Stabil in the mix?

[WinterDeere]

About a decade ago. I gave Stabil a try. I put it in 5 different engines that fall. 18 months later I had lost all 5 engines...he lost an entire fleet of equipment.

I'm not pretending it's anything great, or that it lives up to its marketing hype. But the reality is that any product with a 100% failure rate would not be at the top of the market, in terms of sales, especially after 20+ years on the shelves.

Stabil may be crap, I certainly don't use it anymore. But I have to question your story, just the same. No one is losing "entire fleets of equipment", or having every engine into which they install it fail, without some other undisclosed factors in the mix.

And I have used Stabil in the past, many times in my own portable generators, with no issues. I switched to StarTron several years ago, because it's supposed to be better, but I've honestly never had any issue with either.

 

[Jaygyver]

I guess I'm the lucky one with StaBil, the storage one, as I've probably been using it for almost 20 years now on everything all year round. Pressure washers, chainsaws, old truck that sits more than it drives, generator, mowers, etc. I do use a gas station that is fairly busy so in theory has fresher gas than a mom and pop store off the beaten track. I have never drained or run dry any of my equipment. The oldest equipment is around 20 years old and the newest is around 5 years old.
The generator is the only one I will drain/refill the gas on if I don't use the tank up within 2 years, I will just mix it with some new gas on the mower or something that will use all the gas up fairly soon.

I now have 4-14 gal tanks that I use, 2 for gas and 2 for diesel. The thinking is that I won't have one big tank sitting half empty half the time and don't have to refill the 5 gal tanks every few days. I use the storage version as I don't know how much gas I'll use in a year, I might refill the 14 gal tanks up 3 or 4 times a year one year and maybe once the next year.

But then I never used any treatment the years before and never had a problem either, I just started using it because of all the horror stories and figured better safe than sorry.

 

[dodge man]

I’ve never had a problem with Stabil. I’ve only had a couple of small engines with fuel problems. Both cases had definite fuel issues. Both cases low fuel levels in a gas tank stored for more than 6 months with ethanol fuel.

 

[Suburban Plowboy]

Red Sta-bil is no good. I have been there. It only works on machines that don't move. I know the pain of trying to start a chainsaw after using red Sta-bil and finding out I have been swindled.

You want Biobor EB.

The other day I picked up a saw after maybe 7 months of down time, full of old gas. I cringed because I fully expected to have to rebuild the carb. My fault. It fired right up and ran perfectly.

Biobor EB, Red Armor, and ethanol-free gas. I was astonished. In my climate, this is like a miracle. Before I started using this combination, I would have expected maybe 6 weeks of protection.

I'm not positive, but it seems like Biobor EB plus Red Armor is much better than Biobor alone. I have to put oil in my fuel anyway, so might as well use something arborists love instead of saving 10 cents on cheap stuff.