Monitoring Engine/Transmission While Towing

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All, was considering moving up to a beefier truck than the F150, and went looking for a way to see how towing the redhead's 5500# "tin can" was affecting the tow vehicle on short camping runs around our area before tackling longer and more hilly trips like 10 hours to Gatlinburg in the Smokies, etc. Since most of the time the truck is my 120 mile round trip commute vehicle I really didn't want to go any further down in MPG.


Wound up buying one of these
http://www.scangauge.com/products/scangaugeii/
because it wasn't much more than adding a simple Transmission temp gauge, and looked a lot more fun !

Anybody else using any tools to do similar ? I think Capt Scott has a bluetooth device in his truck.


Oh, results..F150, 4.6L V8, with passive transmission cooler rates at 6300# with our rear end, normal commute trans temps are about 150. We took an hour run north this weekend with trans temp sitting at 165, and hit 185 on one uphill stretch a couple miles long but temps would drop soon as any strain was over.

Cylinder head/water temps stayed about same as normal, MPG dropped from normal 18 HWY to 8 running 55-65MPH

All in all its a fun tool to play with !

[CaptainScott]

YEs sir I do have a similar set up! I have the standard Innova ODBII code reader for diagnostics and such and have for years.

However this last year I got a wild hair and started to research these ODB2 Dongles. They basically plug directly into the ODB2 port under your steering column.

Since I use an iPad and other Apple products I went with an ODB2 WiFi Dongle from amazon.com. Use care and watch shipping times. They can be as long as a month as some ship from China.

Once I had the dongle I purchased and app called DashCommand for my iPad Mini.

With this cheap total set up I can read and clear ODBII codes in any 96 or newer vehicle!

However like EE says, the cool part is being able to read real time data from your rig! MANY more values than I understand are presented! Temps ,pressures, boost, speed, rpm, O2 values, etc etc!

In reality for me, I looks for specific values Like EE did and then the practical use is limited as my truck runs very well.

However my setup runs very high on the NEATO scale! It is just too cool to see real time streaming data while driving! I've used it to diagnose several friends cars also!

If you are an android user the preferred dongle is the Blue Tooth version.
Anyone with questions or wants to see my set up, come on buy or ask here!

Scott

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Update - we towed the redhead's land yacht to Dauphin Island for the month of December and I experimented a bit;

Found that letting the transmission run in OD did nothing but raise the transmission temp 20 degrees even on an easy flat run ! MPG actually got a bit worse too.

The 4.6 F150 was happiest out of OD at 65MPH and it got 10.2 MPG as opposed to 9.2MPG running just at a bit faster at the posted 70MPH..


Also there is a data point for LOD (percent of load). It ran 90 anytime we were on flat ground and higher when climbing hills. Since the F150 is rated at 6300 pounds with the engine/axle I have and the camper weighs 5600 dry that percent of load range used about makes sense I think..