E85 With Flex Fuel Sensor Who Is Running It?
 

Just want to see who is running E85 with flex fuel sensor. And how they like it?

I run e85 and flex fuel sensor in my turboed small block street car. Works great. Where I am ethanol ranges from 70-85%.

Ditto to what he said^

Its especially nice when the pump E85 mix changes for the winter.

Check youtube, flex fuel sensors read water as ethanol! From what that video shows they're not reading ethanol directly but rather gasoline and then assuming the rest is ethanol.

I run E85 in my avalanche maybe once a month....its a nice wake up for the truck...seems peppier but it sure burns through it A LOT quicker!
The only thing i have heard about running E85 is to make sure you are as empty as possible when switching over from gas to E85 and visa-versa and put in more then 5 gallons or the computer wont know you have switched and that's when people start having issues running their vehicles on different fuels...
Around here the E85 is about .50 cheaper then regular....so for me it aint worth running E85 for less mileage.....with regular gas i get around 14mpg city driving...with E85 im running 10-11mpg...

I don't know what youtube says, but the flex fuel sensor does not see water as ethanol. If it did see water as ethanol, the ethanol content would be constantly changing. I have been running e85 for 8 years now. My car has sat for up to 6 months at one point and my ethanol sensor always reads the same as the last time the engine ran. I have a lcd display permently installed which shows my ethanol content real time and my aftermarket ecu displays and always logs the content. I live in a humid area and never experienced a problem with water being absorbed in the fuel.

IMO there is so much misinformation about e85 on the Internet, mainly by people that have never used it.

Found this guy / shop looking for other things.....https://www.facebook.com/DSX.Tuning

He makes an Ethanol % and Fuel Temp gauge for the GM Flex Fuel Sensors he installs / tunes to convert non flex fuel EfI cars.

This guy seems pretty smart.

So e85 is actually available at the pump? Never seen it....what's the advantage for a normal passenger vehicle? Fill up twice per week instead of once?

How about 13to1 compression out of pump gas.

14 apache, don't you really need the higher compression ratio when running alcohol to compensate for the loss in fuel energy? I understand there is advantage when running modified engines for drag racing etc, but I just meant being available at the pump for a daily driver.

Some areas offer it at the pump. Ours (NE) is not one of them.

There is a benefit running it on a daily driver. I have a 2013 Chevy Tahoe. The manual lists hp for pump gas as well as running e85. The e85 hp rating is higher. That says something.

been racing/running E85 for years now, in a low compression, non boosted deal, no reason to use it in my opinion, now with high compression 12-1+ or boosted the stuff is great. I run 25psi+ in a LS engine no IC @1200hp right out of the pump, but yes you will burn about 40% more.

Apache are you looking at running closed loop?

I would like to get a good tune so I don't have to rely on the O2 sensor.

Do you plan on running only e85?

Probably between 100ll to E85

sounds kinda tricky to try that in a boat open loop.

Just an FYI, Boostane works with E85....if you have any questions just give Dave W a call.

I not so sure about that stuff I like to get fuel that has a good number of octane in it from the start.

If I was in fresh water I would run closed loop and not worry. But the salt is a killer.

I run my car open loop all the time with no issues. If you have a good ecu and someone that knows how to program it, it shouldn't be an issue once you get the the tables programmed.

Apache I'm on the south Shore in Nassau if you want to see how it works.

That would be cool what system you running in your car? A few people I know run it one guy does drag week with his 56 chevy and he loves E85. Going to be running Holley dominator with the smart coils.

I run an Autronic SM4 (Australian).

The owner of the shop I use to dynamic my car used it on some of Zuls engines I was impressed by how when the unit works and the data logger

Did you by the Holley yet?

Yes had it for years new in the box. Big reason I went with it was for self learning and smart coils hate the RF noise MSD gives off. Save a lot of fuel on the dyno.

The auto tune feature works great on some units. It definitely saves time.

https://youtu.be/qwkqjotkDJQ One more thing I like about this it has 31x31 load table or 32x32 forgot. Most are not that big.

A lot of load cells are good. A good ecu can interpolate between the cells with good resolution. Here's a video of dynoing an engine using the Autronic while using only one load/rpm cell up to 9000rpm. :) https://youtu.be/vZQvB0KD5NA

The engine is being run on an Autronic PnP Honda ECU.
The video was designed to show the power of the Autronic and how easy it can be to get an engine up and running and very quickly tuned versus other systems.

It takes less than an hour to go from non-running car, to having something that makes great power, holds consistently good A/F ratios, starts everyday when cold, and has terrific driveability without constant tweaking.

We did not use any of the auto-tune features in the video.

The Autronic software works differently than most others out there {including the big name brands}

The Autronic software has a very complex modeling software built into the background of the software to actually predict the airflow of your engine based on a few simple parameters you put in during setup.

Once the model is complete {which you never see behind the scenes} the software is so powerful that it can run your engine very well with only one single cell in the table.

You can, of course have as many cells as you want{up to 512}, but what you find out is that when you are all finished tuning the engine, almost all the cells have the same number or something very close so the table looks very flat in 3D.

With all other brands YOU the tuner, must create the "model" of the the engine's airflow by placing bigger or smaller numbers in the base fuel table until your 3D image looks just like the engine's airflow curve.

With the Autronics doing the model for you, the base fuel table is simply used as a way for the tuner to tell the software when the engine's actual airflow doesn't match the model it created. The model is typically very accurate {as evidenced by the fact that most numbers in the base fuel table are the same or very close}

How good is it at modeling the engine? Watch the video again. No tricks, no slight-of-hand, just basic math and lots of it.

This video was done with a high compression N/A engine, but the software works just the same even on turbo'd cars!

Using the AutoTune feature simply allows you to operate the engine in various RPM and load cells and the ECU modifies the numbers in each cell to tune the engine with no input from the user. Its really cool to watch and its amazing how fast the ECU can tune itself on the dyno, but on the street it might be easier for a good tuner to do it manually since its hard to hold a constant load and RPM.


I did not under stand how the single cell worked until I read this. It uses other information to be able to pull it off. Pretty cool ECU. Same one you have?

Yes I am running that ecu. It is a good video to show how the ecu works but honestly you need more cells. I use every cell that I can, ocd i guess lol

we had the same issue with RF with MSD as well..

I had the fast boxes and it took about two weeks to get the problems worked out. Also the RF from the alternators where trouble for me being close to the pickup. Have herd many people with the fast box having trouble. One other thing hall effect pickups would of solved all my problems back then. Even the spark plugs helped a bunch running resistor type.