E85 can it be used??

Just curious can E85 be used in our cars, or is there only certain years that can use E85, if at all???

If it cant be used in stock form, what mods would need to be made to make it work??

Just curious can E85 be used in our cars, or is there only certain years that can use E85, if at all???

If it cant be used in stock form, what mods would need to be made to make it work??
Venture vans are not equipped to run E85.
To modify your vehicle to run E85 would be an expensive swap to include all the fuel system components and ECM calibrationss

Not worth it... Your mileage will go down when running E85, cheaper fuel but you'll use more of it.

I'd like to rephrase the question :

How much ethanol can we run in the venture in stock form?

I've ben running the E10 in my 99 Venture and 92 C1500 down here in Houston with no problems. I believe that the E10 (10% alcohol) is the max you can burn in the std unleaded gasoline engine.

We've been using 10% for over 10 years now, I'm soon to use 50% and see if my vehicle will handle it.

All gasoline is blended with 10% ethanol (it is used as an oxidizer to replace MTBE)
Usually 15% is the highest you can run with out any issues

Do you think 20-50% would cause a check engine light to come on real soon?

Do you think 20-50% would cause a check engine light to come on real soon?
Refer to my post above

The first part of your post is wrong , there's a lot of clear gas around still (non-ethanol) in addition to some mtbe gas.

I've also heard the 15% figure, but my question is a bit more specific about the check engine light.

I put an E85 conversion kit in my chevy. It was easy to do and works great! I bought it at www.change2E85.com (http://www.change2E85.com). As long as your vehicle has fuel injection, no problem.

I put an E85 conversion kit in my chevy. It was easy to do and works great! I bought it at www.change2E85.com (http://www.change2E85.com). As long as your vehicle has fuel injection, no problem.

Dave,
Why would you pay for the privelege of using E85. Ethanol only has about 1/2 the energy content of straight gasoline, so your gas mileage dropped about 45 - 50% with the E85 but the price didn't. The only way E85 makes sense right now is if you have a cheap source of ethanol (like distil your own). Straight Ethanol goes for around a buck (give or take) on the wholesale market and the federal government subsidizes it, but in the Chicago area E85 is only about 20% cheaper than regular unleaded so on a mile for mile basis you are paying at least 60% more to go a mile than you would pay to go that same mile on gasoline. Maybe when demand increases and the distribution network is working better and there is more competition at the retail level then the price will come down to where it makes sense to use E85, it could actually be cheaper than gas as long as the farmers can keep up with demand and the price of corn doesn't go through the roof.

As Forest Gump said, "That's all I have to say about that."

On the other matter of using fuel with more that 10-15% ethanol you need to be real careful. As I said above ethanol doesn't have as much energy as gasoline and one of the reasons why is because there is an oxygen atom in the molecular structure, that oxygen atom becomes available for the combustion process when the ethanol is burned so it takes a lot more ethanol to burn at a stoichiometric rate which means if you just change a bunch of your fuel from gasoline to ethanol without recalibrating the mixture like Dave's kit above does you are going to lean the crap out of your engine and very likely melt a hole in one or more pistons. There is a reason that they only substitute 10-15% ethanol, any more and people would start melting down their engines and getting really pissed off. Since ethanol is so much cheaper that gasoline don't you think they would swap more in if they could get away with it.

The other thing you have to worry about with ethanol is it is very corrosive (that extra oxygen atom again), so if your fuel system wasn't originally designed to deal with it (like using stainless steel fuel lines and a lined or plastic fuel tank) your going to have a problem.


Sparky

I have no idea where these rumors came from. 45-50% drop is a bunch of BS. I lose only 10% mileage in my Chevy. My buddy who has an Audi A6 only loses 3%. The gov't subsidies is for mixing ethanol and gas to make E85. Guess what - those greedy oil mongers found a loophole and take advantage of the subsidies when mixing E10. So your gasoline in now getting subsized too. My wife converted he vehicle and will never run gas again. She is from a farming family and we are happy to support our families and friends by using E85. The Oil Barrons, Sheiks, Hugo Chavez, etc can kiss my USA butt! It will get to the point when using gasoline from other countries will become un-American.

Lean??? Not true. Any fuel injection system from the factory is more than capable of delivering and ionizing enough ethanol so your vehcile does not run lean. Melt? What are you talking about? My engine runs cooler on ethanol which is going to increase the life if the engine and reduce valve wear.

Corrosive??? You make it sound like Sulfuric acid. Sparky, you are are terrible mis-informed and living in the 1970s. Cars changed in the 1980 since E10 was introduced in 1977. The automakers had to combat leaking fuel tanks and fuel lines so any vehicle built from the 80's until now can handle ethanol no problem.

No offensive Sparky, you sound like a really smart dude - but you are way off. I'm an ethanol user and there are no ill effects on any of my vehicles like you are claiming. I challange you to do a conversion - the worst thing that will happen is you piss off big oil.

