Diesel prices are through the roof (2.3€/L) but my backup fuel storage is ripe for rotation. Hopefully the prices have gone down a bit once I finish the last canister.
I always struggled with these 30L canisters and only strained my back and made a mess trying to pour it manually. This 14€ pump sure makes thing easier.
The gas I’ve had since last summer wouldn’t start in my new chainsaw, just got new stuff, hope it works. Bastards always say not to use 15% ethanol gas, but that’s the only gas they sell outside of super pricey hard to find options. It’s always worked before.
I think Europe cuts their diesal with rapeseed oil, forget the percentage 10 or whatever. It raises food prices but at least works as well as diesal, or at least doesn’t damage diesal engines and gaskets and lines like ethanol does, while also having worse pollution, taking as much energy or more to produce than results from it, making less work per gallon by a large margin, and raising our food prices.
The primary reason not to use ethanol gas is because it’s hydroscopic. It’ll absorb water from the air, and now that water is in your fuel tank. You can always get fuel stabilizer to add in to prevent the ethanol from reacting with water molecules
Thank you I will check that out, that could save me a lot of trouble and money.
Someone did tell me somethimg similar, I want to say they used the word viscosity, but I really do not recall entirely, but they said it was something about water.
I always use Aspen premixed gas, it’s about 4€/l and will always start, eben when a tool has been sitting for a year. Bonus: Healthier to breathe, important when running two strokes.
Four dollars a liter is crazy expensive for us here. Like I’m not even sure how much that is, but gas is 4 a gallon here and that is $1 higher than it has been.
I should just just stop being such a cheapskate though, it takes a long time to run through a gallon.
Edit: I just checked, 4 liters to a gallon, a US gallon, apparently we don’t use the imperial gallon, or irish gallon, who knew? Who cared? Not our public schools. But holy shit, 16 Euros a gallon is a lot a lot of money. You are getting hosed. I am for changing from hydrocarbons but what are they doing with the money? Not that.
I use 25 liters of the stuff per year, it’s really not breaking the bank. Just being sure that the engines always start and not sniffing anything that’s not pure gasoline is totally worth it for me 🤷
Yeah, diesel handles long term storage much better than gasoline, though I’ve never had issues getting my lawnmower to run with a year old gas.
Due to additives fuels last about 3 months or so.
On the plus side this means much lower fuel use and pollution.
I’ve lost machines to bad/old gas. Now I only use rec gas (ethanol free) in anything that isn’t a car. It’s more expensive per gallon but overall less expensive than the $300 it cost me to get my snowblower fixed, plus the money i lost when my string trimmer died in the same year. I do have to drive five minutes further to fill my gas cans tho.
Lost machines to bad gas? Now I’m paranoid, I’ve a brand new chainsaw here. It is also leaking a pink substance which is weird, my bar and chain oil isn’t pink, or the gas, and the tanks seemed empty when I filled them, then emptied the gas and put new gas in.
Pink could be a dye. They dye some fuels so that they can be identified for different purposes so they can charge different tax rates on them, and often because standards are different for different purposes (eg. aviation fuel)
It gums up the carburetor and fuel lines. i’m told. The way it was explained to me is that small engines don’t get hot enough to burn that shit off completely, whereas it’s fine in modern cars. I’m not a mechanic, so I don’t know if that’s 100% correct. All I know is it made sense to repair the $1800 snowblower, and didn’t make sense to have the $120 string trimmer repaired (though I did try everything I knew to try in attempt to revive it on my own before replacing it).
Interesting note, before i switched to Rec fuel, my inexpensive poulan chainsaw was left with old 87 octane in it for 5 years, completely unused during that time. Then I fired it up with that old gas in it. And it still runs to this day. So I guess you never know. Sometimes you can get lucky, I suppose.
Ethanol won’t just gum up hoses. I’ve had it EAT the hose on a wood chipper of mine to the point of sorta flaking apart on the inside. Still need to replace that hose and rebuild the carb.
What will gum up hoses is old degraded fuel that will literally become sticky as it oxidizes.
Old equipment is ethanol soluble. Newer isn’t.