AEM Water/Methanol Failsafe Device Evaluation

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AEM Water Methanol Injection monitor
The monitor kit comes with the datalogging gauge, flowmeter and wiring.  The gauge has an extra white face and brushed metal bezel to match the insides of your car, we opted for the standard black on black as it matched our EVO better.

How could AEM do anything better for us?  Well they have, the folks at AEM has developed a failsafe system to make water injection as reliable as it can be with the creation of their new water injection monitoring system.

AEM Water Methanol Injection monitor
This little jewel is the in-line flow meter.  It is the secret to the system.  It is small, compact, plugs right into the gauge and is easy to plumb.  With this output, the system can monitor actual fluid flow into your motor independent of pressure.

The AEM Water/Methanol Injection Monitoring System uses the same flowmeter as the previous system did but the simple gauge has been replaced with a data logging unit. The new gauge can track the flow and if it falls outside of user defined limits, the gauge can trigger several functions.  The gauge has 12 volt output and ground triggers that can be used to light warning LED’s, power a warning buzzer, control relays that can shut off boost controllers, nitrous solenoids or trigger timing retard devices.  The outputs can also be used by aftermarket ECU’s to switch maps to reduce boost, retard timing and richen mixtures.

AEM Water Methanol Injection monitor
We bought this piezo electric beeper at Radio Shack for $5.  It draws only milliamps so it can be driven by the gauge without needing a relay and has a really annoying 100 dB beep that will get your attention for sure.  We hid it under the dash.

The monitoring system watches over total system flow and uses an input from the AEM Water/Methanol injection system controller for detecting an empty tank or an error code in the system.  If the flow falls out of boundaries or if any error signal from the system’s controller is detected, the system will trigger the outputs and flash the gauge backlight, needle or both.

AEM Water Methanol Injection monitor
Brian Kono of Afterhours Automotive made this really cool gauge bezel that takes the place of the EVO’s ashtray.  We don’t smoke and tough crap to any smoking passengers.  The bezel looks stock, holds the gauge securely and will allow the ashtray to drop back in if we wanted to take the gauge out some day.

We installed the system on our test EVO IX that already had the AEM system installed previously.  The installation was a piece of cake.  We used a warning LED and a pizeo electric buzzer that could put out a 100 dB beep on our output trigger.

AEM Water Methanol Injection monitor
The installation looks very factory like and is easy to see as it is within our sight line.

 

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