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Ethanol...A Problem on Your Boat?
I haven't had any ethanol-related fuel problems *yet* on either outboard
boat, but I keep running into tales of boaters who have. I'm not doing anything special to avoid ethanol problems, aside from pouring some mystery stuff into the tank when I buy gas, but I know lots of guys who don't do that, either, and aren't having problems. So...have you had any ethanol-related problems? If so, what? How did you resolve them? |
Ethanol...A Problem on Your Boat?
"HK" wrote in message . .. I haven't had any ethanol-related fuel problems *yet* on either outboard boat, but I keep running into tales of boaters who have. I'm not doing anything special to avoid ethanol problems, aside from pouring some mystery stuff into the tank when I buy gas, but I know lots of guys who don't do that, either, and aren't having problems. So...have you had any ethanol-related problems? If so, what? How did you resolve them? No problems at all. I use diesel. Eisboch |
Ethanol...A Problem on Your Boat?
On Sun, 23 Dec 2007 18:43:39 -0500, HK wrote:
I haven't had any ethanol-related fuel problems *yet* on either outboard boat, but I keep running into tales of boaters who have. I'm not doing anything special to avoid ethanol problems, aside from pouring some mystery stuff into the tank when I buy gas, but I know lots of guys who don't do that, either, and aren't having problems. So...have you had any ethanol-related problems? If so, what? How did you resolve them? No problems so far. The only problems I've seen, witnessed or been told about are usually older boats with older tanks, in particular steel/fiberglass, fuel line upgrades to resistant rubber, carbed engines or lack of stabilizers or E-Zorb. A lot of that is related to crap in the tank. Usually a good running with one or two filter changes does the trick. One fellow at my boat/engine dealer went through six filters before he got it all out. I do know that there have been problems, supposedly, with phase separation in the Upper Mid-West, but they have QC problems with their ethanol levels - sometimes up to 30% ethanol depending on the fuel load delivery and where it came from. BoatUS is reporting a whole, forgive me, boat load of ethanol problems, but I'm not sure if this is hearsay or accurate reporting - I know we're not seeing the same level of problems that others are seeing. With respect to water absorption and phase separation, it's not existent in this area. Finally, I do know one guy at my old marina who was having trouble with his two E-TECs. Concurrently, some Optimax owners were having problems and those who were still operating carbed engines were screaming bloody murder. Finally the head mechanic had a brain fart and had the fuel tested - it was contaminated and the fuel tested out at 40% ethanol. Apparently it was a screw up at the distribution center. Drain the tank, clean it, seal it, new fuel and the problems went away. So that's it for what it's worth. |
Ethanol...A Problem on Your Boat?
HK wrote:
I haven't had any ethanol-related fuel problems *yet* on either outboard boat, but I keep running into tales of boaters who have. I'm not doing anything special to avoid ethanol problems, aside from pouring some mystery stuff into the tank when I buy gas, but I know lots of guys who don't do that, either, and aren't having problems. So...have you had any ethanol-related problems? If so, what? How did you resolve them? From BoatU.S. Do You Have A Fiberglass Tank? If your boat has a fiberglass tank built before 1991, don't use ethanol. As reported in the January 2006 edition of BoatU.S. Seaworthy, these older tanks have clogged fuel as a result of ethanol's effect on fiberglass, resulting in sludge formed by a chemical reaction the the material. Dan |
Ethanol...A Problem on Your Boat?
On Dec 23, 6:43*pm, HK wrote:
I haven't had any ethanol-related fuel problems *yet* on either outboard boat, but I keep running into tales of boaters who have. I'm not doing anything special to avoid ethanol problems, aside from pouring some mystery stuff into the tank when I buy gas, but I know lots of guys who don't do that, either, and aren't having problems. So...have you had any ethanol-related problems? If so, what? How did you resolve them? The problem seems to be limited to older boats, with many hours of use. You will not need to worry about it. |
Ethanol...A Problem on Your Boat?
"HK" wrote
So...have you had any ethanol-related problems? I never used anything but E10 in my 1977 Merc 165. (Hasn't been anything else available here since the 80s.) No problems. My new 1991 Yamaha OB doesn't seem to mind it either. |
Ethanol...A Problem on Your Boat?
