alternator load vs fuel economy
not many studies done on alternator loads effect on fuel economy. i attended a class on gm's new strategy to turn off the alternator under cruising conditions and the results are nil on an individual basis as far as fuel economy goes. tenths of a gallon in the name, but on a national scale equals alot of savings. which means alternator load does very little to fuel economy. the extra load a hho generator puts on the alternator does not lower fuel economy enough to negate the generator but may cause the alternator to fail prematurely.
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test one idle warm engine
ok, had a quick second and did a idle test. took some pictures but i haven't been able figure this dang thing out so ill just tell you. the car was fully warmed up used an inductive low amps probe to measure current and back probed my injector and put them side by side on the two channel scope. first snapshot was at idle with no alternator load amp clamp shows 6.8 amps and my pulse width is 32.6 ms. next snap shot was showing 31 amps and 38.9 ms. my next snapshot was at 2000 rpms amperage jumped up over 40 amps which was my limit so all i know is that it was over 40 amps pulse width is 17.2 ms. and the last snapshot was 2000 rpm with no load 12.1 amps and 10.8 ms. im not the biggest expert on tbi so im gonna assume that pulse width is so high at idle and lower at 2000 rpms because its pulsing 2 cylinders at once at idle and going to each cylinder at 2000 rpms. now since i was at idle and was not moving i really can't use these numbers for mpg. but i can compare them. so thats a 19.35% increase in pulse width at idle and 59.3% at 2000 rpm. another thing to note is that my car is a 91 honda civic with a 1.5 liter engine with honda's version of throttle body injection and a distributor. it has 295,000 miles on it. the test at idle showed that the alt was fully loaded at that rpm because the output increased when i raised the rpm to 2000. also the alt will have its biggest impact on the engine at idle because the engine output is low. also my car is a small 4 cylinder so alt load will affect it more than really any other engine in the world. and i plan on doing this test with our high amps probe too because i don't fully trust the low amps probe its been messing up lately.
ps ok i figured this dang thing out heres pics of the scope