anyone out there installed one of these? was it worthwhile? also, who makes the better silicon I/C, radiator and turbo inlet hoses, Perrin or Samco? i haven't had a chance to see the quality of either in person.

 

please do keep me posted, i'll be curious how the install goes. breaking the stock inlet house doesn't sound like a particularly good idea to me (i'm big on saving stock parts so that i can put the car back to stock, or close, when i sell it), but i'm also not terribly excited about pulling the intake manifold either.

 

Regardless of which intake hose you install, if you don't want to remove the manifold the only way to get the old one out is to break at least one of the fittings off.

 

i'd probably elect to pull the manifold rather than break off the stock parts -- though i'm kinda wondering whether installing the inlet hose would be worth the effort or not.

 

You won't notice a tremendous performance gain from one of these. My reason for installing one (Samco) had little to do with performance, I changed mine because the stock one was melting where it attaches to the turbo inlet. This is common, and if you take a good look at yours it may be in a similar condition if your car has some miles on it.
As for keeping the stock one intact, assuming it is ok, it's not worth the extra effort. Some stock parts are in demand but this one generally isn't. You wouldn't need to put the old one back to sell the car, as long as everything else is stock the hose just fits right in. If it's black it doesn't even stand out when you look under the hood.

 

my WRX has just under 13k miles in it, so it wouldn't surprise me too terribly much if i either already have a slightly melted hose, or will in the near future. if it is melted, i'd have no problem breaking the piece out since it wouldn't make sense to put a damaged piece back on the car.
i'm not really expecting to see really noticable performance gains from something like this, but all the little parts do add up when combined together.

 

absolutely. i'll probably order one sometime in the next month or two, and i'll be sure to post my results.