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EDIT - as a disclaimer, please understand that I am in no affiliated with this product or any vendor. I haven't received any favors or discounts; I paid full price for this and all of my other mods. I have used many different vendors/distributors here and I'm not biased to any of them. I am just an enthusiast who likes to share data and help others.
While this thread mostly centers on my findings with the Wagner intercooler, there are many other proven products out there that will likely perform just as good (or perhaps better). The takeaway here should be, the OE intercooler is poor and easily becomes heatsoaked when towing or running an increased amount of load on the engine.
How you approach solving it is up to you, for many owners that do not tow often or at all (or are running stock tunes) - the OE intercooler is probably fine.
This is part 1 of a multi-part thread.
I got a decent amount of logs taken over the weekend and with the break in the rain, the new Wagner intercooler went in. First off, take a look at how beefy this thing is compared to the stock unit:
Ok, I'll give the juicy information first and what was most surprising to me. The question I had was how drastic of a change in IAT will an aftermarket CAC actually net? What I did is set up the same run back to back, 2 prior to the CAC installation and 2 after. The runs were done from 0-80MPH and I launched the truck at 2000RPM each time. Every run was done with 4x4 engaged and TCS on and 4x4 remained on through the entire run. The goal here was I wanted to provide the maximum amount of sustained MAP load that would stress the intercooler.
The results speak for themselves on this first part.
Run 1 (pre-CAC)
Run 2 (pre-CAC)
Run 3 (post-CAC)
Run 4 (post-CAC)
I was absolutely floored at how fast the stock intercooler is being overwhelmed. You can see the initial drop from the idle/ambient state (when the truck starts to get moving airflow wise) and before even reaching 40MPH, it is building heat at an incredible rate. You'll notice that on both the Wagner runs, the starting IAT was higher based on me being in idle for a long period of time waiting to set the log conditions I wanted. On both of those runs, even with a higher starting IAT, the lowest temp reached 75-77 degrees (about 8 degrees cooler than the stock unit ever reached). The big difference is the sustained temperature the Wagner unit was able to maintain throughout the pulls.
So at this point, I thought how the heck could the stock unit be that inefficient. My initial thought thought was that the SCT tune and increase in boost/timing was exacerbating an already sub-par component. Turns out, it had nothing to do with the tune. I looked at both of my 0-60 runs, both before and after the tuning (from my previous thread here -> http://www.f150ecoboost.net/forum/13-f150-ecoboost-performance/3831-0-60-testing-sct-livewire.html)
On the 0-60 runs, both the before and after tune runs exhibited the same initial drop in temperature after the truck got moving but temperature never went higher than 10 degrees from the lowest observed temperature. So the obvious answer is the high loaded condition presented by running in 4x4 really pushed out what the stock CAC limitations are.
So I guess the bottom line on this first part is, if you are launching your truck on 4x4 and leaving it in that mode...you can expect the stock CAC to become heat-soaked very quickly. Based on this being MAP load dependent, I imagine that towing a large amount would also exhibit a very similar condition.
While this thread mostly centers on my findings with the Wagner intercooler, there are many other proven products out there that will likely perform just as good (or perhaps better). The takeaway here should be, the OE intercooler is poor and easily becomes heatsoaked when towing or running an increased amount of load on the engine.
How you approach solving it is up to you, for many owners that do not tow often or at all (or are running stock tunes) - the OE intercooler is probably fine.
This is part 1 of a multi-part thread.
I got a decent amount of logs taken over the weekend and with the break in the rain, the new Wagner intercooler went in. First off, take a look at how beefy this thing is compared to the stock unit:
Ok, I'll give the juicy information first and what was most surprising to me. The question I had was how drastic of a change in IAT will an aftermarket CAC actually net? What I did is set up the same run back to back, 2 prior to the CAC installation and 2 after. The runs were done from 0-80MPH and I launched the truck at 2000RPM each time. Every run was done with 4x4 engaged and TCS on and 4x4 remained on through the entire run. The goal here was I wanted to provide the maximum amount of sustained MAP load that would stress the intercooler.
The results speak for themselves on this first part.
Run 1 (pre-CAC)
Run 2 (pre-CAC)
Run 3 (post-CAC)
Run 4 (post-CAC)
I was absolutely floored at how fast the stock intercooler is being overwhelmed. You can see the initial drop from the idle/ambient state (when the truck starts to get moving airflow wise) and before even reaching 40MPH, it is building heat at an incredible rate. You'll notice that on both the Wagner runs, the starting IAT was higher based on me being in idle for a long period of time waiting to set the log conditions I wanted. On both of those runs, even with a higher starting IAT, the lowest temp reached 75-77 degrees (about 8 degrees cooler than the stock unit ever reached). The big difference is the sustained temperature the Wagner unit was able to maintain throughout the pulls.
So at this point, I thought how the heck could the stock unit be that inefficient. My initial thought thought was that the SCT tune and increase in boost/timing was exacerbating an already sub-par component. Turns out, it had nothing to do with the tune. I looked at both of my 0-60 runs, both before and after the tuning (from my previous thread here -> http://www.f150ecoboost.net/forum/13-f150-ecoboost-performance/3831-0-60-testing-sct-livewire.html)
On the 0-60 runs, both the before and after tune runs exhibited the same initial drop in temperature after the truck got moving but temperature never went higher than 10 degrees from the lowest observed temperature. So the obvious answer is the high loaded condition presented by running in 4x4 really pushed out what the stock CAC limitations are.
So I guess the bottom line on this first part is, if you are launching your truck on 4x4 and leaving it in that mode...you can expect the stock CAC to become heat-soaked very quickly. Based on this being MAP load dependent, I imagine that towing a large amount would also exhibit a very similar condition.