"Eisboch" wrote in
: No problems at all. I use diesel. Eisboch Me either. Running diesels on free french fry oil mixed with a little mineral spirits. About 15c/gallon....(c; Larry -- I found what I wanted for Christmas at Best Buy, but she wouldn't stop screaming obscenities while we were scanning her and forcing her into the bag! How was I s'posed ta know associate girls weren't on sale? |
Ethanol...A Problem on Your Boat?
"Larry" wrote in message ... "Eisboch" wrote in : No problems at all. I use diesel. Eisboch Me either. Running diesels on free french fry oil mixed with a little mineral spirits. About 15c/gallon....(c; Larry I might be inclined to try that in a land based motor vehicle like your old Mercedes. I am not sure I am ready to fill up with 550 gallons of french fry oil in the boat and get underway. Eisboch |
Ethanol...A Problem on Your Boat?
Larry wrote:
"Eisboch" wrote in : No problems at all. I use diesel. Eisboch Me either. Running diesels on free french fry oil mixed with a little mineral spirits. About 15c/gallon....(c; Larry A. What do you filter it with, cheesecloth? By hand? B. Does everything you drive smell like a fast-food restaurant? C. Which fast-food chain supplies the highest-class used oil? |
Ethanol...A Problem on Your Boat?
"Eisboch" wrote in
: I might be inclined to try that in a land based motor vehicle like your old Mercedes. I am not sure I am ready to fill up with 550 gallons of french fry oil in the boat and get underway. It's not really practical in a boat....and the marina knows it. You can't get it down the dock..... Larry -- I found what I wanted for Christmas at Best Buy, but she wouldn't stop screaming obscenities while we were scanning her and forcing her into the bag! How was I s'posed ta know associate girls weren't on sale? |
Ethanol...A Problem on Your Boat?
HK wrote in news:5t9q7pF1cqjq7U1
@mid.individual.net: A. What do you filter it with, cheesecloth? By hand? There are 3 of us in the "French Fried Oil Company". One of us has a large warehouse to store it, one is a mechanic who built the final filter system and does all the filtering. My part with the stepvan, is pickup and delivery...for free, it runs on Vegoil, too. We have the restaurant pour it through a large filter funnel back into the same containers it came in. That's good for both of us. We don't have to buy containers and they don't have to pay for their disposal, reducing their disposal fee costs. We paid for the nice filter funnels which filter out the big stuff with a fine screen. As they pour it back in quite warm, its viscosity is quite low...but not hot enough to melt the plastic liner in the boxes. They soon learn what's "too hot" for the poly containers...(c; Each container is dated with a magic marker when it arrives in the warehouse, where it is stored UNTOUCHED for at least 30 day, most over 60 now that we have so much surplus. The longer the better as more solids settle out of it. The stories of water in the oil are nonsense. The oil was 450F when the food was dumped into it. That boils off the water, all that steam that pours out during the cooking. No water can stand 450F for long! We've never found any water in the little sediment the filter funnel misses. After the settling period, the oldest dated boxes are dipped, UNMOVED, in place with a pipette of copper we built on the suction hose of the filter system. The oil pump is a positive displacement, self-priming gear pump we bought from Harbor Freight made in China of cast iron. It's driven by an old washing machine motor I wired up to run at the appropriate speed by adding and removing poles. The SLOW suction sucks up the oil from about 3" off the bottom of the container, hopefully not disturbing the bottom sediment and clogging our two large truck diesel filters 2um and ..5um in series. Each filter has a suction guage on them and the housing came free to us from a wrecked tractor trailer. We've yet to need a new filter because of the settling regime. Once the pipette sucks air, it's removed and the bottom sediment and oil is dumped into yet another container. When that container is full, it is left to settle a couple of months and more oil is extracted reducing our disposal problem even more. (We burn the sediment in a barrel out behind the warehouse, legally, as it's in the county. The oil makes the containers burn very hotly we dispose of, too. Our only output is some ash to the dumpster. The oil has passed through the two big truck fuel filters/water separators, the gear pump and is put in clean 55 gallon plastic barrels, ready for vehicles. Two of the 8 barrels are marked LARRY'S SPECIAL BLEND and those are the ones I add mineral spirits to to