200 miles on a tankful before the flashy-warning on a 2008

[maxtog]

My bike started blinking at me on my way in to work this morning, and I was thinking about how much fuel I had left after the light comes on.  On my old SV, I would use the low fuel indicator to let me know when to get more gas since it came on with 1 gallon left in a 4 gallon tank, and a 150ish mile range to fumes. 

It is safe to assume you have 1 gal left at the blinky (I think it is actually 1.1 gal), so whatever your "typical" mileage is per gallon, that is what you have left.  So I figure I have a range of 43 or so miles.  The best thing to do is to immediately set your trip B meter to "0" at the start of the alert, so at least you know how many miles you have been on your virtual "reserve tank".  It is very annoying that the C-14's computer doesn't track that for you automatically or at least continue to show an estimate of range left (my Infiniti car does... it will tell me range, right down to the end).

[Tom J.]

+1 on the 1.1 Gal remaining after the 'flashy blinky thingy' comes on....

[Dustproof]

Hi Maxtog,

Yep your right no more power but if an engine is tuned to a particular Octane rating the machine will run better, better means more power.  If you think of putting in a high octane fuel without a change in tune, it is a waist of money.  Pinging is BAD, we don't want pinging, but if your engine is running rough, try some higher octane fuel to see if it is easy as that to fix.

If you have a PCIII and get a custom map, the tuner will tune to the fuel you have in the tank.  Once tuned = better performance and hopefully better fuel economy which in turn = happy times riding.

See ya
Noel

[CrashGordon]

Actually, I believe fuel economy will *drop* if you use higher than required octane.

Possibly, but probably not. Octane rating is a ratio of octane gasoline to heptane gasoline. Both are flammable, but heptane is more susceptible to pressure ignition and tends to burn much faster (explosively). So the higher the octane, the less likely the fuel will pre-ignite in a high compression engine. Octane burns slower than heptane which is why it helps prevent pre-ignition in engines that have a lot of carbon buildup in the cylinders. In chemical terms it's a significant difference in burn rate, but realistically the difference is probably slight. The difference in fuel economy is probably not noticeable.

I usually get around 175 miles on a tank when commuting. On a recent trip that involved a lot of cruising speeds, I saw 235 miles before the dash started flashing at me. I usually use 93 octane fuel (though that is from single hose pumps, so I'm probably getting around 91 octane at most fill-ups).