Do Performance Air Filters REALLY Give You More Power?

As car enthusiasts we all love

power

and what's better is that cheap and easy electric air

filters

often promise this by simply swapping out the original air filter for a reduced replacement as engines are essentially fuel pumps. glorified air. The theoretical range is true. Put

more

air and get

more

power

. But is it as simple as that to find out? And in the spirit of tire reviews, I'm going to test two vehicles using nine different input configurations, giving us the largest data set I could at least find on the Internet to know if it's more. air means more power.

The two cars I'll be using were opposite ends of the scale. The first car I will use is the tire that reviews the e92 m3. This car is a high revving naturally aspirated V8 so getting more power out of this one is difficult, the second car will be this one, it's my daily skoda octavia vrs and this may seem like a bit of a boring choice but the engine ea aaa in this is the same engine that comes in the audi s3 golf stars and in many other configurations, this car is in stock. It should have 220 horsepower, but it comes out of the factory with up to 300 horsepower, so it should be a

really

interesting example of whether a boost engine can get more power with more airflow than a high-maintenance, high-speed V8. revolutions, as I like the data to be as accurate as possible.

I've come to dyno developments in North Hertfordshire that make dinosaurs. It's not worth knowing what these guys don't know about getting accurate data and this dinosaur is a very accurate dynamometer. It's not one of those hero dinosaurs that over-reads by 10 20 30. to make their customers happy, all they care about is the right number, which to me is a little worrying about the m3 because they never reached 414 horsepower of strength promised, even when they were new, so it will be interesting to see what is working now, as you can see we have many different types of air

filters

in testing to provide a

really

wide range of data points for the e9203.

We are going to use an original filter that weighs approximately 50 pounds. So we're going to use a k n replacement filter that weighs about 90 pounds so almost double the price now the k n doesn't promise any extra power but it flows more than well, I think this will probably be the most interesting. this is it and i'm not going to touch it it's a used canon l filter it came out of my last m3 it had about 30,000 miles on it and i cleaned it per canon instructions twice so it's like you just had your car serviced and instead of putting a new one in paper filter, you are simply cleaning the existing filter.

The fourth configuration will be this, the attractive and beautiful carbon fiber venturi intake system. Now this is an 800 pound system and eventually on your dyno it brings 8 to 12. horsepower again so it should be really interesting to see if on my stock car it brings more power but I'm pretty sure it does. it will bring more sensuality and should generate a pleasant noise because the carbon fiber should vibrate and then the fifth stroke. In the M3 we are simply going to take out all the air filters and we are going to run with the empty box to see if any filter can

give

it more power.

Also for the Skoda, we will do more or less the same. but not with the dirty filter, we have the original 20 pound filter, we have a 40 pound pipe that is absolutely tiny compared to the original filter, a ram air induction system and again, we are going to run the car without no type of intake, it should be very exciting and fascinating to see if this makes more power than this and if this makes any difference because it's definitely going to flow differently, but let's get on the dyno and find out that this is the toroview. e92 m3 and this car has been nothing but problems since purchase.

Luckily, this video sponsor, Carly, has helped me get unstuck and saved me time and money multiple times. Kali is a Bluetooth embedded diagnostic adapter. These adapters are very useful for self-diagnosis. of car faults, which means you don't have to link the workshop every time your car throws a fault code. However, it's not just a diagnostic tool, it goes a step further and actually allows you to code disabled or hidden functions in your car from your smartphone. One of the common faults on the e92 m3 is that the throttle fails when it fails, the car throws out random errors, kills half the v8 and limits the throttle on the remaining cylinders, usually this means an unusable car on an expensive trip to the dealership, However, with Kali I was able to diagnose that all the reported faults were related to the clear default throttle actuator codes and it gave me full power again until the problem was detected again months later.

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Taro views viewers can get a 20 discount by heading to mykarli.com and using the tire discount code to discover stock. power now we are putting the clean air filter in the clean k n clean out clean in but the paper filter obviously has a lot more filtration area and a little more restrictive so hopefully a little more air should flow through, it will give us more power, sorry, after about 24 runs, essentially no difference, nothing we could do would give it more power, whether it was open airbox, no filter, open airbox, filter, clean k n filter, finally , the only statistical difference was the dirty k n, which is the clean one, obviously, which lost energy. a little bit, but not a huge amount either, this shows how difficult it is to get power from a normally aspirated engine and what a good job BMW has done with the intake system on this one, so now let's load up the Skoda. and see if a turbocharged engine will really make any difference, okay run one trying to find the stock power of my vrs, mine had a little problem.