make thinner oil to run in my unmodified Mercedes cars and Chinese diesel genset. All the other boys have Frybrids in their cars (Mercedes and Volkswagen Rabbit Diesels). (www.frybrid.com). Frybrid, I found, is unnecessary in my climate in the South, especially as it rarely gets cold any more that would thicken the mineral spirit-thinned oil beyond where I could crank it at 22:1 in the Benz cars that have glowplugs. There's about 1800 gallons in the warehouse, today. Where would you like to go? How much mileage do you get? Who cares with 1800 gallons piled up! Drive it like you STOLE IT! B. Does everything you drive smell like a fast-food restaurant? No, not at all. Sometimes I smell the faint odor of fresh fish, oddly enough, standing right over the exhaust, as lots of this oil is used for seafood cooking. But, what IS lacking over diesel is that burning sulphur smell of normal diesel oil. Vegoil isn't low sulphur...it's NO SULPHUR. The smell out the back is MUCH more pleasant and green than dinodiesel. There's also NO BLACK SMOKE no matter how hard you drive it. You don't get as much power from veg as dino oil. Vegoil is thicker, even with mineral spirits, and burns slower, so instead of that hard hammering sounds of dinodiesel, the engine knock is much reduced. It doesn't, however, burn so slow it's still burning when the exhaust valve opens that I can tell, even over 4000 RPM pushed to the floor. There's no popping or damage to the mufflers, so far. C. Which fast-food chain supplies the highest-class used oil? We don't use any fast food chain oil so I can't tell you. We use oil from 4 Chinese Restaurants that are family owned, locally, more as a present to another small businessman. Giving McDonald's a break on its costs doesn't really appeal to me when I can give a small businessman just like me a break in his costs. The Chinese guys are VERY cooperative seeing as how we're saving them about $300/mo on oil and container disposal, their estimate not mine. The oil is a mixture of mostly Canola oil and peanut oil. We fooled around with different kinds of new oil to see how well each ran. We bought it from the food wholesaler in 6 gallon containers through one of the restaurants. I can't really see any difference in how it runs on various vegoils. You'll see these super chemists making some exotic blends with acids and alkalis over on YouTube but I think that's just bull****. As long as the pump and injectors doesn't wear of clog, it'll burn fine. So far, the only thing I've noticed is my FAR less expensive credit card bills....(c; If it's damaging the engines every X miles, I figure I have a few thousand saved dollars to fix that in such a crapshoot. So far, the only thing noticed is the borescope into the cylinder head hole the injectors came out of shows the cylinders are CLEANER on vegoil as it seems to burn cleaner with less deposits from dissolved sulphur, etc., in dino. Diesels were initially designed for vegoil, not dino. They switched to dino because it was cheap....which it no longer is. Larry -- I found what I wanted for Christmas at Best Buy, but she wouldn't stop screaming obscenities while we were scanning her and forcing her into the bag! How was I s'posed ta know associate girls weren't on sale? |
Ethanol...A Problem on Your Boat?
Larry wrote:
HK wrote in news:5t9q7pF1cqjq7U1 @mid.individual.net: A. What do you filter it with, cheesecloth? By hand? There are 3 of us in the "French Fried Oil Company". One of us has a large warehouse to store it, one is a mechanic who built the final filter system and does all the filtering. My part with the stepvan, is pickup and delivery...for free, it runs on Vegoil, too. We have the restaurant pour it through a large filter funnel back into the same containers it came in. That's good for both of us. We don't have to buy containers and they don't have to pay for their disposal, reducing their disposal fee costs. We paid for the nice filter funnels which filter out the big stuff with a fine screen. As they pour it back in quite warm, its viscosity is quite low...but not hot enough to melt the plastic liner in the boxes. They soon learn what's "too hot" for the poly containers...