Beam me to Planet Gore !
Posted on 02/07/2011 10:53:54 AM PST by thackney
...and he filled tanks feeding the boat’s 200 horsepower Mercury engine with gas that had been blended with 10 percent ethanol.
“I heard a station in Greenville had straight gas, but I just took it to the next one I could find. Within 10 minutes, my engine started failing,” Gray said. “(The ethanol) had crystallized and crumbled and had clogged my fuel line, and I had to tear out all of the fuel system.”
Gray saved hundreds of dollars by repairing it himself, but his troubles with the motor are nothing new to marine shop owners, lawn mower mechanics and car enthusiasts familiar with the additive’s apparent incompatibility with small engines and older car engines.
(Excerpt) Read more at fuelfix.com ...
I run it in my boat and all my small engines. It's very good for the valves and runs cleaner and I have no mechanical problems or unnecessary maintenance.
Ethanol is hygroscopic, meaning that it will attract water from the air, which is absorbed into the gas. The water bonds to the ethanol, becoming heavier than gas and the mixture sinks, lowering the octane level and causing performance problems. This is called Phase Separation. Cold temperatures will accelerate this separation.
Water with only 1% ethanol will freeze just a little below 0 °C, whereas water with 95% ethanol will freeze pretty close to -114 °C.
The zinger is that ethanol has a long time to absorb water from the air, which is usually high humidity around a marine gas pump at the dock. Their large tank, with a lot of ethanol, eventually gets a lot of water and ethanol mix at the bottom of it, as it is partially emptied, then refilled, then partially emptied again.
Add to that just ordinary water splashed into the gas at some point.
So if you fill up your engine when the gas pump tank is low, you might get a lot more water than you think. And in cold weather, bingo, ice crystals.
Some of the distributors around here aren't actually adding any ethanol, even though state law requires at least 2%. I have an EAA test kit -- dual chemical and H2O volume/combination-type tests -- that has never actually detected any ethanol.
If you want to pay 60 Grand for an engine, with a mechanic’s nightmare in sustained maintenance, be my guest.
They also run pure Methanol and ethanol in Formula one racers. But those engines are not designed to go 250 thousand miles. They also require constant tuning and ridiculous maintenance.
Your comparison was equally ridiculous.
I thought F1 used spec gasoline. Has the rule changed again?
That info is not correct.
Standards for Reformulated and Conventional Gasoline
http://www.epa.gov/otaq/rfg_regs.htm
1. Odds are you’re not running your marine engine in temperatures at or below zero.
2. I agree that the water in ethanol can freeze (crystallize). But not the ethanol itself. And water in gasoline can freeze too.
The hydroxyl on ethanol makes it somewhat reactive with metals. But I’m not sure how much more reactive it would be than some of the acids and reagents in refined gasoline.
Your second paragraph: yes, I know, I said nothing contrary.
Your third paragraph: I am talking in terms of having to make gas+ethanol versus pure gasoline. The ethanol folks talk about how much emissions go down with ethanol+gas, but they never factor in the extra trucking around of corn to ethanol plants, and then trucking the ethanol to the gas companies for mixing. You can’t pipeline it. So when you consider the two extra trip steps requiring trucks to burn fuel to make ethanol and then get it back to gas companies, does gas+ethanol really reduce emissions over pure gasoline? No.
So I think you didn’t understand the point being made.
your fourth paragraph: same response as above because you didn’t get the point being made.
A little history behind this issue of:
“The end product has to be shipped to some market, so little or no difference if it goes for ethanol or food production. “
OK, let’s back up a bit and give all these dazzling urbanites a little lesson in ag history.
Farmers have been shipping grains as ethanol (aka “whiskey”) for hundreds of years. Why?
Because farm grain commodities have always suffered from a problem of “low value density” when we start trying to transport them to market.
Let’s take a truckload of grain or ethanol as an example. Let’s assume that a class 8 truck has a useful payload of about 50,000 lbs, regardless of whether we’re talking grain or ethanol.
A “test weight” bushel of corn is 56lbs. 50,000 / 56 = 893 bu.
Let’s say that a farmer is getting about $6/bu for his corn right now. The market is higher, but I’m assuming he gets hit for basis.
The total value of 50,000 lbs of corn going down the road is $5358.
OK, let’s look at ethanol. Currently, conversion ratios are about 2.7 gal of ethanol for 1 bushel of corn (and many plants are exceeding this). That means that those 893 bushels of corn become 2411 gallons of ethanol.
Huh. That’s not enough to fill up a class 8 truck trailer - not by a long shot.
Since ethanol is about the same density as gasoline, we’ll assume a gasoline trailer for the truck of about 8,000 gallons. In some states, they allow a “truck and a pup” which comes to 12,000 gallons, but let’s not worry abou that here.
To make 8,000 gallons, we’d need 2,962 bushels of corn assuming a conversion of 2.7 gallons of ethanol per bushel.
We’ve tripled the quantity of “corn” going down the road now.
OK, assume about $2.50/gal for fuel ethanol (which is a recent national average for “rack ethanol,”) what do we have for “dollars per truck?”
About $20,000.
Compared to $5358 for grain (above).
Farmers have been converting grain (any grain) to ethanol for transport for centuries - long before trucks and trains showed up. People should read up on the “Whiskey Rebellion” just after the US Revolution - and why farmers were so pissed off at the taxation placed upon whiskey production. It was about profits and transporting grain to markets in some other form than grains.
So you know nothing about the issue, do you?
Thanks for admission.
Nobody is saying one can’t build an engine that is optimized to burn e85 efficiently. But it needs to be a heavier engine around the combustion chamber, the jets need to be bigger, etc.
But will the market bear it? Will there be a demand for it? When E85 gets more popular and more people use it the price will go up because of demand. It’s already subsidized at the farmer level and at the refinery level, paid for by everyone at the pump now.
Just look at who buys e85 vehicles now. It isn’t regular people. It’s government fleet vehicles mostly. And they require a lot of maintenance.
I thought in the "old days" we added ethanol to gasoline to prevent any small amounts of water in the gasoline from freezing.
No, more likely some plastic in the fuel system crumbled.
This causes the cotton wicks to lose their necessary capillary action much quicker than they used to. People will store a heater with a half-full tank, go to light it next season, and it will be unusable.
Thanks, Busy-Body GovTards!!!
Yeah. So much for the mogas STC.
> I believe that 91 Oct. Premium is mandated nationally to be ethanol free and unoxygneated is it not?
That’s a very good question!
I do repairs on my personal lawn equipment. We have a parts house for small engine equipment and the guys there say they have never seen the amount of fuel system sales as they have the past two or three years. My JETSKI also died from the ethanol fuel.
Unfortunately in NH & MA , all fuel has ethanol , no matter the octane. I asked my buddy who ownes a gas station.
He suggested Seafoam motor treatment as an additive to mix with fuel for all small engines. He uses it in his Harley and his boat.
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