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Technical 17.8 MPG!! How come?

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Technical 17.8 MPG!! How come?

Just filled up again and worked out I got 20.8 MPG (98.2 miles for 21.4 litres), same as the previous tank of petrol. At least it's not getting worse :D

When I finish this run of nightshifts I'm on I'll have a chance to have a look at the O2 sensor, and if that looks normal I'll take the B to a garage.

Quick question though, DTR's a bit of a pain to get to from mine, anyone know if the Fiat dealership garages have the equipment to hook up to the ecu and check all the sensor readings, and if so, what sort of price do they charge for this service?
 
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docorangepeel said:
Yep all Fiat garages can do this for you. Should be about £40 -£60 an hour :cry:
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Don't be shocked if you get a quote of up to £90 p/h, I called a FIAT garage in Slough when I was looking for a front pipe, they wanted £257 for the pipe plus £90 p/h to fit it!!!! :eek:

O2 sensor is likely to be the culprit as you have worked your way through the other possible issues, O2 sensor is easy to get to but will take a bit of effort to remove..........mine took a ring spanner and and wooden mallet!
 
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LittleRedB said:
O2 sensor is likely to be the culprit as you have worked your way through the other possible issues, O2 sensor is easy to get to but will take a bit of effort to remove..........mine took a ring spanner and and wooden mallet!
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(y) Cheers for the heads up! I'll make sure I take all the tools down, plus some extra elbow grease. Just been out for a quick run in the car - this weather is definitely not conducive to working outside on the B!!

Reading the manual, it says that the ecu can detect if the lambda sensor isn't functioning correctly, and if it isn't, a light on the dashboard will come on. Wouldn't I have been told by the ecu if the lambda sensor wasn't working? Or do you think that's only if it's totally failed (i.e. the 7.5A fuse goes), as opposed to gradually degrading like mine perhaps is?

Anyway, on eBay they have universal 4-wire lambda sensors for about £20. Any reason why not to get one of these and wire it up myself rather than pay the £60-£75 the proper NTK one is online?
 
Hopefully, final update on this :rolleyes:

Yesterday morning I spent an hour or two messing around with my mate's multimeter but got nowhere with it. Trying to get a reading from the signal cable of the oxygen sensor was difficult since the wire sleeve's made of some super-tough heat resistant material, and I didn't really want to start stripping away the wire's rubber sleeve on the other (car-side) of the connector. So I took it to a local garage that's also an Alfa specialist and got him to have a look at everything.

Got the call today, it was the O2 sensor after all, so that's been changed. Apparently when it fails the ecu goes into some kind of basic mode where it just lets loads of fuel through without worrying about efficiency and stuff, and that's what happened to mine. Surprised something on the dashboard didn't light up though to tell me the sensor was knackered, according to the manual that's what should happen. Ah well, I'll do a few miles this week and see if the consumption problem's sorted, fingers crossed...

He also found a few other things that need sorting: a front shock absorber's leaking lots of fluid, the radiator's in a pretty chronic state (kind of knew that), and the oil sump drain plug has absolutely loads of silicone sealant around it, so maybe it got dethreaded when I got the oil changed a few weeks ago at DTR.

One thing crossed off the To Do list, another 2 or 3 things added to it, I feel like I'm going backwards with this B :idea:

Oh yeah I asked the local Fiat dealers (Glyn Hopkins in Buckhurst Hill) how much it'd be to get someone to hook up to my ecu and check all the sensors are reading correctly - £79!! Thought it might be about that price though to be fair
 
docorangepeel said:
Yep thats why. I have all the cables but not the error reading software. :cry:
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That reminds me, I saw a thread somewhere on the forum about this - someone has made some pretty basic but useable software to read the ecu and he seemed happy to hand it over to another member. Thread was about 6 or 8 months old. I'll see if I can dig it up.
 
Great news!!! just when petrol hits £1.04 per litre you don't want to be doing 18mpg :eek:

You never take a step forward with a b, once you have fixed all of the broken or rusty bits there are 101 mods to get on with!!

