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Originally Posted by wifi
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I ask the company about what fuel testers reveiw said. Here is there response.
Regarding info on fuel testers website.
I don’t really understand the point of the author’s comments. His business is to sell test kits to detect the presence of alcohol in the fuel. By the end of 2010 85% of the gasoline sold in the US will contain ethanol, so he’ll either sell a lot of kits, or be retired to the Bahamas.
My guess is that much of the site is an anti-ethanol, anti-government rant clothed in a few facts.
Anyway, let’s look at the situation. Ethanol is in the fuel as an oxygenate. It replaces MTBE because that was found to be environmentally dangerous. While there are various opinions about making ethanol from corn, and whether that’s an environmental improvement, it is obvious that we are going to see more and more ethanol in our fuels.
The old gasoline formulations would only absorb very minute amounts of water. Basically, if you got any water it wouldn’t go into solution in the fuel , it went to the bottom of the tank. On some small engines you could see the water sitting in the bottom of the bowl under the fuel filter, just in front of the carb. The water did NOT interfere with the octane rating or other properties of the fuel. Now, when phase separation occurs the ethanol+water is at the bottom and low octane fuel sits above it.
Now we have E-10 and E-85. They contain ethanol. Ethanol is chemically an alcohol, a compound containing an extra O and H at the end of the chain. There are hundreds of compounds that are chemically classified as an alcohol. They are used in food products, pharmaceuticals, cleaners, lubricants, and many other products that we come in contact with every day. The physical characteristics and uses vary greatly.
The author has looked at various MSDS sheets and based on the data on those sheets makes some pretty broad statements. Review of the listed ingredients does not tell the whole story. In so far as how the products work unlisted or trade secret ingredients may be more important than the listed ingredients. Further, the mechanism by which ingredients act may well be altered or changed by the unlisted ingredients, or by the processing of the product. Just because we take ingredient A and B and react them with ingredient C and D doesn’t mean that we end up with A+B+C+D. In fact most formulations end up with X.
The author hints that you should never add additional alcohol containing products to E-10 fuels. Under 2+4 he says the product is not suitable for use in alcohol fuels. He implies that the company supplied MSDS gives that direction, but the MSDS says no such thing. The MSDS describes the product as being soluble in water. The EPA requires each product to describe whether it is soluble in water as that is a common means of fire suppression and spill clean up. The miscibility ( or lack thereof) is not an indication of whether a particular product is suitable for it’s intended use. Manufacturers of fuel treatment would not knowingly put anything harmful in their products. Some may work better than others for a specific purpose, but none are knowingly harmful when used as recommended.
The problem with E-10 is well known. The E attracts moisture until it reaches a saturated condition. The saturation point is temperature dependent. E-10 fuel will hold 0.4% water concentrations in solution at 70 degrees F. But the same mixture will phase separate at 30 degrees F. When phase separation occurs water plus ethanol sinks to the bottom of the tank, leaving low octane (82) fuel on top. Many of the bowl water separators won’t separate this water+ethanol mix. Filling stations with Cim-Tek “Hydrosorb“ filters will filter out this water+ethanol mix. Once this phase separation occurs the only way to reverse the process is to heat the fuel above the saturation temperature. None of us are heating gasoline so that’s not a practical fix. There is no chemical fix that will reverse the process.
I have 3 problems with the author’s conjecture.
1.) The presence of an “alcohol” ingredient does not make the product unsuitable for use in E-10 fuel. In fact the presence of an “alcohol” may be required in order to get the desired effect from the other ingredients in the fuel treatment. A number of the fuel treatment manufacturers have increased their “alcohol” content with the introduction of E-10.
2.) The author assumes that all “alcohols” are bad. Given the broad spectrum of “alcohols”, their chemistry and intended purposes I reject the blanket statement. That “alcohols” are bad.
3.) Assume that a product may have 50% “alcohol”. Further assume that the recommended mix ratio is 1:100. Thus the use of the treatment is increasing the “alcohol” content is 0.5%. Half of one percent. The EPA is already increasing the allowable ethanol (“alcohol”) content to over 11%. The use of small amounts of “alcohols” to carry the treatment ingredient is not harmful to the overall fuel system.
Water is the critical contaminate of E-10 fuels. De emulsifiers can’t work in E-10 because they cannot disassociate the water from the ethanol. The only answer is to use some form of “alcohol” to carry the additive ingredient into the fuel and alter the reactivity between ethanol and water. The question is what type of “alcohol” and what the effect is of the other treatment ingredients.
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