An engineer friend of mine told me that removing a viscous fan would improve mpg but he doubts that in the real world it would be a particularly noticeable improvement and certainly not the 8-10% claimed by electric fan suppliers.
My personal thoughts would be along the lines of if the fan made a noticeable difference the you would notice a difference when the fan was fully operational, I can't say I have.
Strange that this claim never varies between engines and it's been around for decades.
LR still fit viscous fans on their engines i'm sure they would love to reduce the mpg for their vehicles if they could.
The trouble with electric fans they have a switch-on tempreature setting higher than the normal running temp otherwise the fan would be running all the time at normal running temp, some engines may not like to be any hotter than normal.
anything that is powered by the engine will rob you of HP how much is a different thing. a viscous fan is a much better idea for slow crawl green road runs. most longtitudinal engines have a viscous fan
I'd rather trust the reliabilty of a viscous fan - i used to do warranty repairs for a major european engine reconditioner,for engines that failed in warranty the main cause of failure was non functioning electric fans......
my old cherokee had both. having said that there werent a lot of room round the 4l straight 6 and it did run quite hot all the time. My transit got a viscus fan, and that stays steady temp all time, especialy as it does stop start town driving most the time. I dont think it makes much difference.
from my own point of view my engie revs cleaner and smoother and warms up better than it did with the fan.
coupled with all the other mods i have done i have achived 23 mpg without spending a fortune on parts!
my standard lse is on its third gen new viscous fan as it keeps failing and locking up it takes longer to warm up and is slugish compared to mine and it is a 4.2LSE