rslifkin wrote:
Trans_Maro wrote:
I've found that my 2013 MG Stelvio and my 1980 MG LeMans knock under load if I feed them E10.
My Ducati bevel is just down on power with E10.
The wife's Shadow, my old CX500 and the GL1100 that I no longer own all didn't seem to care.
That's because E10 needs to run slightly richer than E0. So if the thing runs a hair on the lean edge of best power or knock margin already, you might need to tweak it richer. Do that and I bet it'll run just fine on E10.
I just buy good fuel and don't worry about it.
I'm in Canada so I don't need to buy that garbage unless I want to.
In reply to curtis73:
I've never really seen the water absorption thing present a problem in any kind of reasonable usage. I've seen 200 gallons of E10 + stabilizer sit in a tank in a boat being slowly used of the course of a full year. No issues with enough water building up to cause separation or anything, no clogged fuel filters, no crud in the carbs.
rslifkin wrote:
In reply to curtis73:
I've never really seen the water absorption thing present a problem in any kind of reasonable usage. I've seen 200 gallons of E10 + stabilizer sit in a tank in a boat being slowly used of the course of a full year. No issues with enough water building up to cause separation or anything, no clogged fuel filters, no crud in the carbs.
Right... with stabilizer. Untreated fuel, however might be an issue... at least more potential for issues than straight gasoline.
GameboyRMH wrote:
ultraclyde wrote:
Plus, legally they can add up to 5% content that is undisclosed, so who knows what's there.
5%? With that much allowance, I will be shocked if there isn't a secret organized effort to slowly dispose of the world's most dangerous toxic wastes through the fuel supply!
If it wasn't for spills and leaks, burning it in a high-compression IC engine would be a very good way to get rid of most toxic waste!
iceracer wrote:
Since the only non E-10 locally is 40 cents higher that 87 E-10 I guess I will stick with and I have had no abnormal problems. No rubber parts replaced on either the 30 yr. old Craftsman mower nor the 25 yr. old Tecumseh powered snow blower.
As mentioned earlier and I also have said, no need to add alcohol in the form of Dri-Gas in our cold winters.
I Don't agree with the regulation but I can live with it.
I hate to re-explain the simple truth. 30 years ago both Craftsman and Tecumseh (both lower end priced motors) hadn't yet been flooded with bean counters who bought the cheapest parts that fit and were serviceable..
Once bean counters took over parts that served long and well were replaced with the cheapest parts available, usually imported from a newly developing country that hadn't yet found any profit in doing what the Germans called Value engineering.. (in other words cost versus service life)
Rather than taking a hit to their reputation manufacturers told field representatives to blame it on the fuel. And the myth began...
Trans_Maro wrote:
rslifkin wrote:
Trans_Maro wrote:
I've found that my 2013 MG Stelvio and my 1980 MG LeMans knock under load if I feed them E10.
My Ducati bevel is just down on power with E10.
The wife's Shadow, my old CX500 and the GL1100 that I no longer own all didn't seem to care.
That's because E10 needs to run slightly richer than E0. So if the thing runs a hair on the lean edge of best power or knock margin already, you might need to tweak it richer. Do that and I bet it'll run just fine on E10.
I just buy good fuel and don't worry about it.
I'm in Canada so I don't need to buy that garbage unless I want to.
How do you know it's good fuel? Do you do lab testing or go by price? Even today some of the fuel used in Canada is refined in America so it may have alcohol in it.. It may also have been contaminated by the last fuel hauled by the trucker. It's not all that uncommon for regular to find it's way into the premium tank. After-all mistakes do happen.. 
curtis73 wrote:
rslifkin wrote:
In reply to curtis73:
I've never really seen the water absorption thing present a problem in any kind of reasonable usage. I've seen 200 gallons of E10 + stabilizer sit in a tank in a boat being slowly used of the course of a full year. No issues with enough water building up to cause separation or anything, no clogged fuel filters, no crud in the carbs.
