Talk to anyone who does small engine repair or marine engine repair.
You're obviously making a huge assumption here. The last time I went to work and
didn't work on a small engine, (or big engine for that matter), was 1983 or so.
I'm not an ethanol advocate or cheerleader by any means, but the
vast majority of fuel problems associated with
any engine could be avoided if the owner followed the manufacturers' recommendations.
Far and away the biggest fuel-related problem I see, is improper storage practices. You can take a guy that's still using his small engine storage regimen from 15-20 years ago as an example. Gasoline doesn't store like it used to. Blended fuels add a new wrinkle to the game. The guy that absolutely refuses to adhere to the current fueling and storage practices printed in the manual for a specific piece of equipment
will end up having a whole lot of easily-avoidable problems. And the sad reality is, those problems will need to be blamed on something
other than the role the owner played.
I've got equipment and vehicles which were made before they started selling the blended crud all over the place. The manuals don't even address blended fuels. Does that mean that there's no issue??? Heck, some of my stuff was made before there was even unleaded gas. How's the manual supose to warn about something which didn't exist when the equipment was made?
We probably all have pieces of equipment like that. I work on all of our stuff, and a lot of customers' stuff as well every day. One of the reasons a 10% blend plateau was originally decided upon, was that it was a blend percentage that could safely be used without causing issues. They didn't throw darts at balloons and happen to pop the one with "10%" under it to arrive at a number.....testing was done. That's how the 10% number was arrived at, and that's my point about the 15% number everyone is so afraid of. Manufacturers tell you going above 10% isn't okay. If someone else mandates otherwise, there'll be a legal mess to deal with. It isn't really difficult to ascertain the alcohol percentage in a fuel sample. You guys that think they're going to start selling it at 15% and simply choose not to label it as such are just being silly here. 15% blends will cause problems when used in stuff it isn't supposed to be used in. When those problems occur, the
first thing an owner or his legal representation will do, is get a fuel sample from one of these "unlabeled" pumps and prove what the alcohol content is.
I've seen pictures and posts all over the 'net about the plethora of problems 10% blends have allegedly caused. I've even dealt with quite a few situations at work in which someone else's original diagnosis of "ETHANOL!!!" has been proven wrong when a machine comes back in a second time and gets assigned to me to fix. After the
actual problem is repaired, the owner goes back about his business and using the same fuel with no more issues. But guess what happened
before that? He picked up his machine after paying for a repair. Someone asked him what the "problem" was, and he replied with "ethanol" because that's what he was told. Then the issue occurs again, and the owner and others around see that the "ethanol" problem is still there....and the word spreads like wildfire. After the *real* problem gets fixed on the second visit to the shop, the word that ethanol
wasn't ever the problem at all doesn't spread like wildfire for some reason. I can't quite figure that out.
And then we end up with threads like this.
