Post by speedracer on Jun 4, 2011 15:39:56 GMT -6
Recently I took my scooter to a Chinese scooter shop owned by two brothers who are both from China and worked at scooter assembly plants. He found the problem to be in the diaphram and was able to get the scooter running smooth again.
While I was there he asked me what type of gas I was using so I told him 87 octane. You should be using 90 octane he said as the manual says. I said well US gas is better then China gas, we have higher octane and China used leaded gas. He came back with China doesn't use a octane rating it uses a Ron formula, plus he added China hasn't used leaded gas since the year 2000. 90 octane is for USA scooters and that is what I should be using.
So now it was time to do the math. In my town 90 octane gas is $.11 more then regular unleaded. So if I purchased 100 gallons of the 90 octane gas I would spend $11.00 more. Now my 250 cc scooter averages 71 MPG so using the 100 gallons of gas as an expample I can go 7,100 and spend only $11.00 more.
Do I want to be cheap and save the $11.00 or put in the right octane and spend the $11.00? To me this is a no brainer as it will take me about a year or longer to put 7,100 miles on my scooter.
While I was there he asked me what type of gas I was using so I told him 87 octane. You should be using 90 octane he said as the manual says. I said well US gas is better then China gas, we have higher octane and China used leaded gas. He came back with China doesn't use a octane rating it uses a Ron formula, plus he added China hasn't used leaded gas since the year 2000. 90 octane is for USA scooters and that is what I should be using.
So now it was time to do the math. In my town 90 octane gas is $.11 more then regular unleaded. So if I purchased 100 gallons of the 90 octane gas I would spend $11.00 more. Now my 250 cc scooter averages 71 MPG so using the 100 gallons of gas as an expample I can go 7,100 and spend only $11.00 more.
Do I want to be cheap and save the $11.00 or put in the right octane and spend the $11.00? To me this is a no brainer as it will take me about a year or longer to put 7,100 miles on my scooter.
ba-dump. I've read up on this quite a bit and IMO it comes down to your compression ratio. If it's around 9.5:1 or lower you really don't need premium's detonation retardants to prevent premature combustion. In fact, you'll get more energy out of regular because you can't harvest all of the energy in premium with the lower ratio. If your ratio is 10:1 or higher you'll need premium to prevent pinging which can seriously damage your engine. There's cleaners and detergents in all fuels anymore so you won't lose out there either. If your engine is knocking and pinging you should bump the octane up some.
