fuels are.
Loyalty cards, special clubs, flashy advertising and scantily clad fuel
girls are all used to entice customers to use just the one brand wherever they
go. Perhaps I lied about the girls. In return some customers are adamant that
there are benefits to be had from a given brands fuel. Except few fuel customers keep comprehensive
logs of fuel consumption *cough* /link to 9-3 fuel page/ and therefore appear
to simply guess at how effective or otherwise a certain fuel is. It’s also hard to quantify a change in fuel
consumption or engine behaviour over one or two tanks because there are so many
variables.
And yet, aware of the above, Chef running on ASDA diesel is noisier when
cold, less responsive and sootier. It’s
hard to quantify the response and noise aspects but there is more soot behind
during firm acceleration. Of course, I
can tweak my VP44 to increase the acceleration and soot if I want to. Consumption wise, I can’t comment. One tank of ASDA and a whole bunch on Shell
isn’t a fair comparison. But the good
news is that a new application on my Tungsten T3
will automatically monitor fuel consumption, brands and grades for me and I
won’t have to worry about doing it manually.
In late April things started warming up and the air conditioning could
be used to cool the interior down. Over
the winter months the Saab’s automatic air conditioning
system spends most of its time adjusting the heater to warm the cabin up but
now that the sun is stronger, the air temperatures higher, it’s cooling the
interior.
Some time ago I wrote that I suspected the cabin air temperature sensor
was misbehaving. This sensor sits in
front of the gear lever and has an integrated fan to draw air over the sensor
from the cabin, thus obtaining a more accurate measurement. If the fan doesn’t work, as the dashboard
warms up either through the sun or the lights in it, so the temperature sensor
reports higher figures and the system compensates by pumping more and more cool
air into the cabin. This is exactly what
Chef appeared to be doing so I had a careful listen for the fan. Nothing.
As of yet I’ve yet to take the dashboard apart so as to have a fiddle
with the sensor and see if I can’t get it working again. For that I’ll wait until it’s just a little
bit warmer by the time I arrive home of an evening.