This is a bit embarrassing, but I might as well come clean: Up until a few years ago, I was still flying my Cessna T310R with only the primitive engine instrumentation installed by the factory in 1979. Shame on me!I'd long since upgraded my avionics stack with conspicuous quantities of glass, including a Garmin GNS-530 navigator and a Sandel SN3308 Electronic HSI. I'd installed an XM Satellite Radio receiver to pipe stereo music to my ANR headsets. I'd added VGs to the wings and vertical tail. I'd even reupholstered my seats with the latest visco-elastic memory foam padding. But I was still relying on 30-year-old, steam-gauge engine instrumentation.A modern, digital, engine monitor had been at or near the top of my wish list for years. Yet somehow the $5,000 I had set aside for this upgrade always seemed to get preempted by something else (usually non-aviation-related) every March when my annual comes due. In addition, I secretly dreaded what I expected to be a difficult, time-consuming and tedious task of installing such a system in my turbocharged twin, because it involves stringing a zillion wires from the cabin out through the wings to the engine nacelles. So for years I kept making excuses, procrastinating, and occasionally catching good-natured flak from my aviation friends and colleagues.A few years ago, I finally bit the bullet. I purchased an EDM-760-6C system from J.P. Instruments (taking advantage of their Sun 'n Fun show special discount) and installed it in my airplane. The installation was indeed time-consuming -- it involved the installation of 29 sensors and 500 feet of wiring, and took me a full week -- but wasn't nearly as difficult as I anticipated and worked perfectly the first time I powered it up.Within months, I was kicking myself for not installing the system years earlier. It's without doubt amongst the best time and money I've ever spent on my airplane.During the past few years and more than 600 hours of flying with my engine monitor, I've gradually learned more about how to use it and how to interpret the data it displays and logs. The more I've learned, the more I'm convinced this kind of instrumentation belongs in every piston-powered aircraft. A digital engine monitor arguably offers the best cost-benefit ratio of any item of avionics you can install.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.avweb.com/ownership/the-savvy-aviator-26-interpreting-your-engine-monitor