12/11/2013 5:12 AM
Thanks Hector.
When we switched over to 10% Ethanol a few years back, we noticed right away that we would have issues. Just as the video posted, all of our small equipment - weedeaters, stick edgers, blowers, sod cutters, etc... - starting having issues. Fuel lines breaking down, rubber grommets on the fuel tanks themselves falling apart, carbs trashing up, and lots of spittering and sputtering. Likewise, we also noticed a HUGE problem with our fleet of Ford F-250 trucks. We run about 15 of those out here and every one of them had an issues. Seemed to be isolated to the F-250, as none of our Rangers or F-150s were compromised. And yes, we have a few Chevy's that were fine, too. We're talking lots of filter changes, pump intake filter changes (which required dropping the tank) and a few fuel pump problems from the clogged filters. Although we have filtration and a fuel/water separator on our storage tanks, it appeared the Ethanol was cleaning the inside of the vehicle's tank. We started adding an Ethanol treatment to the tanks to buy us some time until either 1) our vendor could start servicing us with non-Ethanol, or 2) we switched to someone who could. This worked somewhat on our bigger tanks, but we still had issues with the smaller equipment. We eventually switched vendors and are now paying about $.08 more per gallon for non-Ethanol since the vendor has to make a special trip just for us. For a company that goes through about 100,000 gallons of unleaded a year, that $.08 adds up, but nothing compared to the downtime, labor, parts and headache of what we went through originally.