Best cooling electric fan
People have a strange desire to try reinventing the wheel. I'm a 7X Long Hauler on the Power Tour...and have found that the fancier the cooling system looks, the hotter the car usually runs. Three electric fans and a $1200 custom radiator? He's the guy with the hood open 4" and the heater blasting in 90-degree temperatures to not boil over in traffic.
Car manufacturers will happily spend $10+ million on cooling system R&D to eliminate a clutch fan for an extra 0.1MPG (or to save $1 on each car built) in the EPA tests. Most people have neither the money nor the desire to put that level of effort into it.
I wish I remember who said it, but one thing that has served me well with cooling systems: the factory engineers knew what they were doing. Start there.
So the factory engineers that came up with the Ford Contour set up I run don't know what they're doing, but the factory engineers that put a fixed blade fan behind a 19" radiator for a /6 did?
I didn't "reinvent the wheel" putting an OEM Ford electric fan system on my Duster. I found an OEM electric fan that was roughly the right size for my radiator core and met the ballpark CFM requirements for my engine and used a decent fan controller to replace the ECU that originally controlled that fan system. It's harder than just slapping something on there but if you take a few steps to make sure you do it well it's not like it's all that difficult. And at this point there's literally a set of instructions and a parts list on how to do exactly that set up, so you can pick the parts out of the catalog just like buying the OE Mopar stuff.
Just admit you don't like electric fans. That's fine, don't run them on your car. No need to make up BS about them, like anything if you set it up right they work just fine. And if you don't, they won't. Not the fault of the electric fan.
Very true. Unfortunately, who is going to help you put that system together for your car? A lot of people are more eager to sell you a system that will bring them in a nice high profit margin than a system that will really work well. That is what happened to me. I bought a Griffin Aluminum radiator with their custom-made shroud and electric fan system. Guaranteed to handle 600 HP. It didn't. I tried everything, but I wound up trashing everything except the radiator. The radiator itself worked pretty well when paired with a factory fan shroud, fan blade, etc.
Yes, I recall that Griffin set up, their “exact fit” electric fan combination only flows ~1730 CFM. So probably about 1k CFM short of the
bare minimum for a stand alone fan on one of these cars, and almost half of the low speed output on the ~$150 Ford Contour fans I run.
It's a shame that a major name like Griffin markets that set up, but it's also not that hard to go online and find that the people that are successfully running electric fans on these cars have fans that pull more like 3k CFM. Blindly buying the expensive set up in the catalog doesn't always work, that's true for a great many things.