Narrowband vs Wideband AFR Gauge

we've talked a lot about afr gauges in the past but one thing i neglected to mention is there are two types and why one is better than the other so we better take care of that today now we've talked about o2 sensors before i did a really really good tuning video with the basics of it that really gives you all the details of this but the o2 sensor's job is to measure the exhaust gas and provide the engine with an air fuel ratio number so the ecu can manage the fuel air ratio that's or the fuel ratio that's feeding the engine so i mean its job is very very critical and there are two different types of o2 sensors that we talked about in that tuning video one here on top is a narrow band o2 sensor the one here on the bottom is a wideband o2 sensor now we'll talk a little bit about the differences between the two but they've got the same job but they perform it much differently so that's what we need to concentrate on today now i know everybody loves this so let's uh let's draw out how an o2 sensor reads in both a narrow band and a wideband and hopefully this will make a little bit more sense to you so if we look at here on the left side this is rich a rich condition this is stoic and this would be a lean condition down here okay stoic would measure straight across and cover on a on a gasoline engine anyway and that's what we'll concentrate on today because i don't want to talk about diesel or anything else but let's just say that stoic in this instance is 14.7 or 1.0 lambda okay so rich on a narrow band scale on a narrow band scale would be up here lean down here so if you follow the curve of how that will could flow into an engine is like that stoic is right here that's your magic number rich is a number up here lean is a number down here here's the trouble with the wideband o2 sensor it only reads from zero volts to one volt okay here in the middle point five volts okay at stoic that is the reading that it is sending back to the computer at half a volt that you are operating optimally when the engine starts to run rich then the o2 sensor sends that signal back to the ecu and says hey you've got a little bit too much fuel here in the mixture you need to lean it out a little bit now here's where that problem comes into play on a narrowband o2 sensor you don't know what rich or lean is on the lean side it could be 18 to 1 it could be 20 to 1 anywhere in between and not knowing that number is where the the key is here same on the rich side it could be ten to one which is what we'll talk about here in a minute on a y band o two uh it could be eleven to one i i don't know and that's the problem with the narrow band system is it doesn't give you a really precise number to measure by so it will tell you when it's rich and it'll tell you when it's lean but you have no idea what that number looks like and that's going to become critical to us here in just a second when we talk about the narrow narrowband o2 sensor so let's draw that one out next now let's take a look at the wide band o2 sensor and how it reads so same three things here on the left you've got a rich condition you've got stoic and you've got lean those factors don't change okay stoic is still going to run right down the middle of the fuel curve and the exhaust curve everything that's coming out that does not change rituals always be there lean will always be there in the case of a wide band o2 sensor okay you've got a reading on the narrow band we talked about just a minute ago it had a zero to one volt reading on a wideband and this is the key here you've got a zero to a five volt reading okay one two three four and on down the line okay so when you look at stoic here it is reading around two and a half volts okay sort of a straight line there and same situation here you got lean running up through stoic and over here to rich okay the key to the wideband o2 sensor is they almost always universally read this way depending on the type of the sensor and the type of the processor that they use to calculate that reading and set it back to the computer but rich is almost always 10.1 lien is almost 20 to one okay and if you have a fuel condition that falls here and remember this is 14.7 this may read accurately on a gauge at 15.7 15.8 15.9 that reading will be very accurate with a number instead of you're just running rich you're just running lean so we talked about here in the in the narrow band you don't know what this number is that factor is out the door all as you know is it's rich or lean or it's running right where it's supposed to be in optimal conditions so that's the difference between the two is the wideband o2 will give you a number where you can base your tuning process on or if you're feeding it to a computer the computer can base its calculation on what that actual number is so y band o2 sensor wildly better than a narrow band in that case because you can read the numbers very accurately very inaccurately okay so now that arts and crafts are done here typically the narrow band o2 system was used on older vehicles and again like we talked about it reads from that zero to one volt range there's not much information that can feed back to the computer it's either rich stoic or lean that's it the computer makes the correction to keep the engine as close to stoic as possible um remember what we talked about here if you're running rich the computer will say oh and it's within that parameter that it falls into it will adjust it back to get to stoic because that's where it wants to read that's where it's optimal that's where it gives you the best fuel economy and that's where the baseline of it is set if it's rating a little bit too lean and it falls within that range it will adjust it again to get back up to stoic the problem with all of that is if the o2 sensor if you're if you're reading at 10 to 1 but the o2 sensor in a narrow band only reads at 12 to 1 it will make no correction it is out of its range and it will make no correction until it comes back within range and then it will make the adjustment to the fueling that's the biggest problem with the narrow band is you've got that again you don't have an idea where the adjustment is going to be made or what the actual number is but it's also that if it falls outside of the range it'll just keep operating as normal until it gets back within range and then it'll make the adjustment to the fueling to put it back where it wants to so very very difficult piece to that so the computer makes that correction to keep the the fuel as close to stoic as possible and that adjustment is in a closed loop correction to the fueling now i believe we talked a little bit about open loop and closed loop again in the in the tuning video that i did with all the definitions and it's definitely one you want to take a look at because it'll give you a baseline of what all this stuff means and make it a little bit easier to understand what we're talking about here but the biggest positive to a narrowband o2 sensor or a narrowband afr gauge is they are significantly cheaper than a wide band gauge and it's something that most people take into consideration when they're buying they will see the price on a narrow band so cheap and go i guess that's the one i need to buy i'll just buy it so now we've covered a little bit of the basics of the the narrow band let's talk about the wideband the