Ethanol in Marine Fuel

[Gerry Zagorski]

Ethanol sucks pure and simple, especially in the marine environment where you are around a lot of moisture, you don't have a sealed fuel system like you do in a car and fuel tends to sit around a lot longer. The reason is the alcohol it contains.

Check out this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzFzYoxxA10

Every mechanic I've talked to about this says 2 things:
1) You should treat your fuel with some sort of ethanol treatment. We have been using Stabil. I know some marinas selling Valve Tech fuels and they supposedly have additives already in them.
2) I know it's not practical but you should try and fuel up more often and only take on as much fuel as you are going to use in a shorter period of time.

Lastly a water separating fuel filer like Racor is a must. If you do get a bit of water in the tank all you need to do is drain the bottom of the filter. They sell 2 types of filters, one for outboard and the other for inboard applications. The outboard filter has a translucent bowl at the bottom of the filter and the inboard one a metal canister where the water that is separated from the fuel collects.. Open the pit cock or remove drain plug at the bottom of the filter and any water the filter may have picked up drains out.

If you do happen to get too much water in a tank then you have a few choices to get rid of it.
- Water will settle at the bottom of the tank and the good fuel at the top. If you can pump the fuel out manually from the tank, pump the tank until you see no more traces of water.
- You can hire a fuel filtering company who will pump the entire tank out, run it through their filtering system which removes water and dirt and pump it right back into your tank.