(c; Each container is dated with a magic marker when it arrives in the warehouse, where it is stored UNTOUCHED for at least 30 day, most over 60 now that we have so much surplus. The longer the better as more solids settle out of it. The stories of water in the oil are nonsense. The oil was 450F when the food was dumped into it. That boils off the water, all that steam that pours out during the cooking. No water can stand 450F for long! We've never found any water in the little sediment the filter funnel misses. After the settling period, the oldest dated boxes are dipped, UNMOVED, in place with a pipette of copper we built on the suction hose of the filter system. The oil pump is a positive displacement, self-priming gear pump we bought from Harbor Freight made in China of cast iron. It's driven by an old washing machine motor I wired up to run at the appropriate speed by adding and removing poles. The SLOW suction sucks up the oil from about 3" off the bottom of the container, hopefully not disturbing the bottom sediment and clogging our two large truck diesel filters 2um and .5um in series. Each filter has a suction guage on them and the housing came free to us from a wrecked tractor trailer. We've yet to need a new filter because of the settling regime. Once the pipette sucks air, it's removed and the bottom sediment and oil is dumped into yet another container. When that container is full, it is left to settle a couple of months and more oil is extracted reducing our disposal problem even more. (We burn the sediment in a barrel out behind the warehouse, legally, as it's in the county. The oil makes the containers burn very hotly we dispose of, too. Our only output is some ash to the dumpster. The oil has passed through the two big truck fuel filters/water separators, the gear pump and is put in clean 55 gallon plastic barrels, ready for vehicles. Two of the 8 barrels are marked LARRY'S SPECIAL BLEND and those are the ones I add mineral spirits to to make thinner oil to run in my unmodified Mercedes cars and Chinese diesel genset. All the other boys have Frybrids in their cars (Mercedes and Volkswagen Rabbit Diesels). (www.frybrid.com). Frybrid, I found, is unnecessary in my climate in the South, especially as it rarely gets cold any more that would thicken the mineral spirit-thinned oil beyond where I could crank it at 22:1 in the Benz cars that have glowplugs. There's about 1800 gallons in the warehouse, today. Where would you like to go? How much mileage do you get? Who cares with 1800 gallons piled up! Drive it like you STOLE IT! B. Does everything you drive smell like a fast-food restaurant? No, not at all. Sometimes I smell the faint odor of fresh fish, oddly enough, standing right over the exhaust, as lots of this oil is used for seafood cooking. But, what IS lacking over diesel is that burning sulphur smell of normal diesel oil. Vegoil isn't low sulphur...it's NO SULPHUR. The smell out the back is MUCH more pleasant and green than dinodiesel. There's also NO BLACK SMOKE no matter how hard you drive it. You don't get as much power from veg as dino oil. Vegoil is thicker, even with mineral spirits, and burns slower, so instead of that hard hammering sounds of dinodiesel, the engine knock is much reduced. It doesn't, however, burn so slow it's still burning when the exhaust valve opens that I can tell, even over 4000 RPM pushed to the floor. There's no popping or damage to the mufflers, so far. C. Which fast-food chain supplies the highest-class used oil? We don't use any fast food chain oil so I can't tell you. We use oil from 4 Chinese Restaurants that are family owned, locally, more as a present to another small businessman. Giving McDonald's a break on its costs doesn't really appeal to me when I can give a small businessman just like me a break in his costs. The Chinese guys are VERY cooperative seeing as how we're saving them about $300/mo on oil and container disposal, their estimate not mine. The oil is a mixture of mostly Canola oil and peanut oil. We fooled around with different kinds of new oil to see how well each ran. We bought it from the food wholesaler in 6 gallon containers through one of the restaurants. I can't really see any difference in how it runs on various vegoils. You'll see these super chemists making some exotic blends with acids and alkalis over on YouTube but I think that's just bull****. As long as the pump and injectors doesn't wear of clog, it'll burn fine. So far, the only thing I've noticed is my FAR less expensive credit card bills....(c; If it's damaging the engines every X miles, I figure I have a few thousand saved dollars to fix that in such a crapshoot. So far, the only thing noticed is the borescope into the cylinder head hole the injectors came out of shows the cylinders are CLEANER on vegoil as it seems to burn cleaner with less deposits from dissolved sulphur, etc., in dino. Diesels were initially designed for vegoil, not dino. They switched to dino because it was cheap....which it no longer is. Larry Damned cool. I wonder if there is a way to make a small business out of this, keeping it out of the hands of the damned corporate sharks. |
Ethanol...A Problem on Your Boat?