wideband o2 sensor this is the sensor here that made all of the tuning that we do on efi systems possible because when you are working on a narrow band you don't have enough relevant information to make a good educated calculated decision on how to adjust fueling the wideband o2 changed the entire game and allowed tuners and engines if it's a computer-controlled efi system to make those decisions much more accurately and that's why vehicles that that went from a initial narrowband o2 system to now a wideband are way better than what they ever were and again it gives tuners the ability to make great adjustments so again we talked about the y band o2 making given all that information between 0 and 5 volts that additional range of of measurement there or voltage allows for that really precise measurement of what's being expelled out into the exhaust so when you get those really accurate readings on the on your afr gauge or the computer gets those really accurate readings it can make better adjustments engines run better they build more power you don't leave anything on the table because you have adjusted out of it or you can't figure out what adjustment to make and it's well i guess it's running all right i guess i'll leave it alone but you may be leaving a lot of power on the table because maybe you're in a lean situation or maybe you need to you're too rich and you need to lean it out a little bit to get it back into a little bit more you know range where it makes better power so it's the it's the the beauty of the wideband o2 now here's the downside in this system when you're talking about a narrow band system they are cheap so there's got to be one that's really expensive and that's the wideband o2 system in an afr gauge they are sometimes two and three times the money of a narrowband now you can buy a good decent narrow band system i think it's been a while since i looked online but maybe in that 30 40 dollar range to under 100 somewhere in there diesel run two three four five hundred dollars for a good afr setup now the the fast one that i bought and we did a video on here a couple weeks or months ago that one's a very very sophisticated one because it has a single o2 sensor or you can buy it in a dual o2 sensor and it is very expensive because these bosch o2 sensors are very expensive they are not cheap whereas the narrowband ones are very inexpensive you can build a kit and a gauge very easily here these are much more expensive but i think the difference is pretty clear here which one is the better one for this the situation that you're going to work in when you're trying to carburete tune or if you're doing efi tuning now let's talk a little bit about when you would use either one of these and you'll hear a lot of guys you know say that the narrowband o2 sensor is garbage it's junk it's pointless it's useless whatever negative term they want to use to describe it and i don't disagree with it it doesn't really have much of a place in anything that i do but i can see where potentially if you know somebody has a very stock car and they are just trying to drive and get the maximize the most fuel economy out of the engine then maybe the narrow band is perfect for what they're doing and i would have no problem putting a good quality narrow band o2 sensor engage in somebody's vehicle if that's all they're trying to do is stay as toy can get really good fuel economy so i guess and it's limited because you don't have a lot of those folks out there and or maybe you do they just don't live in the world that we live in so it's hard to say but it's not useless it just doesn't have much of space here with what we're doing if your engine has a has a big cam in it after market intake bigger compression ratio then get the wideband o2 sensor if you're running boost or nitrous then get the wideband o2 sensor you know if you have a three gauge panel you know hole in your car and um you know you're just trying to find another gauge to fit in there that will kind of move around and look cool and and maybe do something then yeah maybe spend the money on the narrow band afr but there's probably a dozen other gauges you could probably fit in that hole they'd probably be better so that's bad example i guess but the point being is the wideband o2 is the way to go and i felt bad the other day and the reason why i'm making this video is i saw online uh a conversation with some folks and you know the guy just went out and bought a very inexpensive narrow band o2 sensor or afr gauge and you know how being online with you know instagram or facebook or whatever as soon as you make a comment that doesn't really fit within the norm you know people tend to blow up on you a little bit and that guy got leveled for it and i felt bad about one that he wasted his money but two that he didn't understand the reason why uh you would buy a you know a wide band over an o2 or a narrow band when there's so much more money so i hope that cleared a little bit of that up um you know i i hope that guy you know that's down the road will watch this video and not make that same mistake because i'd feel bad about that but uh you know even though it's not my money it's still a horrible thing so anyway i hope that cleared up some uh you know some understanding of the differences between the two you know the the narrow band is very inexpensive the wide band is very expensive and this is one of those places you just don't want to cheapen out on it get the wideband o2 and the the wide band afr gauge you'll have a much better time and you'll get much more precise information out of it so you can make really good tuning decisions and get this thing done right you know so without an o2 sensor to capture all this information you know it's a longer tuning process for one but it's one that's going to be incomplete because you just don't have a good measurement of what's going on there you know you may accidentally stumble into the optimal tune on a carburetor but you'll never know that you're at the optimal tune because you're not getting the feedback from the exhaust telling you hey you've got this right you've got dialed in where you need to go so the o2 reading on the afr gauge is what confirms the adjustments you're making and it tells you which direction to go so very very important to to use this type of tool when you're tuning on a carburetor because you just don't have that many sources available to make good decisions when you're tuning a carburetor so if you have any questions please leave them down below i'd love to answer them if you got something on the video thought it was cool leave me a thumbs up or a thumbs down hey at least it's feedback right at least i can measure from there see how we did that come full circle so anyway i appreciate the you guys watching if you've got any questions don't hesitate and we will catch you all on the next video see ya

Channel: Muscle Car Solutions

Views: 27,723

Keywords: wideband, narrowband, wide band, narrow band, wideband o2 sensor, narrowband air fuel gauge, narrowband o2 sensor, AFR, AFR gauge, o2 sensor, oxygen sensor, wideband tuning, tuning with wideband o2 sensor, wideband o2 sensor explained, wireless afr, best afr gauge, lambda tuning, aem wideband, wideband install, FAST afr, afr tuning, best afr guage

Id: sCN3xXM0lzU

Length: 16min 15sec (975 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 31 2020