Right... with stabilizer. Untreated fuel, however might be an issue... at least more potential for issues than straight gasoline.
More decades ago than I'd care to admit, long before ethanol, I briefly ran a gas station.. Whenever I'd stick a tank to see how much fuel was in it. there would be a lot of water in it.. Sometimes well over an inch or two..
Now I don't remember how big those tanks were but let's assume they were at least 10,000 gallons..
The tanker would dump a load of fuel and when it was time to re-stick this time there would be more or less water in the tank.. I figured dumping a load of gas would cause it to swirl around and some water would be pumped out for several days. Then it was how much condensation would form and settle back into the tank before the next refill..
In short water in gasoline has always been with us..
Yeah, any fuel being stored will have water concerns. Ethanol fuels handle it a bit differently though. The water gets harmlessly absorbed as long as it's not too much. Too much causes separation issues. On the other hand, straight gas or diesel won't absorb water, so the water can sit in the tank and cause issues or it can lead to stuff growing, etc.
In reply to rslifkin:
Since cars have been burning water with their gasoline from the beginning. Water in moderate amounts shouldn't cause an issue.. You are right in that water in moderate amounts will be absorbed when alcohol is used until it reaches saturation point..
The trouble is pump gas from gas stations is a variable. Some tanks are quickly emptied while other may be refilled only a few times a year..
The only real solution is to buy gas in sealed (expensive) containers from sources like VP fuels etc.. (race car fuels)
I've seen problems I could attribute to E10 only 2 times.
-
~2010 Kawasaki push mower engine, whatever pot metal the carb was made from really hated the stuff and it would fill completely up with yellow sludge if it sat for very long.
-
Malaise era car vapor locking in traffic, would idle alarmingly rough if it wasn't moving, you had to put it in neutral every few minutes and rev it to spin the fan up and pull more air through carb to cool things off. We insulated the metal sections of the fuel line in the engine bay with pipe wrap foam and foil tape from Dome Depot, no more problems, smooth idle on a 90* day in a traffic jam.
My dad just dumps cheap Meijer 87 into all his 20th century power equipment, at most he'll flip the fuel valve if equipped to run the carb dry. It all fires back up in the spring.
Just the other day I picked up a car that sat for something like a year with half a tank of gas in it, put a battery in, aired the tires up, drove it 120 miles home.
That said, if I could get E0 for the price of E10 it'd be a no brainer to buy the stuff that's gonna give me ~4% better fuel economy and doesn't smell like its already gone bad when I'm pumping it.
In reply to Mitchell:
You are preaching to the choir here regarding WaWa. Where I live in PA, there is one every couple miles. A Royal Farms just opened up 10 minutes from here. I need to stop and try their fried chicken.
I personally would be dubious of anyone claiming they sell E0 fuel. Unless it's at a airport or port, with air and water based prices.
In reply to alfadriver:
Or "REC90", I've seen that available outside of a marina. It's easy enough to test the stuff in any event, either with an ordinary graduated cylinder and a calculator or one sold just for that purpose.
In reply to frenchyd:
I generally make a point to buy fuel from busy / heavily used stations for that reason. Minimizes the risk of things being stale.
In the pre ethanol water in the gas could cause problems in the winter by freezing.
Then people added ALCOHOL to their gas to absorb the water.
With E-10/15 no need to add more.
So there is one plus. If you live where water freezes.
stuart in mn wrote:
The answer is, it depends. 
Some people have all kinds of problems with e10, others don't, but I'm not sure why that is.
I think your assessment can be attributed to some people blaming all of their problems on E10.
Like, I met up with a guy from Michigan who I used to work with, who said the fuel down here in Ohio burned up all the valves in his 2.5l S10. Never mind that zillions of Iron Dukes lives just fine on Ohio gasoline which has been E10 since at least the mid-80s when I started paying attention to it. And never mind that I remember his truck having perpetual exhaust manifold leaks, which can wreak all sorts of havoc on oxygen sensor readings, as well as regularly burning up his plug wires.