Larry wrote:
HK wrote in news:Y6idnbDe_oa62- : Damned cool. I wonder if there is a way to make a small business out of this, keeping it out of the hands of the damned corporate sharks. We have a better idea, but haven't acted on it as we all work, sort of. In SC there is a new rule that SC Electric and Gouge MUST buy any surplus power from a renewable resource you produce, whether corporate likes it or not. 1800 gallons is only a fraction of what I can collect. I get calls from other restaurants wanting me to pick up their waste weekly. Unfortunately, we're out of room in the corner of the warehouse so I must decline. The idea was to use up the surplus powering a diesel genset hooked to the two-way kilowatthour meter, right at the warehouse, where we have quite a bit of unused realestate between the building and the swamp out back. I was already given a 250KVA monster from a hospital in Alabama that had upgraded to a larger one, but by the time we got it here and installed it, we'd be in debt way too much to make it profitable, forced to sell our power to pay down that debt and its interest. Nope....too grandiose. The monster would make an oil slave out of me. That's where the project stalled this fall..... I'd still like a nice stationary genset, maybe in the 100-150KVA range, 3-phase, any voltage to feed them. They're paying about 5.8c/Kwh, that's $209 a 24 hour day, minus what George's warehouse uses. That comes to $6264/month, minus oil changes and maintenance on the monster. $6000/month is a nice little income even split between the 3 of us. There's even a tax incentive available to get the government bureaucrats somewhat off our backs. Fuel is cheap...(c;...and renewable! We're burning waste oil! Once the genset is hot, it'll run easy on pure oil. We can switch it manually from diesel 2 to vegoil, which is all the Frybrid does automatically for mylady in the cars. A tiny part of the AC power could heat the oil, if necessary, on really cold days. I used to love playing with big gensets when I was working in Iran. We had 6 big Deutz air-cooled diesel beasts powering the mission at the airbase because local power was, in the late 70's, not really reliable. They were 250 KVA monsters and there was 680,000 gallons of #2 buried under the parking lot to run them independently, in emergencies. Power R Us!...(c; When they found out how much I loved to be around them, the company engine boys were more than happy to let me operate them, two at a time, synchronized, because they didn't want anything to do with the electric power side of them. The Chinese have all kinds of big powerplants with famous prime movers like Deutz, Perkins, Lister, etc., like this: http://www.made-in-china.com/showroo...-list/catalog- 1.html Here's the Chinese diesel 6.5KW genset that's oil powered at my house. It was $1599 at Pep Boys Auto Parts. All I wanted was two wiper blades for my stepvan...(sigh) Runs fine on the oil/mineral spirits mix... http://tinyurl.com/2xf5w7 Larry Go for it! Anything you can do to get money out of the power company is worth doing. |
Ethanol...A Problem on Your Boat?
HK wrote in
: Go for it! Anything you can do to get money out of the power company is worth doing. A bonus...(c; Larry -- I found what I wanted for Christmas at Best Buy, but she wouldn't stop screaming obscenities while we were scanning her and forcing her into the bag! How was I s'posed ta know associate girls weren't on sale? |
Ethanol...A Problem on Your Boat?
"Larry" wrote in message ... Here's the Chinese diesel 6.5KW genset that's oil powered at my house. It was $1599 at Pep Boys Auto Parts. All I wanted was two wiper blades for my stepvan...(sigh) Runs fine on the oil/mineral spirits mix... http://tinyurl.com/2xf5w7 Is that thing air or water cooled? If air cooled, can you still hear? Eisboch |
Ethanol...A Problem on Your Boat?
"Eisboch" wrote in
: Is that thing air or water cooled? If air cooled, can you still hear? Eisboch Air cooled. Totally enclosed. Huge muffler with little stack. My neighbors say it makes a wonderful sound with their dropcords plugged into it..... Larry -- I found what I wanted for Christmas at Best Buy, but she wouldn't stop screaming obscenities while we were scanning her and forcing her into the bag! How was I s'posed ta know associate girls weren't on sale? |
Ethanol...A Problem on Your Boat?
Larry wrote:
"Eisboch" wrote in : Is that thing air or water cooled? If air cooled, can you still hear? Eisboch Air cooled. Totally enclosed. Huge muffler with little stack. My neighbors say it makes a wonderful sound with their dropcords plugged into it..... Larry We've got a 500-gallon propane tank buried in the yard, so our backup generator runs on that fuel. Out here in ruralville, generators are common. |
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