i would try a tune up like plugs,wires, fuel filter etc. if you havent already

 

hey RonJ theres your information on alcohol absorbing water read it and tell me what you think bout it now. http://www.fuel-testers.com/ethanol_...ecautions.html

 

The advertisement at the link makes statements that would seem to support the contention that a 10% ethanol/90% gasoline mixture has a 50X higher capacity to absorb water than does pure gasoline. The weakness of this source, however, is that the sole purpose of the article is to sell a product for testing ethanol-supplemented gasoline. The company would clearly profit monetarily by making the public believe in a problem that may not actually exist. The company also fails to cite references that would back up any of their claims. While I am unable to disprove statements made by the company, the advertisement fails to provide a convincing, unbiased argument supporting the claim that 10% ethanol/90% gasoline absorbs a substantial amount of water and that this property represents a significant public problem. The article also makes no mention of any intentional "watering down" of gasoline by suppliers.

 

ronj how many years of college do you have under your belt? and what is your degree in?

you make my head spin

 

ok i understand what your trying to say there but i was talking to a guy i work with and he is the one that brought this point up to me while we were working on a car. so i was telling him about how we were talking about this and how you dont really believe that ethanol absorbs water so he told me to say this. have you ever went out and gotten drunk? well if so you notice that the next day that you have a really dry mouth or you feel really thirsty? well thats the alcohol since ethanol is also a base from alcohol it kinda the same thing. when you go out drinking the alcohol absorbs all the water out of your body so it makes you dehydrated. also when you read that article it also states that ethanol gas only has a shelf life of 100 days i wonder if thats because it absorbs too much water to be able to run in your car?

 

what RonJ said made perfect sense to me the first time around. It made even more sense the second time. I just didn't say anything because it seemed so sound.

 

I know that ethanol and water are infinitely miscible. I just don't know whether adding a relatively small amount of ethanol to gasoline permits the resulting mixture to dissolve much more water than does pure gasoline.

Alcohol does indeed cause dehydration by absorbing water molecules and causing you to **** as a way to eliminate the alcohol, which your body perceives as a toxin. It seems a huge leap, however, to draw any reasonable parallel between alcohol dehydration of the human body and your argument that ethanol gas is able to dissolve substantial amounts of water.

My question is whether the stated 100-day shelf life of ethanol gas is any shorter than that of pure gasoline.

 

well the body and ethanol fuel can be kinda linked together because the fermentation of the corn is the same as what they do to make alcohol so it act the same way between the two of them. as from what i have looked at on the shelf life gas all depends on how it is stored. see ethanol will suck the water outta the air from the humidity. so like when you fill your tank up with ethanol gas there is air that is let into the tank. also when the truck fills up the gas station that barrel will get air in it.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygroscopic
"Hygroscopic substances include honey, glycerin, ethanol, methanol, concentrated sulfuric acid, methamphetamine, and concentrated sodium hydroxide (lye)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol
"Hydrogen bonding causes pure ethanol to be hygroscopic to the extent that it readily absorbs water from the air."

So ethanol does bond with water molecules. However, when does ethanol have a chance to bond to them? When air gets inside the storage tanks? Keep on reading.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth%2...re#Composition
"Water vapor (H2O) ~0.25% over full atmosphere, typically 1% to 4% near surface"
"The density of air at sea level is about 1.2 kg/mĀ³(1.2 g/L)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasoline
"The weight-density of gasoline is about 737.22 kg/mĀ³"

1-4% of the volume of the air near the surface of the earth is water. The volume of this air is about 1.2 kilograms per cubic meter. Compare this to gasoline, about 737.22 kilograms per cubic meter. Assume that you have a 1:1 ratio of fresh air to gasoline in your fuel tank. For this to happen, you'd have to fill your gas tank up to 50%. Now lets also say that you have the maximum typical amount of water vapor in your air, 4% of the 1.2 kilograms/cubic meter, that's .048 kilograms of water per cubic meter of air that can go into your gas. 0.048/737.22 = .0000651, which is less than a hundreth of a percent of your gas that's water. That's practically nothing. For the sake of the argument, lets say that you fill up to a maximum of 1/4th of your tank of gas, leaving a ratio of 1:3 in your gas tank (1/4th gas, 3/4th air). Then you triple this ratio of water vapor to gas, giving you .0000651 * 3 = .0001953, just about 2 hundreths of a percent of your gas is water, assuming it all the water vapor in the air enters the gas. That's still negligible.

Now, most people don't go opening up the fuel tank to their car unless they're adding gas, so you can assume that the only moisture getting into your gas tank is when you open it. The seals on the tank were meant to hold gas vapors in. This should keep most water molecules from getting in, too. There might be a slight leakage, but I'm willing to bet that it's tiny. I'd also bet that the gas station operators aren't going to open up the station gas tanks unless there's a (rare) problem or unless they're refilling. If they refill, then they're going to fill it almost all the way up, meaning there'll be little air inside the tank to hold moisture. I don't buy that air alone could cause significant amounts of moisture to get into your gas.

EDIT: dang, I just noticed that methamphetamines are hygroscopic. I better keep my crystal meth sealed...