Cold start question

[mitosis]

Originally Posted by Porsche

Will you tell us, please, how many MINUTES of gentle driving do you find it generally takes for the oil temperature to rise to 185° F.

Oh yes, I will...

...but I turn all my logs into charts on my work computer since I don't have excel, or really any way of reading out a .csv file here at home.

So expect an answer in the form of how many minutes it takes at various outside ambient temps around 8 AM pacific time tomorrow.

Also, today was really the first cool day around here so there should be some interesting data to be found in the coming months as it gets colder at night.

In fact, I drove the Fit all day today so the cold weather combined with the car being off for more than 24 hours should give a pretty good baseline.

[Porsche]

Originally Posted by mitosis

Oh yes, I will...

...but I turn all my logs into charts on my work computer since I don't have excel, or really any way of reading out a .csv file here at home.

So expect an answer in the form of how many minutes it takes at various outside ambient temps around 8 AM pacific time tomorrow.

Also, today was really the first cool day around here so there should be some interesting data to be found in the coming months as it gets colder at night.

In fact, I drove the Fit all day today so the cold weather combined with the car being off for more than 24 hours should give a pretty good baseline.

Thanks! I'm eager to learn what you have to share with us.

[Porsche]

Originally Posted by Anthony

-30 Kelvin? Isn't that some black hole type shit?

Chillier than your tent.

[RJ_203]

I usually wait for the RPMs to drop and for the temp to be atleast on the 1/4 mark of the temp meter. But if I'm in a rush I wait for the RPMs to drop then baby the car until temps are good. But...hehe if I'm in a super rush I jus go yea..jus go
Do you prefer to jus be pulled out the house right after waking up, thrown outside and be forced to Run??? Car might feel the same Warm up you car bro as much as you can

[ZionsWrath]

I think warming it up can actually lead you to a false sense of security. If you let it idle for 15 minutes in winter and get in thinking it is warmed up and drive it more than gently, guess what you transmission, differential, and all suspsension components including tires and brakes are still ice cold.

I start it and drive away. If it is really cold I will let the RPM drop so I can start getting a bit of heat through the vents. Driving with numb hands sucks.

[stugray]

"Will you tell us, please, how many MINUTES of gentle driving do you find it generally takes for the oil temperature to rise to 185° F"

Not sure if you are screwing around, but here you go:



That shows about a rise from 174 to 194 in about 5 minutes of easy driving. Getting it above 200 took some effort & "spirited" driving.

[ZionsWrath]

I don't have any equipment for data monitoring but I feel comfortable to redline after 10 minutes continuous driving (i.e. cruising at 60-70 on highway in 6th gear)

Can you post a graph of you starting the car and driving off from a dead cold start? How long to reach operating temp?

[ZionsWrath]

Originally Posted by mitosis

Start it up, wait for the O2 sensor to heat up and the engine to go into closed-loop mode (aka the RPM will drop), wait about 5 more seconds to see if it's idling smooth, gently drive off, wait for oil temp to hit about 185 F (monitoring with Torque app), drive it like I own it!


I am of the opinion that letting a modern engine idle while cold is bad for it, so I try to minimize the time I spend idling and warm the engine up by driving the car gently.

For the oil temperature, 185 F is just an arbitrary number I picked because that seems to be the first place where the oil temp "plateaus" when I look at my log charts... my oil temp curve starts out as a nearly linear constant rising trend, then it'll stay 185 for about 3 minutes before jumping up to around 200. I don't know why it does that but it's a pretty consistent pattern that I observe in my logs so I have very unscientifically concluded that 185 F must mean it's warm enough for government work.

Also, this:



In all my logs, when the coolant first hits its peak temperature and stabilizes at about 190 F, the oil has only gotten up to 150 F... and that's once the coolant is already fully warmed and the needle is pointing at the second line after C like in this picture here:

[IMG]http://www.ridelust.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/DSC_2092.jpg[IMG]

...so for all you guys saying you start driving it hard once it hits the first mark after C (I'm just assuming that's what you mean by 1/4 warmed) just know that your oil is actually still very cold at that point in time.

Hey I want to use torque, what bluetooth OBD II are you using?

[Vracer111]

Originally Posted by ZionsWrath

I don't have any equipment for data monitoring but I feel comfortable to redline after 10 minutes continuous driving (i.e. cruising at 60-70 on highway in 6th gear)

Can you post a graph of you starting the car and driving off from a dead cold start? How long to reach operating temp?

I just recently got a Scanguage II (~$150) and it looks like for me (running 5-W30 Redline oil) it takes about 10 minutes for the oil to come past 180 F degrees...and settles at about 205-210 normal driving. I won't get on it until I see 190. Stock water temperature gauge seems to be about 155 at the first tick mark and when it initially stops it around 170. Needle doesn't move but temp then goes up to 191-193 and steadily stays there. Keep the car in 2nd and run it hard and the oil temp shoots up fast...no time at all to go from 205 to 225. Average air temp currently of 90 for me. I did leave the car idling while i went in the post office last week and saw the following stabilized temps; Oil - 201, Water - 195, Intake air - 152

Here's a picture of it installed in my FRS I just took, car has been sitting in the garage for about 5 hours with the hood open...which is how I always leave it in the garage.



