Re: Admin Servers

On Mon, Dec 27, 2021 at 9:43 AM Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis
<midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

And since
it was a diesel it would idle for hours on next to zero fuel so it was
left idling a lot if it was to be used again soon. :-)

There is a lot of wiggle room in "next to zero".

This idea that diesels consume next to nothing while idling is fairly
common but outdated.

For applications which could reasonably go with either gasoline or
diesel (like passenger cars), the real-world efficiency is actually
approximately the same, including while idling. Tests done on cars
with 2-liter engines (in 2015) show that either type can idle for
around 6 hours on a single gallon of fuel (with a slight edge actually
to the gas engine).

Bigger vehicles with bigger engines naturally consume more fuel,
including while idling. In that same set of tests, various larger
diesel vehicles consumed a gallon of fuel every 1 to 2 hours.

I don't know how big that John Deere of your youth was, but I have to
imagine it was less efficient than today's diesels which, from my
point of view, consume a lot more than "next to zero" fuel while
idling.

This is not to say that idling was the wrong thing to do back then. I
fully appreciate the much greater relative cost of starting up an
engine in those days, on those machines.

John Y.