danielhv

danielhv

Well Known Member
Just curious if anybody has ever compared the costs of a regular steam gauge panel (ifr capable w/gps) to a similarly equipped glass panel? Not just instruments, I'm talking vacuum pumps, batteries, etc.
 
Yes, I did this as part of my design process back in 2004. With the caveat that I wanted electric gyros and an HSI, the costs came out to be virtually equal (actually, the Glass was slightly less, but in the noise). Of course, the only HSI available back then was about $5K, so that skews the comparison.

Paul
 
I wonder how much it has changed over the last 4 years with the increase in competition... Also, anybody expect to see a decrease in price for steam gauge instruments trying to stay in the market? I know older planes like cessna's etc will always use the steam gauges... but how much of the market is the experimental category responsible for?
 
We do this all the time! In fact, we just finished a VERY basic VFR panel for an RV7 that is 100% steam gauges, engine instruments and all.

Surprisingly, the cost of steam gauges and their requisite ancillary items has not gone down, it's gone up.

All said and done, this steam gauge panel came out about $700 more than it would have been with and equivalently equipped low price EFIS panel and in the end had less functionality.

You simply can't beat the current crop of EFISes and Engine monitors for combined cost/benefit/functionality. It's also gotten the the point where it's getting cheaper to use an EFIS as a backup (to say something like a Chelton or Garmin 900) panel instead of good quality steam gauges. You'll notice that many of our newer G900X panels are using the Dynon or AFS as a backup...price is one of the reasons.

Now, all that being said, if you're building a bare bones VFR plane and install the FAA minimum instruments (Flight and Engine), steam gauges are going to be cheapest. Other than my own plane, we haven't done a panel like that ever - because it would be silly to pay is to do so!

My 2 cents as usual!

Cheers,
Stein
 
Steam Gages

My panel is Steam VFR and Vans engine and fuel gages. I did not go with TSO instruments and came out much better than glass.

You need at ask yourself, do I want simple VFR panel or do you like the bells and whistles? You get a lot more information in the glass than you do with steam. If I were to redo my panel I would go with glass this time just for the added information glass offers.
 
steam gauges vrs glass - weight

Another aspect to this is weight. I built a spreadsheet about 1-1/2 years ago and steam gauges came out at slightly less weight. This may be dated by now as there are new glass instruments available.

Stein, without doing any work, would you have an idea on this ??
 
Yes, I agonized over the steam gauge vs glass panel approach also. I ended up with a large poster board showing my alternatives and cost for each solution. My overriding design goal was to have independent gauges, instruments , radios, etc...thinking that if any one thing went inop, it would not affect the others. The cost for the individual approach was more than the glass panel(s) alone approach. So my compromise was traditional pitot / static flight instruments, individual Garmin radio stack stuff, Advanced's AF2500 engine monitor (small glass panel), and an electric DG and Dynon EFIS -D10a as the AI. No vacuum stuff at all.

I was also having a space issue on the RV-6A tip up panel, so the engine display panel solved the space / fit issue, and with all the equivalent bells and whistles that I wanted anyway, turned out to be less $$. My justification for the glass?? I'm really a VFR kind of guy. If it decided to go blank, there was nothing on it that I needed to keep flying anyway.

Now I kind of understand one of our pilots comments back in my Navy days. He refused to look at his engine instruments. He said, paraphrasing, "all they are going to do is confirm what you don't want to know".
 
I have now had 2 planes with glass panels and on more than one occassion have done the spread sheet thing. Everytime I do a comparison weight and cost are always close to equal between the options. Depending on options or brand I can always make the spreadsheet lean one way or the other.

In the end I ended up with glass in both planes and I also ended up putting in backup steam guages after power and other failures during flight left me with dark panels. This in spite of what I considered adequate redundancy. Specifically Altitude, airspeed, RPM and MP.
This clearly added cost and weight to the glass side of the spreadsheet.
 
I've flipped coins on this a number of times and am leaning toward glass for one major (for me) reason: I want good and complete engine info. Once you pay for an engine monitor, you are a long way toward glass. The Dynon monitor with the large display is $2,730 with probes, while the FD180 is $4,420, the way I would have it configured. So for me, the EFIS is $1,690. Not bad.

What drives the other side for me is if your unit goes bad in Las Cruces, NM, you can go across the field and buy a new turn coordinator or whatever and be flying again as soon as you have it installed. With an EFIS, you may be there a few days while it goes to & from the factory, plus remove and replace time and maybe a weekend if it arrives at the factory on a Friday. This is not a predictable cost, but if it happens, you may wish you had gone with steam, regardless of the cost difference.
 
RScott said:
What drives the other side for me is if your unit goes bad in Las Cruces, NM, you can go across the field and buy a new turn coordinator or whatever and be flying again as soon as you have it installed. With an EFIS, you may be there a few days while it goes to & from the factory, plus remove and replace time and maybe a weekend if it arrives at the factory on a Friday. This is not a predictable cost, but if it happens, you may wish you had gone with steam, regardless of the cost difference.
Click to expand...

This is definitely true if you have a single-box EFIS. Of course, almost all the engine monitors are "single box" as well, but they are provign to be pretty reliable (I haven't heard of a lot of failures). But the desire to not be stranded somewhere is another good reason for some level of redundancy, be it multiple boxes or an analog airspeed/altimeter.

Paul
 
There are several kinds of "cost."

There is the cost of the equipment.
There is the cost of your time to install the equipment, or the cost to pay an installer.
There is the opportunity cost lost in terms of dashboard real estate when several individual instruments do not provide the same functionality in the same space as an EFIS / EMS.
Related to the above, there is the cost of redundancy or lack thereof if you cannot fit duplicates into said space.
There is the cost of ease-of-use between different solutions.

All that said, I typically make decisions like these using parameters:
- Mission
- Mission
- Mission
- Budget
- Space
- Time

Note that if the first three aren't met, you have failed the exercise!

:D
 
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