I normally don't wait that long at all after starting to go on my way. Back out the garage, close the garage get in, turn off traction, and go...taking her easy until up to temp.

I think I'll log the ScanGauge performance for my drive into work with my GoPro and post it up so you can see how it warms up real time...

[mitosis]

Originally Posted by ZionsWrath

Can you post a graph of you starting the car and driving off from a dead cold start? How long to reach operating temp?

Yeah I'll post 'em up in the morning when I get to work, I have several logs of my morning commute at ~7 AM ready to go... definitely dead cold starts as it is early morning and the car has been off for 9 - 12 hours depending on how late I was out driving the night before.

Now for REALLY cold starts, we'll have to wait another month or two.

Originally Posted by ZionsWrath

Hey I want to use torque, what bluetooth OBD II are you using?

I am using the OBDLink MX by ScanTool... a quick google search should get you there.

[Vracer111]

I have the GoPro mount in position for the morning drive to work and the GoPro charging...

[stugray]

Originally Posted by ZionsWrath

Hey I want to use torque, what bluetooth OBD II are you using?

I just bought the ELM327 mini on ebay for $10

[zaptorque]

Originally Posted by Yellow13

Pizza

I second this.

[mitosis]

Originally Posted by ZionsWrath

If you let it idle for 15 minutes in winter and get in thinking it is warmed up and drive it more than gently, guess what you transmission, differential, and all suspension components including tires and brakes are still ice cold.

This is a very good point, and is the fundamental reason why someone like me would be of the opinion that with a modern car is it actually a BAD thing to let the car warm up by just sitting in the driveway idling. You're much better off actually driving the car, gently, until it is fully warmed up instead.

Originally Posted by Porsche

Will you tell us, please, how many MINUTES of gentle driving do you find it generally takes for the oil temperature to rise to 185° F.

Well, it's looking like about 8 minutes in every one of those logs before it FIRST hits that temp, but I'd say it wouldn't be a bad idea to still wait for at least 10 minutes before driving the car too hard.

Originally Posted by ZionsWrath

Can you post a graph of you starting the car and driving off from a dead cold start? How long to reach operating temp?

OK, now on to logs!

Some general notes for these logs:
-Startup is at about 6:40 AM on each of these.
-Not every chart starts exactly at engine start, sometimes it takes a bit for the bluetooth to connect.
-The vertical lines represent 1 minute each.
-I am logging to the file every 5 seconds, so the numbers on the bottom represent how many data points are there... point 1 is the first data point, point 13 is one minute later, etc.
-Ambient air temp readings start off a little high but stabilize soon after the sensor starts getting some airflow over it.
-Intake air temp will match the ambient temp at first but once the engine is warm and the car comes to a stop you can see that heat soak creeping in.
-Engine load spikes that show up just before vehicle speed decreasing are throttle blips and rev-matching on the downshift, load spikes that show up just before vehicle speed going from 0 to something are launches.
-The engine load measurement on Torque seems to be WAYYYY off sometimes... for example this morning I was trying really REALLY hard to baby the car so we could get the slowest possible heat-up for the sake of getting a worst-case number for Porsche, but for some reason Torque STILL shows 75% to 80% loads even when I was barely creeping along on surface streets.

August 26th:
Ambient air temp was 64 F.
Looks like I drove it very gently on the freeway that day.
You can really see the neat correlation pattern between heat soak and vehicle speed in this one... look at those lumps on the intake temp near the end and how they all line up with the low points on the vehicle speed (stoplights).


August 28th:
Ambient air temp was 64 F.
Looks like I drove it more normally on the freeway this day.


August 29th:
Ambient air temp was 66 F.
More of the same.


August 30th:
Ambient air temp was 64 F.
Looks like I got stuck behind some slowpoke about halfway through my freeway trip on this one... you can see my impatience in the way the engine load is all spiky like that around the 6th and 7th minutes, lots of on and off the throttle wishing I could go faster there.
Got quite a few hard launches at 100% engine load starting at about 10 minutes, must have been making up for being stuck behind the slowpoke.


September 17th:
Ambient air temp was 62 F.
The gal in front of me on the freeway onramp was a dinosaur, you can see where I got fed up with her slowness and gunned it to pass about half way into the 6th minute.


October 4th:
Ambient air temp was 62 F.
I had trouble getting the bluetooth to connect this morning so there was an extra minute or two of idling before the chart starts.
I was putting out extra effort to drive very gently this morning, especially for the first surface streets from the driveway to the freeway.
The car had not been driven all day yesterday and it was a cold, windy day yesterday so this morning it should have been one of my coldest starts yet... the minute or two of extra idling while sorting out the bluetooth kinda ruined that though.
I still think that this chart represents a good worst-case scenario (that is for now, since the weather is still pretty warm at 62 F) for answering Porsche's question of how long for oil to warm... just add a minute or two on to the 7 minute time that this chart shows.