Which is cheaper and or works better, hi test gas or booster in a can?

Anyone done any math averages yet?

Anyone done any test to see if booster in a can worked as well as hi test gas?

Whats your flavor of gas 86 87 89 93 94

What flavor of gas do you start with before you add booster?


What brand of gas?


What brand of booster?


Lets just skip all the useless debate on why or what reason anyone is using hi test gas or booster in their car or cars.... Reason why folks are doing it is an endless topic..............

 

It's hard to decide what's "better" without taking into consideration the reasons for using it.

 

Anyone doing the science lab stuff for their race gas, little bit of this from paint store, little bit of that from airport, little bit of oldspice...........

 

Gotta remember, Octane booster in a can may raise you up "2 points", so 92, to 92.2 octane - A VERY BAD DEAL ECONOMICALLY.


I have some links at home I can post later, home brew octane boosters, etc. Mostly toluene anyway.
If you can buy high test, i'd buy that.

 

Price is always the main reason. Which is cheaper but if one doesn't work...........

But we can get to far into endless debat when someone with a punny stock TBI305 wants to run 94 for gibblewoble reasons and we go off into a pissin contest.

 

That's just it though. For 99% of people here, 87 octane pump gas is the best solution in terms of cost/benefit.

In terms of octane number improvement per dollar, you probably couldn't beat tetraethyl lead, but there are more than a few problems associated with its use these days.

 

Buying it with whatever octane rating is always going to be cheaper than trying to home mix some octane into it unless you are producing your own chemicals.

 

Definitely buy the 89 Octane (IIRC) with 10% ethanol added. It's cheaper than 87 octane and has a higher octane rating of course, Win Win situation except if the alcohol decides your parts are old and eats them away so you have to replace rubber parts that wouldn't have needed to be. But either way they'll need replacing if they're that far out of service anyways. With 89 Octane you can't go wrong.

 

The whole country, every grade, has 10 percent ethanol added since aerly this year.

 

Couldn't be, We still have 87 Unleaded, 89 Super Unleaded, 92 Premium, and used to have 20% and 30% ethanol blends but those are getting fazed out. Last I checked SD is part of USA. (No need for a wise crack about little old South Dakota either ) 92 and 87 don't have any ethanol added according to our pumps all around the state.

 

i thought government standard was straight 10% ethanol. the only other blend i know of is E85 which is of course 15% ethanol

 

all the pumps here are marked "may contain up 10% alcohol"

BTW, E85 is 85% ethanol

 

you are correct, my bad

 

Final Answer, the octane booster in a can is a joke. Its made to treat a full tank of gas, but who wants to run at the track with a full tank? It also turns your engine orange. Attached is a pic of what my cylinder heads looked like after running octane booster once a month at the track. Now I mix 100 octane race gas with 91 octane premium to get 96 octane.

 

Weird, I was under the impression that it was a new government regulation. Must have been mistaken! Sorry.

 

Usually the gas companies add in 10% ethanol to act as an antifreeze. Part of the winter blend formula. I'm pretty sure i've heard five7 or Vader mention that around here before as well.

haha, orange cylinder heads That's awesome

 

toluene is 116 octane
gas is 93 octance

so to mix just use a simple chemical formula to spit out what octane you'd like to make.

 

It's okay man, we're all mistaken every once in while. It'd be nice if it were required of them to have at least some alcohol in it all to reduce the use of regular unleaded but I highly doubt it. Thanks for that pic kevin, never have I run octane booster and now I definitely never will.

 

That just a sign of hi octange use. I have seen plugs like that before.
1/2 a can of 104+ to 2gals will do that.

 

doesnt the 10% ethenol actually decrease the octane rating in gas?

 

No, adding ethanol increases the octane rating of gasoline. Pure ethanol has an (R+M)/2 octane rating of about 115 or so.

 

ya, they are using it in place of MTBE, at least in all of masachusetts...

 

if you dont need higher octane dont use/buy it. if you want the most out of your motor buy the lowest octane the motor will take. otherwise youre just throwing away money. dont buy gas at the airport if you have efi, youll **** up your o2 sensors. yu can make your own booster with products bought from a paint store: Booster Talk here one more thing, be very careful with alky, any more than the 10% added and it will start eating away seals and lines.

 

I've taken apart a lot of engines over the years and running on pump 102+ octane never turned stuff orange. Its not octane related, its the additive used to change the octane rating.

 

They've actually completely eradicated the use of MTBE because of the pollution and Cost factors of using it rather than using abundant ethanol. No gasoline sold in the United States can contain MTBE. I remember reading this in our local paper last summer. That's why ethanol prices started to rise during the summer because of a shortage from the lack of MTBE use.

To finally answer your original question, My opinion anyways, use high octane racing gas, It may be more expensive but you get what you pay for. There are a lot of good additives or synthetics that claim to strengthen your motor and some do, but most are just too insignificant to notice or there are other permanent ways to fix the problems. Run high octane race gas, forget the additives in the Automotive sections of department stores.

 

spiffy

 

Also to clarify, use UNLEADED high-octane gas with your EFI street cars. It usually comes at the pump with octane levels of 100 or 103. Leaded stuff is 110 or higher, and you dont need it unless you're running a carb with 12:1 compression or higher.
For reference, here are the same heads as above after running regular high-octane gas at the track instead of octane additives in a can: