As you may have read, in our last post about our new dyno, we learned a lot during our first month of ownership. The biggest issue we were seeing with vehicles being run on our new rolling road was that intake temps were abnormally high. Not only is this potentially unsafe for a vehicle, it also meant that we couldn’t get ‘real world’ power and torque readings as intake temperatures were higher than they would normally be ‘on the road’.
How Do Intake Temperatures Affect Dyno Readings?
In short, to make more power, you need to burn more fuel and in order to burn more fuel, you need more air. Ultimately, the cooler the air, the denser the air. Modern ECU’s are super clever and have built-in safety parameters to protect the engine and its components. Although we may request a high level of fuel during the combustion cycle, if the ECU notices that there isn’t enough air to combust the fuel efficiently and safely, the ECU will pull back on the amount of fuel that is delivered.
Why am I telling you all of this?…
Well, what we found is that due to the old orientation of our dyno cell (pictured above) , the cell got very hot, ESPECIALLY for RWD vehicles. The cooling fan only had a small area to pull air in and push air back out into the intake of any vehicle.
Our problem was two fold: The cooling fan couldn’t get fresh air into the intake as there was no fresh air feed AND the area in which the cooling fan operated in got very warm. This means that we were feeding the intake with hotter temparatures than they would normally be fed whilst driving on the road and therefore, the ECU was pulling back on fuel, reducing the amount of power the car produced.
So… What did we decide to do?
Extraction To The Rescue
Obviously, the solution to this problem was to feed the cooling fan with fresh air and give it enough ‘breathing space’. This eliminates the issue of recirculating hot/warm air AND gives it fresh air from outside the workshop. The best way to acheive this was to flip the orientation of vehicles so that the nose pointed out of the workshop and the exhaust exited towards the back wall. However, I’m sure you’ve already spotted the new issue that this creates: exhaust fumes.
We therefore decided, in order to tackle this problem, we needed to install an extraction system on the back wall of our workshop.
Lots of money, assistance from the supplier Dyno Blowing Systems and 3 days of blood, sweat and tears later, our new 7.5kw extraction system is here. The good news is that we’ve tested everything and are seeing intake temps stay nice and low.
Check out the short clip below to see our new extraction system in action!
Moving Forward
To further prevent any intake temperature issues, we have decided to also purchase an additional 7.5kw intake fan from Dyno Blowing Systems to make sure even 800bhp+ cars are going to keep nice and low intake temps. We’ll provide another update of our new cell when that arrives in the form of a feature video. Watch this space!
Bookings & Questions
We’ve now opened up the dyno on our remap booking system. This means you can book in a custom tuning session or power runs with your remap online. We are still in the process of developing our standalone dyno booking system but in the meantime, if you’d like to book JUST dyno time on its own, feel free to message us on our socials, give us a call or send us a contact form message.
