Quote:
Originally Posted by HEI451
Reread it, he wasn't agreeing with me, he was lambasting me because I had a dissenting opinion from his "educated from vendors on the net" information.
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I guess I read it as sarcasm directed towards the "myth that won't die." Probably not worth pursuing, it's easy to mistake intent on message boards so unless he comes back and clarifies we have what we have.
Quote:
Originally Posted by HEI451
Anyone can go to numerous web boards and read where people have bought into the "electric fans make horsepower" myth, and read where an extremely small handful of the conversions worked, for some incredibly few individuals, and the myriad of the rest that now have more cooling problems than they imagined they ever had.
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Just on the face of it; I can't imagine how that could work unless it was critical to keep the engine coolant in a very narrow temperature range. That, of course, is something that electric fans can out perform mechanically driven fans at since they can be controlled independent of engine speed.
More generally speaking; I don't need a whole lot of data to know that converting rotational torque to electricity, storing it and then converting electricity back to rotational torque is less efficient than mechanically converting rotational torque to rotational torque.
People seem to think that electrical gadgetry runs free of mechanical cost which is just silly. No gizmo is going to free you from the laws of thermodynamics and they will inform you that any conversion of potential from one form to another has a net, irrecoverable, loss. In any given comparison, with equal fan design, you will lose efficiency with each conversion. A vastly more efficient fan design might save you more at that end than you loose in the conversion but you still loose in the conversion.
What you get with electric fans is aesthetics (looks modern, cool, shows off your chrome pulleys, etc.) and, if you set them up correctly, control. You do not get efficiency. The most efficient setup (presuming you need a fan because you run it more than a 1/4 mile at a time) is a properly sized and shrouded clutch fan.
There are any number of good arguments for running electric fans in a given vehicle but if it is a reduction in parasitic loss you are fishing for you are probably better served spending your money on other things.