Hello to all those owners considering a conversion to LPG.

 

Well I am having my lovely new Elegance converted as I write this and propose to write up the experience, good and or bad for those contemplating a conversion.

 

I live in Northumberland and bought my demonstrator 13 plate Citigo last week with 2864 miles on the clock, always planning to have it converted to LPG, not for environmental reasons but one of cost. There are a number of garages around Newcastle who sell LPG at 66 - 70p per litre and at this price differential to petrol, it will take me 3.5 years to breakeven, that's doing an annual mileage of 6,000 per year. I  normally keep my cars for around 10 years so I should be quids in.

However the main reason is one of cashflow, having retired recently I would rather keep the cash in my pocket living modestly than contribute to further petrol company profits.

 

I had made the choice to downsize my car and had decided to buy a Skoda Citigo, after driving my partners amazing VW Up! The Up! is a little too racy in styling for my taste, so I settled on the Skoda instead. I looked at the Mii but SEAT support not as good as Skoda.

I located my Skoda via a Skoda dealer on Autotrader, struck a deal and became the happy owner of a near new Citigo.

I had discovered that if I was Polish I could get an LPG Citigo from the factory converted by their dealer network, or a CNG Citigo if I was Czech. However no such options for us here in the UK.

 

I contacted UKLPG association and discovered that I had three businesses in the Northeast who could do the conversion, and after checking out all three I chose Bewick Mobiltiy at Blaydon to do the work.

I had completed quite a bit of research on the conversion by this time, looked at the videos, read all the commentaries and test reports, (isn't Google translate wonderful), so that I could understand what I was being told by the people who would undertake the conversion. 

 

I met the folks at Bewick and after a long discussion with owner, Brian Burns, did a deal, paid a deposit and booked the car in for last Monday on the understanding that it would be with them for 5 days. I pick the car up tomorrow

 

...... to be continued.

 

 

Notes:

 

1. Poland is one of the largest manufaturers of LPG/CNG equipment after the Italians and Dutch. The quality of the equipment is equal to any in Europe, the price is usually much cheaper.

 

2. There seems to be quite a variation in the quality of the workmanship of the businesses undertaking the conversions. To get the work many LPG businesses quote cheap one day conversions using cheaper equipment, ie Polish. This can and does cause problems of cars not running correctly because to little time is spent on tuning and setup. It's not the equipment at fault it's the conversion workmanship.

 

3. BRC (American owned, Italian manufacturer) has a huge dealer and spares support network in the UK, providing inspections of approved BRC workshops, continual training, top reliability and brilliantly designed installation tuning software that takes a lot of work and provides time savings out of setup. Naturally dealers go for this as it's a no brainer for them and that is why BRC have such a large part of the UK LPG conversion market. It tends to be at the higher end for cost of conversion.

 

4. I joined www.filllpg.co.uk a crowed sourced website that provides the latest prices and location of every LPG filling station in the UK. Downloaded their csv file and loaded it into the Navigon seems to work fine.

 

 

 

 

 

Very interesting.....Let us know how you go on.

Oh,welcome as well.

Nice report. As the man above says, looking forward to hearing your progress.

How much did this cost?  Not thinking of having the Citigo I have on order converted but my hubby has had £995 quoted to have his 2010 1.6 VVT Scenic converted.