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Diesel Chips

Ray!

By Ray!
in General Patrol Discussion

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Ray! Newbie

Ray!

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To avoid any potential for inaccuracy contained in my review – real or unintended - I have decided to amend it.

Since first writing my review I have considered what I really wanted to achieve from the diesel chip review; ie: focus on what extra, if anything, I could get from the Chip It performance chip. I do not think that the amendments that I have made to the review detract from that intention.

One of the benefits of modern diesels is the ability to use performance chips, similar to what has been available for many years now for petrol vehicles. Diesel chip technology is far more complex than that for petrol engines because of the way that diesels produce power; air/fuel ratios for diesels can vary from 15:1 to 150:1, compared to petrol engines where the ideal ratio is 14.7:1, with only a few points either way for acceptable rich/lean configurations.

The original diesel chips provided increased fuelling to provide additional performance and one of the first chips that I encountered was the Dtronic for the Di 3.0lt. The Dtronic was, I believe, a South African product, but it was fraught with lots of quality control issues and many units brought to Australia failed to deliver any performance improvements whatsoever. Eventually, the Dtronic faded from the Australian scene and around the same time, new chip technology was emerging from Europe, where diesel technology was many years in advance of what we had available in Australia. Most of the fuel only chips come/came from basically the same basic design and were packaged and marketed under different brand names. Under the skin, they pretty much all looked and performed the same.

Variations began to emerge and the systems became more sophisticated, especially with the introduction of common rail diesels, where you could control not only the fuel pressure, but also the electronic injector pulses, as well as boost. These diesel systems seem to be advancing, like anything else, and more options are likely in the future. The one thing that ties all of these current chips together is that they are all piggy-back systems, that is, they work with the diesel ECU to modify what's happening at any point in time, they do not entirely replace the ECU, as is one option that can be done with petrol engines using a Motec, Haltech, Wolf etc ECU. Another option with petrol engines is ECU re-flashing or entire EPROM replacement. The former is not necessarily a bad thing, as it allows somewhat greater options in tune, though in a much coarser fashion, depending on the nature of the chip.

Some say that these piggy-back chips are but a hack and advocate that a complete ECU replacement, an ECU re-flash (ie direct reprogram of the ECU), or the EPROM replacement, is the purist way ahead - were such available. In a sense this is true, but the latter option would mean that each and every installation would require extensive dyno tuning etc, to achieve optimum results, and why would you not want anything else, if replacing the ECU entirely or re-flashing your existing ECU? This of course would mean significant additional cost to the owner, as every vehicle would need to be carefully tuned depending on its configuration and idiosyncracies. No two diesels would be tuned alike. At least with the piggy-back systems, you get a near enough, which is more often than not, good enough result.

So what diesel chip is best? That's not an easy answer, as it depends on what you're after, what mods you have done or are prepared to do and how much time and effort you are prepared to put into getting optimum results, as well as what you are prepared to pay. What this leads me to now is a review I did a while back on two chips; one a well established and well regarded chip, and another relatively new and considerably different chip in design and implementation. I undertook this review purely because I was cynical about some of the claims of the newcomer chip and was handed a challenge to compare one against the other. I already owned the DP Chip and was more than happy with the way that it performed and accepted the challenge. Chip It sent me a complete unit with no caveats whatsoever so that I could undertake a comparison.

I was somewhat hesitant to post this but, as it's already appeared on the other forum, for members that come here directly, it may be informative. So, if you do decide to read the review, do so in its entirety, don't skip anything, as it will inevitably lead you to the wrong conclusions. It's long, but it can't be anything else if it's to be complete. Also understand that the review is completely independent and I gained no favours undertaking the review; I paid for chips (though as a matter of disclosure, I did get the Chip It for effectively trade price, which I appreciate, considering the time and money I'd spent on the review). Finally, both chips provide positive results for your diesel, but they do it in different ways and that's what you have to understand when choosing a diesel chip. Here's the review link:

http://www.australia....au/chipit.html

Cheers

Ray

Edited by Ray!
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Ray! Newbie

Ray!

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Yes, I had to drop the max boost settings down a few weeks ago because of severe over-boost, but the tweaks that I did the other day to the max boost settings has improved things quite a bit. Wih the lowering I did, I was keeping max boost at about 21 PSI, but not getting as good sustained power on hills, so I adjusted the boost so that it became a reducing curve rather than a straight line and then just a severe drop to stop over-boost. I think I have a bit more headroom to increase boost and keep it to around 23 PSI, which I think is quite safe.

Cruising to Melbourne, the Scangauge was showing a fuel reading of between 9-11lt/100km consistently on the flats (not that it's overly accurate) and even up hills it was showing between 12-13lt/100km and seeming to not require as much effort. EGTs were also lower than before. So it all looks good.

Cheers

Ray.

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twisty Newbie

twisty

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Yes, and something I can't talk about until next week, hopefully.

Cheers

Ray

"can't" ... you mean "won't", ya tease.

What can you tell me about petrol chips? Are they different to diesel chips? Are they all the same? I understand I won't get the improvements you'll get with a diesel, but a dual map for lpg/petrol would be nice, I think.

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Glort Newbie

Glort

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Yes, and something I can't talk about until next week, hopefully.

Cheers

Ray

Don't tell me, you're buying a 4.2! :o

Or maybe it's a forum takeover and you have done a deal with terry ???

You going to work for chipTwit???

:)

I better not say any more in case I get in trouble for going too far and creating rumours again. :rolleyes:

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