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LPG Rolling Road Set-up

Andrew Higgins

Over the last few weeks, I’ve noticed a distinct power loss/ holding back from my LPG conversion. Having spoken with my fitter and trying a number of set-ups, he suggested contacting importers. Autogas2000, in Leeds, are the sole UK importers of the Tartarini LPG kit. I contacted Chris Wise, the owner, and arranged to visit for a rolling road set-up.

On arrival at Autogas2000, I was very impressed with the set-up. I was to be even more impressed with their customer service later on.

Chris decided to do the set-up himself. I’d emailed him what I thought was the problem and details of our site, pointing out our use of the obd-2 lead. So we got to work. We strapped down the rear of the car for safety, although on a 4 wheel rolling road with a rear wheel drive car, we would have been safe enough without the straps.

I’ve had rolling road sessions before so I knew what to expect. I gave the car a check over; fuel, oil, coolant and tyre pressure. You need to remember that you will be taking the car to extreme levels.

 First thing we checked was the base mapping. On my car it was version 12. We saved my advanced map settings to reload later as an upgrade was available. Version 18 was loaded, and my advanced map setting added. Chris then set about fine tuning the map. One of the things he noticed was a lack of gas in the mid-range. This was corrected and has made an enormous difference. The car is much smoother to drive and doesn’t need to be worked as hard to make good progress.

As I mentioned earlier, my car was suffering from a power loss in the upper rev band. From about 4000 rpm, it was like hitting a wall. As you can imagine, trying to diagnose this issue on the open road would have proved very difficult. This is where the rolling road comes into it’s own. We ran the car up to 4000 rpm, then floored the throttle. Sure enough, the car began to struggle. We ended the run early and analysed the data.

 There it was. The gas pressure was dropping dramatically at higher rev. Chris pointed to the regulator/vaporiser. “That’s your problem”, he said.

Now, the regulator is an expensive part. About £140! And my year’s warranty had run out last month. Not a problem, said Chris. This part should last 100k miles, not my 11k miles. So he replaced the part free of charge. This was way above normal customer service considering he only supplied the kit and not the fitting. We replaced the regulator and tried another run. No problems this time. Sorted!

The car was booked in for a set-up that should take an hour. Mine took 3 ¾ hours including a road session. Chris had originally quoted me £40 for the set-up. Because of the time taken and the fitting of the new regulator, he had to up the price by……a tenner! Yes, £50 for all that work!

I can’t recommend Chris (autogas2000) highly enough. I asked for some conversion prices and was  surprised to find prices have came down about £400 from when I got mine done. Go see for yourself! http://www.autogas2000.co.uk/