What is Engine hours? Calculate Engine hours.

When buying a used car, everyone first looks at the odometer, believing that the condition of the vehicle directly depends on its mileage. However, the mileage does not always indicate how much the machine's resource has actually been used up. More precisely, the degree of its wear can be judged by other data: how many years, months, days, hours and minutes it actually worked. And this depends on many factors, primarily on the operating conditions.

SEVERAL years ago, according to the regulations, the interservice mileage for most models did not exceed 5,000 km. With the improvement of technologies and the increase in the service life of lubricants, the interval between scheduled maintenance was extended first to 10,000, then to 15,000, and for some brands even up to 20,000 km. But then the process of increasing mileage between obligatory visits to the service stopped and even in some cases went in the opposite direction.

A similar state of affairs was previously not typical for cars. Another thing is some kind of agricultural or military equipment, which in the process of operation does not move so much and not too fast. No one ever took into account the mileage of grain harvesters and army tanks - to determine the resource they worked out, they used the so-called engine hours, that is, the time that the engine worked in total. And the timing of the scheduled maintenance is determined not by the mileage traveled, but by the number of hours.

As can be seen from our experiment, with the current congestion of city streets, such a practice may be useful not only for specialized equipment, but also for ordinary cars. Perhaps, over time, automakers will also take this into account. Well, without waiting for the car to routinely install the operating hours meters, we will probably, on our own initiative, reduce the service interval of our Ford. To begin with, at least 5000 km., And then we'll see.

- If we consider the operation on the highway, then the average speed without traffic jams should usually be at least 70 km / h, but in practice somewhere around 80 km / h, then 15,000 km: 70 km / h = 214 hours.

- If we consider the operation in the city, then the average speed without traffic jams should usually be somewhere around 30 km / h, i.e. we get 15000: 30 = 500 engine hours.

Plus for warming up in winter, it's another 50 hours.

In total, in conditions without traffic jams, 15,000 km is:

- in the city equivalent

550 hours;

- on the highway is equivalent

What is the difference between mileage and engine hours? How to calculate the number of engine hours from a car's mileage? The answer to this question, unfortunately, is not so simple, or rather, it is not - it is impossible to accurately calculate the number of engine hours passed, knowing the car's mileage. However, this can be done relatively and approximately.

First of all, you should know that usually the manufacturers of most cars set approximately the same conditions for calculating engine hours, and most often 200-250 engine hours of engine operation are equal to 15 thousand kilometers in the case of a calm measured drive with a moderate amount of traffic jams and, in general, the engine idling (after all, in this case, the mileage does not increase, and the engine hours increase). But if, for example, you prefer aggressive driving at high engine speeds, often stand in traffic jams, in general often stand with the engine running (you bask in a stationary car, for example), then this ratio increases in favor of engine hours - i.e. the latter becomes more than the mileage. And in this case, you use up the resource of the engine (and some other units) faster, you need to change the engine oil more often, and so on. And in the event that you often drive along the highway in a calm manner, your car rarely stands idle with the engine running and is more often in motion, then the calculation of the mileage based on the mileage should be based on the fact that at the same 200-250 mileage can reach up to 20,000 kilometers. However, if we are talking about the regular replacement of fluids and oils in a car, based on these data, then this is just the case when "it is better to overdo it than to miss it."

Most likely, you will find the calculation of engine hours (information on the calculation procedure: about vehicle speed, crankshaft speed, etc.) in the operating manual of your car model, or in its detailed technical characteristics.

Nevertheless, accurate information about the number of hours passed is in the "brains" (on-board computers) of some car models, and you can find out what the number of hours and the most accurately correlate their number with the mileage of a car by reading this information from the computer processor of the car.