F
foggyparrot
Deleted User
With Pooh going and my feelings about our Monaco not being what they should, I got to thinking about possibly changing the coach again.
I know it's not relevant, but the Monaco is a lovely coach, it drives well, it does most of what we wanted, but it's probably just a question of greener grass and all that.
With the cost of diesel sky rocketing I did a few quick calculations as to the overall cost of fuel over a 12 month period and wondered if the extra MPG that you tend to get from a diesel is now offset by the lower price of petrol.
Are you with me so far?
We travel about 2500 mile a year and the last time I checked fuel consumption on the Winnie, a 530 mile round trip returned us 17.6mpg towing the trailer and car.
Although it's not exactly accurate, the Monaco returned us about 12.5mpg last time out.
I'm sort of figuring that the average petrol coach should return about 10 mpg so although it's no real contest as far as the Winnie goes, the difference in mpg between the Monaco and a big petrol A class is quite small. So I got to work on the spreadsheet and tried to take into account all of the variables to see exactly what the annual BOTTOM LINE differences were between petrol and diesel fuel costs.
Just to make it interesting I threw in some estimated costs on LPG as well.
So far (and based upon my own very limited experience) it seems that diesel is still substantially less expensive than petrol despite the price per litre difference.
As an example these are the figures I came up with:
A small (30 footish) 6.5 Turbo diesel (the Winnie) could cost as little as 30.4 pence per mile in fuel costs - so 2500 miles could be achieved for as little as £760.00.
An 8.3 (or thereabouts) pusher could achieve 42.8 ppm costing £1070 per 2500 miles.
A petrol vehicle (7.3) returning 10mpg (? - don't really know - pure speculation) would cost about 47 ppm costing £1185 for the same mileage.
I believe that you can lose something approaching 1 mile per gallon less on LPG (10%) but the costs would still only be 29 ppm with a 2500 mile cost of £725.
The problem that I have is that I obviously can't speculate about actual fuel consumptions but can only work with the figures I have - including the price of fuel local to me.
Obviously a small coach with a gas conversion is going to achieve substantially more that the above, but I have to consider a larger coach (with a payload similar to the Monaco) so have excluded Pooh sized vehicles from my wish list.
At the end of the day it's purely speculative and I don't think that the engine type or size would be paramount in us making a decision about which coach to actually buy, particularly when you consider that the overall difference in fuel costs for the entire year would only equate to a paltry £115 between a big engined diesel and similar petrol. However, a ready converted LPG could save us about £460 a year at best and £355 at worst. That does make you sit up and take notice!!
I still think it would be difficult to justify that cost of converting if you were only doing the mileage we do, but a ready converted coach might be worth looking at!
Any way, just to try and balance out my research, I wonder if any body could give me actual fuel consumptions and (as importantly) the fuel prices from different areas.
I stress that this is only an exercise and is unlikely to influence our decision to change or not, but for my interest and to occupy a bit of time, responses would be gratefully received.
I think it's important to collect as much data as possible because everybody's style of driving is different as well as the types of journeys they do. For instance, I NEVER use my cruise control because I believe it makes for an incredibly un-economical drive (that'll spark a debate!!).
Should anybody want to see my results once I have compiled my data just let me know.
Mike :thumb:
I know it's not relevant, but the Monaco is a lovely coach, it drives well, it does most of what we wanted, but it's probably just a question of greener grass and all that.
With the cost of diesel sky rocketing I did a few quick calculations as to the overall cost of fuel over a 12 month period and wondered if the extra MPG that you tend to get from a diesel is now offset by the lower price of petrol.
Are you with me so far?
We travel about 2500 mile a year and the last time I checked fuel consumption on the Winnie, a 530 mile round trip returned us 17.6mpg towing the trailer and car.
Although it's not exactly accurate, the Monaco returned us about 12.5mpg last time out.
I'm sort of figuring that the average petrol coach should return about 10 mpg so although it's no real contest as far as the Winnie goes, the difference in mpg between the Monaco and a big petrol A class is quite small. So I got to work on the spreadsheet and tried to take into account all of the variables to see exactly what the annual BOTTOM LINE differences were between petrol and diesel fuel costs.
Just to make it interesting I threw in some estimated costs on LPG as well.
So far (and based upon my own very limited experience) it seems that diesel is still substantially less expensive than petrol despite the price per litre difference.
As an example these are the figures I came up with:
A small (30 footish) 6.5 Turbo diesel (the Winnie) could cost as little as 30.4 pence per mile in fuel costs - so 2500 miles could be achieved for as little as £760.00.
An 8.3 (or thereabouts) pusher could achieve 42.8 ppm costing £1070 per 2500 miles.
A petrol vehicle (7.3) returning 10mpg (? - don't really know - pure speculation) would cost about 47 ppm costing £1185 for the same mileage.
I believe that you can lose something approaching 1 mile per gallon less on LPG (10%) but the costs would still only be 29 ppm with a 2500 mile cost of £725.
The problem that I have is that I obviously can't speculate about actual fuel consumptions but can only work with the figures I have - including the price of fuel local to me.
Obviously a small coach with a gas conversion is going to achieve substantially more that the above, but I have to consider a larger coach (with a payload similar to the Monaco) so have excluded Pooh sized vehicles from my wish list.
At the end of the day it's purely speculative and I don't think that the engine type or size would be paramount in us making a decision about which coach to actually buy, particularly when you consider that the overall difference in fuel costs for the entire year would only equate to a paltry £115 between a big engined diesel and similar petrol. However, a ready converted LPG could save us about £460 a year at best and £355 at worst. That does make you sit up and take notice!!
I still think it would be difficult to justify that cost of converting if you were only doing the mileage we do, but a ready converted coach might be worth looking at!
Any way, just to try and balance out my research, I wonder if any body could give me actual fuel consumptions and (as importantly) the fuel prices from different areas.
I stress that this is only an exercise and is unlikely to influence our decision to change or not, but for my interest and to occupy a bit of time, responses would be gratefully received.
I think it's important to collect as much data as possible because everybody's style of driving is different as well as the types of journeys they do. For instance, I NEVER use my cruise control because I believe it makes for an incredibly un-economical drive (that'll spark a debate!!).
Should anybody want to see my results once I have compiled my data just let me know.
Mike :thumb:
)
