On Trial

The Car Mechanics team assess a number of products aimed at making your motoring life easier.

CAR MECHANICS APRIL 2002

SYKES-PICKAVANT HANDHELD GAS ANALYSER

Gas analysers are usually the size of a TV set and just as heavy, so when I saw Sykes-Pickavant's new handheld gas analyser for the first time I was amazed, The size of a paperback book, and a full four gas analyzer with Lambda readings as well.

I have had it on test for a week, and prefer it to the workshop unit now. Its first job with us was for a vehicle that we had done a propane conversion on that was not good on fuel consumption. We needed to see what the emissions were at speed under load. Unfortunately the vehicle was too big to get into the workshop for a rolling road emissions check, but with the Sykes gas analyzer this was no problem. It also had an added advantage to our workshop gas analyser here - it can be set to give the correct emissions readings using propane as a fuel: I took it out on a road test with the analyzer attached, and gave It some welly down the M1, Reading the instrument while driving is not a good idea, but Sykes have thought of that as well - sets of emissions readings are saved at the press of a button to be recalled on returning to base,

Checking the unit against our workshop instrument showed the readings to be virtually identical (see bottom picture) - but the response time of less than 15 seconds for the Sykes was a lot better than for our workshop unit. A printer is an optional extra - this uses an infra-red link and enables a customer printout to be given out.

The only downside to the unit is that it is not an MoT Approved Emissions tester, While it is of a quality so that it should not have a problem with approval. The costs are kept down - MoT approval costs a lot.

I also found it very useful for checking head gasket leaks - using a workshop gas analyser to do this by sniffing the vapour space in the expansion tank is not a good way to do this - they just suck far too great a quantity of gas. In fact the detector samples only a small amount of this gas - the rest is discarded via a sample line splitter. The result is that while you may pick-up a big head gasket leak in this way a smaller leak will go undetected - all the header tank gas is removed before the workshop analyser gets going. We have overcome this limitation in our workshop analyser by installing a separate low flow sample line with its own low flow pump direct to the detector without any sample line splitter.

The Sykes unit though has a sample pump with a low enough flow rate to allow reliable header gas sampling for head gasket problems. Use an extra water trap in the sample line though, in case of accidental pulling through of coolant from the tank.

Dave Peacock