Revised 14/06/2005 .

From the time I bought the Galaxy, I new that fuel economy would be a problem (average 22mpg around town, increasing to 28mpg on long motorway runs). The solution was to convert to LPG - at nearly half the price of petrol and given the business miles I drive ( although not as many I used to do ) I would soon recoup back the cost of the conversion.

I drove round in the car for nearly a year, still thinking about converting before I finally got round to doing something about it - I wish I had done it sooner.

The problem I had was that through searching on the net and ringing round the registered installers, I couldn't find anyone who had converted a new model, 2.8litre V6 Ford Galaxy, or that was sure that they could convert one.

There are two common types of LPG systems, single point injection and multi point injection, further details of which are on the LPG systems page. Plenty of companies had installed single point injection systems in the the older pre-2000 Ford Galaxy's, however this wasn't recommended for the newer models.

In layman's terms, the LPG system works by injecting a gas rich mixture into your air inlet manifold. The systems computer turns off the car's petrol pump and fools the cars ECU into thinking it is running on petrol.

The problem with the single point system is that the gas is injected into the inlet manifold just before the air enters the air filter. So essentially, while gas is being injected, all the air between the air filter and combustion chambers is in an explosive mixture. Should the engine back-fire, this gas rich mixture would explode and blow up your air filter and all engine power would be lost. That said , there are hundreds of thousands of cars using this system without problems. Due to this risk of explosion through backfiring, it is not advisable for it to be installed in vehicles with plastic inlet manifolds. Pre 2000 Galaxy's had steel manifolds while mine has a plastic one (although it does look like steel) 

The multipoint system is a more advanced and sophisticated version, albeit working on the same principles. Individual injectors are fixed into the inlet manifold allowing gas to be injected immediately before the intake valves . The gas is injected in sequence a split second before each relevant spark plug fires, providing the explosive mixture to enable the engine to run without any risk of backfiring.

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