thinking about running e85 on my vette does anyone now what is required?has someone already done this?

 

The LS1 is not designed for E85. It is crap fuel anyway. Why would anyone run watered down gas?

 

i know its not designed for it but it can be modified to take it, i heard of people gaining power from e85 cause its a higher octane #

 

Octane is not a measure of the energy contained by the fuel. Octane is a measure of how well the fuel resists detonation. Low octane fuel will detonate (knock) in high compression engines. High performance engines need higher octane fuel to prevent detonation, it does not supply more energy. Alcohol stores much less energy than gasoline.

Alcohol has many drawbacks. In addition to less energy, it absorbs water and goes bad quicker. It consumes more energy during its production than it supplies.

It's one of the greatest con jobs foisted on us by the farmer lobby

 

You can get more power with ethanol and high compression and blown engines, but it does take more of it because gas has more energy by volume. It is 102 to 105 Octane.

It wasn't the farmer lobby, it was Archer Danials Midland and Bob Dole that brought us ethanol in our fuel.

 

There's power to be made with e85, but it's not for everyones engine combination. The main benefit is the ability to increase timing, as was previously mentioned. Your tune needs to be updated to reflect the new stoich and timing and you'll need to check that your fuel system hardware is compatible. It's fairly easy.

If your combo is on the edge with compression and spark knocking, e85 may be a good option. Curious, why are you considering e85?

Mike

 

Around here I can't find conventional gasoline, I've looked. It's all e10.

 

Thanks for the link, I forgot about how it all got started. It reminds me about a book I read about ADM's price fixing schemes during the 90s.

In any case, presently the farmer lobby is all on board. Here in Indiana they tried to get E15 mandated, which fortunately failed. E15 would have ruined a lot of engines.

Like you said, engines can produce more power on E85, but ONLY if modified to run at such high compression that the higher octane is required. Just filling up with E85 wont do it.

And then the engine will be incapable of running 91/93 premium, will get terrible mileage, e85 is much more rare, and have all of the drawbacks of ethanol magnified several times.

 

I wouldn't say it's crap fuel. In many cases, especially in the turbo world, it's cheap race fuel. I ran E60 mixes on my old 335i and it really brought the car alive when running the correct fuel map.

 

Indiana has next to no real gas either. I spend a lot of time in northern Wisconsin, it is easy to find there because of all the boats.

 

I ran e85 in my 02 z06 for a couple years, like others have said you need to have the car tuned to take advantage of it, and you may need larger injectors as well depending on your other mods. If the car is mostly stock I wouldn't say there is much if any advantage to it, but if you're running boost or have just about everything bolt on including heads/cam there can be advantages.

There were three reasons I switched - 1) I couldn't reliably get anything better than 91 octane, while I had pretty wide spread access to e85 which tends to be closer to 100 octane. Cheap insurance and allows you to run more timing. 2) In my opinion it smells a hell of a lot better in a car w/o cats and 3) Engine temps tend to be a bit cooler

While it tends to be cheaper you also burn ~30%+ more fuel so compared to premium it's maybe just slightly cheaper or close to a wash. Your range on a tank will go down and you have to be able to find a station with e85 so it makes road trips and longer journeys require a bit more planning.

So in the end I'd say it depends on the car and your goals as far as if its worth it or not. Tune and possibly injectors (and fuel pump if you're making a lot of power) should be all that is needed to switch.

 

E85 may be among the lesser evils when used in a race car that is constantly being abused and the engine rebuilt. I still think it is crap fuel for a car that is expected to have long term reliability.

 

You also need to address the corrosive effects to the fuel lines, seals, etc.

 

No real benefit in running it in a near-stock vehicle. However, E85 is perfect for high-horsepower supercharged and turbocharged applications. Even the high-compression n/a guys running a shot of nitrous use it. The slight reduction in fuel economy (who cares?) is worth the benefits gained in horsepower from allowing higher (and safer) boost levels. More boost, less chance of detonation, cheaper than gasoline = win-win-win. I personally know many guys running E85 successfully, and I plan on using it in my next boosted build.

If your heart is set on using E85, I believe some guys just run larger injectors and pump, a late model PCM and GM flex fuel sensor, along with the required tune. Don't quote me on that, though. D3 Engineering in TX has done a few conversions, as far as I know.

 

I've ran E85 in my race cars for 5 years with great success. BUT my engines had 12.5/1 and 13.8/1 compression. On a stock or nearly stock engine I wouldn't consider using it. No real benefit for the cost it'll be. 91 is all a stock or nearly stock engine needs. It wasn't near as corrosive as people let on though, it's not like alcohol at all. But it don't like rubber and SOME plastics, so if you do switch be careful.

 

I personally would like to run 100% ethanol. Cleaner, less pollution, but the oil and gas lobby will never let that happen. Heck, the only reason we ended up with gasoline, was because John Rockefeller had a large supply of the cheap, dirty, byproduct of kerosene manufacturing. I'd rather give my money to American farmers than countries that want to kill us.

Jim

 

 

Ethanol requires more energy to produce (grow the crops, transportation, distilling, etc.) than the final product produces. It drives up the price of food, since the corn is being used for making fuel rather than food.

Turns out ethanol can be worse for the environment:

http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/e...-for-lobbyists
http://www.ewg.org/agmag/2013/02/cor...nd-environment
https://stateimpact.npr.org/pennsylv...11/12/ethanol/
http://dailycaller.com/2015/10/15/th...e-environment/

We are hardly dependent on the Middle East for oil. We will soon be an oil exporter, since the ban has been lifted.

 

I'm not really in favor of exporting our oil. If the doom and gloomers are correct that it is running out, it seems silly to be selling ours while it is cheap. We should be buying everyone else's and saving ours for after theirs run out.

 

The corn will be planted, grown and harvested anyway. Your "facts" seem to be written by the oil companies.

Jim