Must have been that Northeast Ohio gasoline. That, IIRC, is the same fuel blend as his part of Michigan.
FWIW, the owner's manual in my first car, a 1972 Ford Thunderbird, said that the vehicle was completely fine with running gasohol, which was the 1970s term for gasoline with 10% ethanol. On a professional level, I have never seen fuel system problems attributable to alcohol in the fuel. Rochester fuel injectors died a lot in the 80s/early 90s, but that is mostly because Rochester injectors sucked.
I mostly think the "OMG ETHANOL BAD" is scare tactics. I vivdly remember taking EvanB's 2.5RS to a fuel station in Iowa at the RXNC for a fillup. The options were 87 octane, and non-ethanol 87 octane. The non-ethanol was maybe 60 cents a gallon more! At the contemporary fuel prices that was about 30%.
BOOGA BOOGA BOOGA. Also Obama's gonna take your guns so stock up now, due to demand all prices are temporarily 50-100% higher but buy now while you still can!
rslifkin wrote:
Trans_Maro wrote:
I've found that my 2013 MG Stelvio and my 1980 MG LeMans knock under load if I feed them E10.
My Ducati bevel is just down on power with E10.
The wife's Shadow, my old CX500 and the GL1100 that I no longer own all didn't seem to care.
That's because E10 needs to run slightly richer than E0. So if the thing runs a hair on the lean edge of best power or knock margin already, you might need to tweak it richer. Do that and I bet it'll run just fine on E10.
This reminds me of something.
Teh RX-7 runs completely open-loop. I tune in on Ohio blend gasoline (which is de facto E10) and I make the cruise portion of the map just barely richer than incipient lean misfire.
I drove it west to RallyCross Nationals twice, in 2012 and 2014. Both times, I had to add fuel in Illinois. Both times, the engine went from running sweetly, to having light-load misfires that disappeared at heavy thottle. Running the tank empty and installing non-Illinois fuel solved the problem every time.
The kicker: I have a friend whose WRX lives on E85. He mentioned getting a tank in Illinois and then his knock monitor started reading TILT until he ran that tank out and refilled.
Conclusion: Don't ever buy fuel in Illinois.
On a related note, I wonder sometimes why some of the former sugar growing islands that I just visited don't try to make their own fuel. So that they can import less.
curtis73 wrote:
But you can't get around physics. Ethanol contains fewer BTUs both by weight and volume than gasoline and power (all other things being equal) will be reduced using concentrations of ethanol.
At stoichiometric mixtures, the fuel BTU versus airmass is close enough that you can call it identical. If you tune for the additional liquid fuel needed, there's no power loss.
Engine power is always dictated first by how much air you can get in, then second by how effectively you can burn the fuel.
In reply to Knurled:
Why run totally open loop? Even if you can only run closed loop during cruise above a certain RPM, that should still be enough to let it adjust the fuel trims to compensate for slight variations in fuel.
In reply to rslifkin:
Unless I'm cruising UPhill, or towing the trailer, the engine is still stuttering a little bit under cruise. You can't run closed loop if you're throwing unburnt oxygen through the exhaust.
And this is why that car gets an oil change every 1000mi or so... fuel dilution out the wazoo! And if I forget/am too lazy to change the oil, the oil level gets high enough that under the right conditions the engine pumps some oil up into the airbox, which makes a gigantic smoke cloud and reliably kills the O2 sensor, which is another reason I never run closed loop.
In reply to Knurled:
Sounds like you'd need a pretty narrow range of conditions to allow closed loop. But if it's stuttering / misfiring a little at cruise, aren't you probably running it too lean?
In reply to Knurled:
I agree, something is amiss with your closed loop calibration. Be it the sensor or the reaction to the sensor.
rslifkin wrote:
But if it's stuttering / misfiring a little at cruise, aren't you probably running it too lean?
Well, "stuttering" in the sense of the characteristic cyclical misfire from exhaust dilution, as opposed to lean or ignition misfire.
Stuttery
