And I'm back to being exhausted again

Busy weekend, including off-roading all day yesterday!

Good news: The turbo did not interfere at all!

Power was never my limitation before (I'm currently limited by traction of the 29" stock tires), so there was really no expectation at all for it to improve my off-road performance. My only hope was that it wouldn't make anything more difficult. I basically never even noticed I had a turbo all day, except for some wastegate noise a few times when I had an opportunity to use some extra throttle going up relatively smooth steep hills. It never abruptly spooled up unexpectedly or otherwise made throttle control difficult.

Here's a sample of what I did:


As you can see, I don't do anything that is very technical, so I can't comment at all on how it would do in trickier situations like rock crawling.

Listen closely and you can hear the wastegate whooshing a bit near the top of the first hill, just before the sound of squealing tires overpowers it.

I was in 4LO all day, using 1st and 2nd gear for all the interesting parts. I generally stay in lower gears to keep the RPMs up in the mid-range (same technique I always used before the turbo). I had no trouble creeping over/up stuff down around 1000 RPM in 1st gear either. And I only stalled once

I never did get a chance to do some side-by-side under-hood temperature comparisons with a stock engine. It was a sunny day, mid/upper 70's, and my temp gauge on the dashboard never budged from the middle. I did quickly check some temps under the hood at one point moments after shutting the engine off, and found nothing scary. Various places ranged from about 170 to 240 degrees. No melting plastic. No glowing red turbo or pipes.

The part of the day where I REALLY noticed benefits of the turbo was during the 170 mile round trip to the ORV park and back. I averaged 25.6 mpg! It was mostly freeway driving in the 70-80 mph range. Before the turbo and lift, I would average somewhere in the 19-21 mpg range for the same trip. Even though I now have to use at least 91 octane, it's an overall savings on fuel. Fuel is about 5% more $/gal compared to 87 octane, but I use about 20% less fuel per mile.