Phil Pascoe
Established Member
It was said several years ago that the cleanest air you could breath on Oxford Street was to get your mouth around the exhaust pipe of one of the top of the range Saab's.
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Some things I can swallow, some things I question but that statement is in a whole different dimension.
Please understand, air is not emitted from an exhaust pipe.
Phil Pascoe
Established Member
Ice? Mercury? Custard?
And your proof is???
Euro 6 diesels are a far cry from 'ye old smokers' diesels of yesteryear (in fact a E6 diesel seen emmitting ANY smoke at any time is a automatic fail and if seen will be required to undergo an emissions test!!!)- and the new euro 7 spec ones (many diesels already meet the new euro 7 specs, as they are coming in in less than 8 months time (July 1 2025) and are even tougher...)
In fact, if you want to 'die peacefully in your garage'- a petrol car is your best bet- a E6 diesel emits HALF the CO of a E6 petrol car...
https://inelo.com/european-exhaust-emission-standard-from-euro-1-to-euro-7/
Now its your turn- what PROOF- not hyperbolic statements made without actual data being shown to support them- do you have to support your statement???
Actual data- numbers...
Like I mentioned before- if you want to try it, then using a petrol car is your best bet- as they are legally allowed DOUBLE the CO emissions of a diesel... (carbon monoxide/CO is what is the 'silent killer')
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_emission_standards
Unless you have managed to sneak your car onto a submarine or other airtight containment, there is always plenty of oxygen in the environment- what killed people was too much carbon monoxide in the air- which inhibits the bodies ability to USE to oxygen in the air...I don't see any mention of Oxygen coming out of a car exhaust. Quite important if the fumes, however "clean", are your only source of air.
https://www.co2meter.com/en-au/blogs/news/carbon-monoxide-levels-chart
Do you not notice a complete lack of Oxygen in there? Oxygen is the gas that supports life and makes up 20.95% of the air that we breath.
The largest part of most combustion gas is nitrogen (N2), water vapor (H2O) (except with pure-carbon fuels), and carbon dioxide (CO2) (except for fuels without carbon); these are not toxic or noxious. A relatively small part of combustion gas is undesirable, noxious, or toxic substances, such as carbon monoxide (CO) from incomplete combustion, hydrocarbons (properly indicated as CxHy, but typically shown simply as "HC" on emissions-test slips) from unburnt fuel, nitrogen oxides (NOx) from excessive combustion temperatures, and particulate matter (mostly soot) from incomplete combustion absorbed by PF's.
As you can see it's far from being air which was my original statement which triggered off a lot of this.
Exhaust gas will kill you by suffocation if nothing else, it is absolutely incorrect to state that the 'air' coming of the exhaust is cleaner than the air going into the engine which is an often (but very incorrect) statement pos6ted.
You need to look at the operating cycles of the petrol and the diesel engine, a diesel engine runs unrestricted air and is the reason a diesel has the higher volumetric efficiency unlike the petrol where you throttle the air and this means that there is excess air at parts of the operating range for a diesel. Now saying that
the air might be clean but your lungs would explode and then you would inflate like a space hopper .
IF you had a completely airtight room then after a few hours (days) then you might run out of oxygen- but as that applies to not a single home garage on the planet- a lack of oxygen is of no concern...
What killed people was carbon monoxide poisoning- and as my links above showed- you would need to run a modern diesel for twice as long as the same age petrol powered vehicle to get to the same levels- so indeed- 'diesels' are less likely to be able to kill you!!!
The statement that the 'air' coming out is cleaner than the air going in can indeed be the case in cities that have high smog levels- as the systems used to 'clean' the pollutants out of the vehicles own exhaust will also clean the same pollutants from the air being drawn into the motor...
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So you’d be up for a demonstration would you, exhaust into the car through window and let it idle for an hour with you in there?
Note, I’m not seriously suggesting you do, I know it would kill you.
Note, I’m not seriously suggesting you do, I know it would kill you.
If I had a choice of vehicle to try it in, and I wanted to live- the diesel is the 'safer' option of the two to try it with lol
Be interesting to see just how high the CO levels would actually get in a car- it too late for me to bother trying to calculate it, but but it would have to hit well over 200ppm to do it 'in an hour'- how that equates to the 0.5g per km would depend on many factors, which would change the results considerably
A diesel SUV like my sisters is around 3000L of air volume inside, and assuming that an hours worth of idling adds 5 grams of CO to the interior (using that 0.5g per km as a basis, although that would inflate the figures as that is at higher rpms, not idling like it would be in a garage), thats approximately 0.06l of CO at STP so thats 1 part CO to 50000 parts air which works out to roughly 20 ppm, so assuming I haven't made any mistakes, thats about 1/10th of the levels needed to be fatal in an hour...
(I changed my mind lol- I really should be going to bed, but I got interested in crunching the numbers...)
It's been a few year since I did molar calculations- so I could be wrong (plus I used some rough approximations in there as well) anyone care to double check my 'back of the envelope' figures???
IF they are right- that 20ppm about double the safe exposure for 8 hours...
So far from fatal for an hour...
Be interesting to see just how high the CO levels would actually get in a car- it too late for me to bother trying to calculate it, but but it would have to hit well over 200ppm to do it 'in an hour'- how that equates to the 0.5g per km would depend on many factors, which would change the results considerably
A diesel SUV like my sisters is around 3000L of air volume inside, and assuming that an hours worth of idling adds 5 grams of CO to the interior (using that 0.5g per km as a basis, although that would inflate the figures as that is at higher rpms, not idling like it would be in a garage), thats approximately 0.06l of CO at STP so thats 1 part CO to 50000 parts air which works out to roughly 20 ppm, so assuming I haven't made any mistakes, thats about 1/10th of the levels needed to be fatal in an hour...
(I changed my mind lol- I really should be going to bed, but I got interested in crunching the numbers...)
It's been a few year since I did molar calculations- so I could be wrong (plus I used some rough approximations in there as well) anyone care to double check my 'back of the envelope' figures???
IF they are right- that 20ppm about double the safe exposure for 8 hours...
So far from fatal for an hour...
Enjoy yourself in the garage with the engine running, it's been nice knowing you
What comes out of any exhaust pipe is not air. Air contains around 20% oxygen. That oxygen is used by the engine to burn the fuel, the rest of the air entering the engine really serves no purpose. So the "air" coming out of the pipe contains very little oxygen.
Much the same true of ourselves, it is the oxygen in the air we use, not the rest of it. We of course are much less efficient in using it. That is why you can give mouth to mouth to resuscitate someone, because the air we breathe out still contains a lot of oxygen, not the case with a car engine.
The point is that the CO figure is completely irrelevant. If the car was sealed then you would die of oxygen starvation long before the CO got to you in either case.
Each breath you take is diminishing the oxygen level whilst increasing the level of CO2.
If the garage rather than the car is the sealed environment then much the same. Both you and the vehicle are breathing in oxygen and exhaling gases that will not sustain life.
So will take a bit longer because you are starting with a bigger volume of air, but ultimately the same result.
