How to Install Water Methanol Injection and Tune Your Engine For It

Water Injection system used in the video: https://www.snowperformance.eu/en/wat...

How Water Methanol (or Ethanol) injection works:    • I Inject Water Into My Engine and Mak...  

This video is a detailed step-by-step tutorial on how to install, configure and tune your engine for a water methanol injection kit.
This video covers the following:

Hardware install,
Wiring,
Nozzle position selection,
Nozzle sizing,
ECU tuning,

I will be installing the Snow performance Stage 2 kit but almost everything you will see in this video applies to other kits from other manufacturers as well as DIY kits.

The first thing we will install is the tank or reservoir. You can install this anywhere but I recommend that you install it somewhere far away from heat as well as road debris. Usually, the car’s trunk works well for this. To install the tank you just need find or provide four studs or bolt holes and bolt it down. I used two existing holes in my trunk and made another small bracket for the remaining two mounting points.

Before you install the tank make sure to install the outlet nozzle which will feed water to the pump. All threads in this kit are self-sealing NPT threads so they don’t really need any sort of sealant but I prefer to install them with a bit of sealant. The Snow Performance kit comes with the correct sealant for this application.

Something else this kit has is a fluid level warning sensor that tells you when the tank is about to run dry. This is optional and you don’t have to install it but I think it’s a nice useful feature. The fluid level sensor is connected to a little warning light that you install in the interior of your vehicle. The light flashes red when the water level is low.

Next, it’s time to install the pump. The pump can be installed both in a horizontal or vertical position but it must be installed close to the tank and the inlet nozzle of the pump must be below the level of the outlet nozzle of the tank so that the water drains easily into the pump without the pump having to suck the water up. Both the tank and the pump should be installed below the level of the intake manifold of the engine where the water-methanol mix will be injected.

If you’re running a turbo or a centrifugal supercharger, then you can not install the nozzle into the turbo intake because the high-speed water and methanol droplets can erode the leading edges of your compressor wheel. If you’re running a screw type or roots supercharger then you should install the nozzle before the supercharger. This is the ideal nozzle location for such applications.

This means that in turbocharged, intercooled applications such as mine, the nozzle should be installed after the intercooler but before the throttle body.

Once everything is installed we can proceed with the tuning. The first step with the tuning is to set your injection timing. This is set on the little display and it is absolutely detrimental to the performance of your system. There are only two things you can set, the start time of the injection and the end time of the injection. The rule of thumb is to set the injection start time at about 40% of your maximum boost pressure. So if you’re running 1 bar or 14.5 psi of boost then you will set injection start time at 0.4 bar and end time at 1 bar.

In general, if you choose an overly large nozzle or too early of an injection timing you will notice a power loss because of water injection. The overly large amount of water mist coming in too soon negatively impacts the combustion flame front and kills power. If you experience a power loss or measure it on a dyno after installing the water-methanol system then you can start by setting the injection timing later. If that doesn’t help you will likely have to go to a smaller nozzle. Alternatively, you can increase your boost pressure and ignition timing even further because the power loss tells you that there is now ample space to safely add more boost and timing.

Once you’re done with boost pressure you can play with the timing. This is my ignition timing map and for example, you can see that at peak boost I’m running relatively conservative timing. This is adequate timing without water-methanol injection but it’s actually conservative with water-methanol injection. Increasing timing by a few degrees here can easily gain another 10, 20 or likely even more horsepower.


A special thank you to my patrons:
Daniel
Pepe
Brian Alvarez
Peter Della Flora
Dave Westwood
Joe C
Zwoa Meda Beda
Toma Marini
Cole Philips

00:00 Table of Contents
00:53 Hardware Install
04:20 Wiring and Pump Priming
05:40 Nozzle Location
08:09 Nozzle Sizing
08:59 Injection Timing
11:36 ECU Tuning
14:26 Water Injection Causes Rust?

#d4a #boostschool