Corpusfishing.com

[grasscutter]

Just wondering what some of you are doing to keep your gas fresh. Just got mine out of the shop. My fault. Boat sat up a bit after Harvey. Instead of draining everything out and starting over, I just filled it up and went. Bad idea. I did everything I dared do (changed filter, lines, cleaned tank, drained the vst, etc.) before taking it to the shop. One thing I noticed when I pulled the tank was the guage float was disintegrating into a black goo mess. I have since removed the whole float assembly from the tank.

[BayFly]

I am guilty of letting my rig sit too long sometimes, and especially lately, due to building new house and selling the other one, not to mention the move! Since I'm a part timer as a coast dweller I've had to develop a plan to deal with boat gas. If my rig sits for more than a couple of months I check it's contents by using Kolor Kut, a paste like product made for the welding industry to check the contents of tanks before they weld. It tells you what contents are present by changing colors for alcohol, gasoline, and water, or even water saturated gasoline. If my gas is saturated and I plan to use most of it immediately I do so, but if not I pump it out with a small hand pump and use it in my Chevy truck. I have never found my gas(ethanol) phase separated which it would be if water was identified by the Kolor Kut. When I add gasoline I use a stabilizer called Pri-G which was originally made for diesel fuel, but reformulated for ethanol. I've spent several years in oil industry related jobs, thus the knowledge of the products. I leave my tank empty when I am not using the rig, and only put the amount of fuel I think I'll need in the tank at any given time. Since plans don't always work out I have to test and pump occasionally.

[Johninaustin]

Any unused gas at the end of the trip goes into the truck. I don't store gas at all.


A $1400 carb repair bill cured me of that pretty quickly.

[Rebecca of Sunnybrookfarm]

[grasscutter]

To make matters worse, when I drained the old gas, I decided to put some of it in my lawnmower. Another bad idea. I figured something lodged between the needle and seat because the combustion chamber flooded with gas, locking the motor up. I know this because when I pulled the plug, gas poured out. So I pulled the float, cleaned the needle and seat, and it still flooded. That cost me another $100 for a new carb. I also put some of the gas in my wife's lawnmower/weedeater, and she complains every time she uses it. But then, she did that before I put the old gas in it.

[BayFly]

Hey grasscutter, you're complaining about your wife complaining about her weed eater!

BTW, your problem probably stems more from using ethanol in a gas tank which has had primarily non-ethanol used in it for some time. Use of non-ethanol gasoline results in deposits of whatever is put in the fuel after it's processed separating from the gasoline and adhering to the walls of the tank, thus when you use ethanol the alcohol in the ethanol cleans the deposits out, plus melts most plastic, including some plastic gas tanks. I'm certainly no fan of ethanol, but so far I have been able to avoid the problems ethanol can cause by being diligent in keeping my fuel clean, using the same stabilizer religiously, and not occasionally changing from ethanol to non-ethanol or vise versa.

[grasscutter]

She likes that weed eater and lets me know when it don't sound right .

The tank is maybe five years old, but I have replaced the pick up tube in it twice. It is a 12 gallon tank mounted under the console. Ethanol is some bad stuff. The pick up tube breaks off and that could be a problem if it happens in the wrong place, like crossing the ship channel or something. That's probably the bigger concern I have. I have a portable tank. It might be a good idea to set it up and just bring it along just in case. But you'd think the tank manufacturer would have some sort of stainless fix or something. I haven't found it if there is.

[BayFly]

It's been quite a while since I've bought any fuel line, but the last I bought at West Marine was rated for ethanol use. If you are not buying fuel line specified for ethanol, even if you primarily use non-ethanol, I suggest you consider getting the ethanol rated line. You never know when someone might have fouled up and mixed ethanol with non-ethanol somewhere along the transfer process before the retailer ever got the gasoline.

[grasscutter]

Excellent suggestion Bayfly and one that was done a year or so ago. What I'm wandering is if there's a good additive. Mercury has a couple, there's seafoam and stabil among others. I've read not to choose one with alcohol as an ingredient. My brother and I share another boat that also had bad gas. That tank was probably holding 50 or 60 gallons that the Yamaha shop pulled out. It's a 90 gallon tank.

[bd0202]

Ethanol & water. If it comes out of the water more than a month, drain the tank. Sorry to hear you went through this. Either that or pour additives in it MONTHLY to keep it from doing that.
_________________
All things will pass. Have a Blessed day.

[BayFly]

In my initial response to your post I mentioned I use Pri-G for a stabilizer, and put it in my tank upon buying whatever amount of gasoline I need. A little of Pri-G goes a long way, but I will have to post back about it's application/gallon of gas, due to my bad memory. Between the use of Pri-G and Kolor Kut I have been able to stay out of trouble. That being said, I still have pumped my tank dry more than once when the Kolor Kut indicated I had water saturated gasoline, and I was not planning to use the boat soon. Fortunately, I've never had "bad gas" or phase separated gas. I should add, I'm not concerned about using water saturated gas in my Yamaha HPDI, because I use a water/fuel separator of 2 milligrams rather than 10, and an HPDI is one of the more fuel sensitive outboards.

[BayFly]

FWIW, I just went back and corrected my bad spelling of Kolor Kut in case someone was trying to find any information about it by using my bad spelling. It's a great product originally made for welders to identify the contents of a tank they were planning to weld on. Since the development of ethanol it has been re-formulated to indicate alcohol, as well as gasoline, water, and water saturated gasoline. In the case of phase separation it will indicate the separate fluids.

[bd0202]

Here's the main difference between flying and boating:

The FAA requires anyone working on an airplane engine in the civilian world, aside from PM like adding oil, etc, - to have an A&P license. In the boating world, there are marine mechanics but there is no requirement to use them or their "marine certified" parts.

That being said, in aviation world if a plane is going to be pulled out of service for ANY reason more than a week, all tanks get drained. That's up to mechanics in that world, but in marine world it's something to be mindful of.

Again, sorry you experienced this - but as a suggestive lesson going forward - if anyone expects their boat to be "off the water" for more than a week, drain the tank(s).
_________________
All things will pass. Have a Blessed day.

[grasscutter]

Here's a link to some tests that were done comparing different additives.
https://www.practical-sailor.com/issues/34_11/features/Ethanol-Gas-Additives_5692-1.html
I can see where draining the gas out of the tank would be a solution, but what do you do with 50 gallons of left over gasoline? I tried to suck gas out of that boat after Harvey, trying to get fuel for the generators. Not that easy to do. Here's a scenario. Boat has 20 gallons in it. Not enough buffer to run inshore. So you pump in another 50 gallons. That gives you roughly a 200 mile range give or take. You burn 30 gallons leaving approximately 40 in it. What do you do with that 40 gallons, or say, $100 bucks worth of fuel? Maybe another solution would be to fish more.
By the way, I'd like to take this time to change my "wandering" to "wondering". Phones.

[bulldog1935]

we recently got back from Arroyo with 20 extra gallons of gas, filtered and split between our two trucks.