The trick is to get made redundant so that you don't have the disposable cash - then you HAVE to take a break from the mods and repairs and just get on with driving it! (y)
 
I've got a couple of front shocks if you're interested. They're OEM and a few years old but according to the Belgian MOT they're in good working order.
 
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Hi Matt, I'm definitely interested in them m8. Will send you a PM in the next few days to chat about it some more. Just off out now for a looong night hopefully ending in Ricky Hatton knocking out Floyd Mayweather!
 
jiggy said:
Hi Matt, I'm definitely interested in them m8. Will send you a PM in the next few days to chat about it some more. Just off out now for a looong night hopefully ending in Ricky Hatton knocking out Floyd Mayweather!
Click to expand...

A Ricky win would make my night - just back from the Madj-Stad where Reading beat Liverpool 3-1!!!!! Come on you RRRRRR's!!! :D
 
OK now I'm really gutted - not about Ricky Hatton though, that was a shame but maybe to be expected. Having just filled up after doing a half a tank of petrol, I got 19.3 MPG (6.85km per litre, 14.5 litres per 100km) for that last 100 miles or so :(

That's about a quid just to go 4 miles!! I have to drive to Lincolnshire and back for Xmas, 300 miles round trip :cry:

So... since this problem reared its head a few months ago I've had the variator changed, new air filter, tyre pressures checked constantly, O2 sensor changed. There's no indication of a problem from the dashboard, the fuel pump's working fine - I can hear it when I turn the key, the car generally sounds good, though is definitely a mite sluggish in the lower gears. What else could it be? Airflow sensor or something?

Next step - I'll be ringing a certain specialist garage to ask for a free diagnostic using the F/L tester and software. When I got the variator done a few weeks ago the mechanic said to me as they were leaving that they were waiting for a replacement cable so they couldn't actually look at the ecu. But it says "full systems check" on my invoice, so the way I see it is I've paid for a service that wasn't delivered.

Then I'll ring the other Alfa specialist garage from last week to ask him if he actually even tested the O2 sensor before he replaced it. Probably got rid of a perfectly decent working part for no reason. Plus I paid £25 for him to diagnose my fuel consumption problem before he decided to change the sensor. I don't think he did b***er all diagnosis though, except go "oh, crap fuel consumption, must be O2 sensor gone" even though I told him if that was the case then a light would have come on the dashboard.

Sorry about the rant, just proper frustrated :mad:
 
OK, new plan. I'll get it looked at next week, get the emissions fully tested for any clues. The bloke I just chatted to had an interesting idea - it could be due to the radiator not doing its job properly.

Apparently if it's leaking badly, the engine will run cold, the feedback it gives to the ecu will mean the ecu overcompensates by running rich, causing awful fuel consumption. Something like that anyway. What was more interesting is he came up with this before I told him I have got a dodgy radiator (was advised by the garage last week that it needed changing at some point soon) and before I told him where my engine temperature gauge normally sits (quarter-way, sometimes less like this morning, sometimes halfway in sitting traffic - I thought that was normal though?)

Hehe sorry for the boring long rambly posts! Maybe I should get an FF blog instead!!
 
O heck you lot are getting me worried now! I thought I had a fuel problem when i went to fill up for the first time after picking the car up, spent 10 minutes on the forecourt trying to work out how to get the petrol cap off, then after paying went to get back in the wrong side of the car!

Good luck with sorting this out...
Shel
 
Doesn't sound quite right.

Correct me if I'm wrong but the water thermostat controls whether or not to let the water pass through the radiator and another thermostat controls turning on or off the fan.

If the water is too cold it won't be allowed to run through the radiator unless the thermostat is broken.

If it does run through the radiator, the radiator can't over cool the water. If it's partly blocked it could under cool. If it's leaky you could get air pockets in the system, but again that would lead to overheating.

As I say, correct me if I'm wrong :)
 
Matt: I couldn't correct you on that, sounds about right to me. Going to ring them tomorrow to arrange summat else so I'll try and get them to explain that one to me again.

H: Cheers, never thought of that. There's no odd noises to suggest anything wrong with the brakes and obviously no handbrake light on. I'll definitely try and check them though. To check for binding brakes is it just a case of jacking up the wheels and then spinning the wheels by hand making sure there's no friction?
 
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