More Inside the Car
I installed a simple kill switch so I can turn the entire system on and off. A typical install would have the accessory wire that turns it on, connected to a fuel pump so the system is only creating hydrogen while the engine is running. You don’t want to sit in a parking light and turn your key to listen to the stereo and be making gas. The kill switch simply is spliced into this line so I can turn everything on and off, should I choose. This is more to help with me showing the gas production on and off. The PWM also has a switch to do this, but I like this idea of a main switch. The red LED above that switch comes from the dual EFIE hidden behind the panel. The LED is built into the unit, but I pulled it out and remotely mounted it, again, just to see and make sure the unit is on.
The gauge to the left is an old Air/Fuel gauge I used on a car several years ago, but it’s basically a light show and pointless, which was proven when it showed a good reading back on the old car but with the larger turbo it had, I ran lean anyway and lost a some valves and warped a few pistons. This will probably be removed. The thought is to give you an idea of your fuel mixture by showing the feedback from an O2 sensor. With my car being a narrow band, they really don’t tell much of anything other than something is happening. The car ECU (or PCM) gets the signal and knows what to do with it, but the gauge itself just bounces lights up and down. Swapping the O2 sensor and gauge out for a wideband system will give you the actual reading, but doing that will tend to cost around $200.
Other gauge ideas could be an EGT gauge to show engine exhaust temps. If you are running to lean, these temps will rise and show on the gauge. Or maybe an accurate amp gauge to show the draw on the electrical system from a stereo, stereo amps, HHO generator, lights, etc. What I may end up doing is mounting the Kiwi MPG gauge there, if it looks like it will do the job.
Behind the panel, as mentioned earlier, is the EFIE. This taps into the O2 wires, in my case the front two O2 sensors. Once activated, you need to tune the EFIE to compensate for the oxygen the O2 sensor will see. Since it will see more, it will send that reading to the car computer, which will think not enough fuel is going into the engine and will compensate and dump in more fuel. You may have heard stories where people have commented about actually loosing MPG using an HHO system, and chances are, it’s because they are not compensating or have their tune incorrect. By adding this unit, I can now adjust it to send a different reading to the computer, so it is still happy and won’t add that extra fuel, in fact lean things out a bit since you are using hydrogen now as a partial fuel source. In the case of my car and the particular EFIE I’m using, which is the standard unit for this system, if you lean the adjustment out too much, the ECU will think the sensor is bad and drop into a default mode, usually a rich mixture, and most likely trigger the Check Engine Light indicating a bad O2 Sensor. This is what I’m trying to tune, but like I said, it’s a drawn out process to drive, gas up, figure out MPG, adjust, and then drive another tank, etc. This is where the Kiwi or Scangauge comes in handy or if your car has an MPG computer already in it, like my Chrysler Minivan.
More in Part 4