I ran first tank at 75% and dropped around 25% mpg, the next tank I ran was 84% and the mpg was dropped 30 % or so. Max power felt the same , but engine seemed a bit doggy. No check engine light.

At the times I bought e-85 the price of gas was cheaper by 10-20cents/gallon. Passed e-check, back to gas. Passing e-check was my only reason for using it.

That's what happens when you use E85 with out a conversion kit. Your car's software can't figure out what is going on and thinks it is running lean. So it dumps more fuel in than needed - hence the poor mileage. Using a conversion kit creates a map for ethanol use to preserve fuel economy. Many folks do what you did - adding a little ethanol to get it running cleaner to pass emmissions. Some folks use a little ethanol to help stop dieseling in thier older cars.

Yes, all my detonation went away too.

Dave, I will be the first to admit I don't have any first hand knowledge of E85 conversions however, in my travels I found these 3 statements on the listed web sites:

"Q. When using E85 ethanol to fuel your car, do you get the same kind of fuel economy that you do when using gasoline?

A. The term “fuel economy” refers to the efficiency of your vehicle. It is usually defined as how many miles your vehicle can go on a gallon of gas. For example, if your vehicle contained 10 gallons of gas and you drove 300 miles, your fuel economy would equal 30 miles per gallon. E85 ethanol holds less energy per gallon than gasoline. When you fuel your car with E85 ethanol, you might only be able to travel about three-quarters the distance that you would if you were using gasoline."

http://www.gm.com/explore/education/5-8/fuels_energy/qa_session/e85.html

and:

"Based on miles per actual gallon of fuel, fuel economy predictions and constant speed on-road measurements result in a penalty for E85 of \mA24% when compared to gasoline"

http://www.sae.org/technical/papers/1999-01-3517


And:

"Does the use of E85 reduce fuel economy?

Because ethanol contains less energy than gasoline, E85 reduces vehicle fuel economy and range by 20-30 percent. Vehicles can be designed to be optimized for E85, which would reduce or eliminate this tendency. However, no such vehicles are currently on the market."

http://www.epa.gov/SmartwayLogistics/growandgo/documents/faq.htm#i_10

So; With that being said I apologize for my (woefully) uninformed comment of 40-50% reduction in fuel economy. Let's do a quick cost benefit analysis using your 10% reduction in MPG, for example if you got 20 MPG before and now you get 18 MPG and the difference in fuel prices are say $2.00 for E85 and $2.40 (prices I found online at an E85 price spotter web site) for gasoline that would give you a cost of 11.1 Cents/mi for E85 and 12.0 Cents/mi for gasoline which is a difference of .9 Cents/mi. I don't know how much a conversion kit (or even what is included) but a performance chip goes for about $300. So to pay off that investment would take over 30,000 miles. If you didn't achieve as good as the 10% you did then the system may never pay for itself unless the price gap widens.


On the matter of damaging engines due to lean mixtures, I still contend that using E85 or even greater the E10 is risky without a conversion kit. I fully believe that with the conversion kit your engine runs cooler since alcohol has a higher latent heat of vaporization value than gasoline. Without the conversion kit I believe that a fuel injected engine will run lean enough to exceed the range of fuel mixture adjustmen the the engine controller will allow at which time the mixture will burn at a higher temperature causing engine damage. If you read the entire abstract of the SAE paper above you will notice that the author recommends increasing the injector size by 40%, but this would only be an issue if the engine spends a lot of time at max power and speed.

Production E85 vehicles have fuel systems that are prodominently plastic, stainless steel and vitrol to protect from the corrosive effects of the alcohol. Post E10 fueled vehicles still relay on plastic and anti-corrosion coatings in the fuel systems to protect them in the highly diluted concentrations of alcohol. Over the long term the effects of the higher concentrations are more likely to cause corrosion in the older systems.

All for now.

Sparky

Very good research.

I disagree with is the sae paper saying that you need to increase injector size. My mechanic put in a bigger injector in his vehicle since he feared the duty cycle might be over worked on the factory injector. Mileage was terrible and the car ran like crap. He found that the factory injector ionized the ethanol better than the oversized one. Also going over sized did not allow him to switch back to gas utilizing a conversion kit's flex capability. He also discovered that since ehtanol has a cooling effect, that factory injectors did not overheat when pushed harder even at extremes like full open throttle.

Even though ethanol has less energy than gasoline and the amount can be metered, the people who publish this documentation are not taking into consideration that fuels burn differently when under pressure. In a lab when determining potential enery, they conduct testing at atmospheric pressure. Underpressure, they behave very differently. The higher the pressure, the more efficient the vehicle with be with ethanol. Some engine builders are making E85 specific engines with compression like 14:1. They have 500 horsepower and get better mileage that the same engine running gas with only 200 horsepower and 8:1 compression.

The unfortunate thing that I have found is that there is more mis-information about ethanol on the web than there is factual.