I'll put the data on the screen to see how much power it has. one should do about two four five not 225 which might respect access to a slightly newer engine we have 230 horsepower so let's put the tube through the filter and see if that little thing gives us more power, it just doesn't seem necessary for this to be so small and so tiny, I'm sure it lets more air through, but the main job of an air filter is to filter the air and that's what I mean, look at the difference, yeah, it made some power, four horsepower I thought. do something 236 236, so 236 in the first round, which is the highest power so far, but it seems that the heat absorbed by the engine reaching the top of the air filter made it less consistent, so it dropped to 231 , while the pipe through It was two, three, four, very interesting, so there you have it, does a high

performance

air filter give you more

performance

knowing that yes, frustratingly as expected, nothing could do anything for the e92 m3, wouldn't that big normally aspirated and highly powerful v8 just make more power than it had? with the stock filter the only statistical difference was the dirty k n which reduced flow at high rpm which makes sense because the power dropped and you lost about 10 power so if you are thinking about using a k n filter they are good and seemed to make a There is a slight difference in the noise, but I would make sure you are on top of cleaning or do what I think I am going to do with the car and just put in a cheap paper filter every time it needs service , until finally it was like this.

It's a little disappointing that this doesn't make more power, however my car is completely stock and I don't really know its history so it may not be the healthiest example at the moment but in the future it will be as part . of the e 92 m3 build series that I'm doing for the tire review channel, one of the episodes will be about power and that is I have a full titanium aquaponic exhaust system and this, and then I'll map it out at At that point , I'm going to go back and review this to see if a remapped car with a better exhaust system will have an advantage among stock, so subscribe if you're interested in seeing that in the future, the Skoda. was the surprise of the day now, I don't think it's any surprise that this flows more air than this.

You can see how restrictive it looks compared to this little bit of foam. It was nice to see that it was a four brake horsepower increase. Every time we pulled, the ram air system was really interesting from the Skoda side, now it had a six brake horsepower increase on the first run, but since I was in a hurry to install it, I didn't fit the heat shield frame . That meant on the second run it started sucking in some hot air and dropped five horsepower, so it was just stock, which is a pretty good lesson in how more air is good, unless it's hot air. hot bad, even if it's a lot, so think about it. that since you are doing an induction system don't just put a conical filter like that and then leave it open to the engine compartment because drawing in hot air is rubbish for the engine, it just has to do things to compensate for that less dense air, that's the other reason why this inventory is inside the original air box because you don't want hot air from the engine so those are the two lessons from this test dirty is bad you don't have a dirty filter hot air is bad if you are installing a fancy induction kit, make sure you seal it off from the hot air from the engine because you're going to lose power, but in a powerful two liter Volkswagen group engine, more flow meant more power and in the highly suspended. e92 v8 that stock just didn't bother the elephant in the room leak now I haven't tried it but I'm pretty sure if I had tried it and if you want to see me try it leave a note in the comment.

I'm pretty sure this wouldn't leak as much as this or these wouldn't leak as much as these. Now one of my favorite YouTubers is Project Farm. If you haven't seen his channel, I'll leave a link in the description to his air filter filtration test because he did a really good job filtering and I'm going to spoil the ending for you. It was not good for cloth filters and it was good for paper filters. These seem to filter much better than these, that's the other thing you have to balance is the reduction in filtration which is worth a few extra horsepower, but that's your decision.

I hope you enjoyed this test. I've had a lot of fun doing it. It's been a bit. It's stressful and I'm sorry some of the images aren't the best. It's really difficult to film in a dinosaur cabin with light and sound, but I hope it was interesting anyway. If there is anything else you want to see me do in the future, feel free. to leave a comment below, as always I will try to answer everything if you have any questions, subscribe if you want to see what happens with that e93 as it changes its suspension, changes its brakes, changes its weight, reduces its power, increases every time make a change, I'll try it on the track.

I know I've been promising this for a while, but the car has been a nightmare. I had to work a lot on it to get it ready for the track and again now my summer is over so it looks like it will be early 2021 when hopefully the tracks will be a little more available and life will be a little more normal thanks again to dyno developments for taking care of my ocd and allowing me to do run after run after run after run to get the data as perfect as possible. If you're looking for a dyno, give these guys a call because they make the most accurate dinosaurs in the industry and if you want them to test your car, come on up.

Your car phone book does dyno testing at a very reasonable price but as always, drive safely and we'll see you next time.