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Ethanol could kill your small engine
An ethanol pump
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Kai Ryssdal: Thirty-six billion gallons -- that's how much renewable fuel the government says the U.S. must produce by 2022. And here's an unexpected consequence of that ethanol mandate: Alcohol is murder on lawnmowers and small engines. Mechanics insist that as gasoline blended with ethanol takes over at gas stations, small engines across the country will start choking to death. Wyoming Public Radio's Peter O'Dowd reports.
Peter O'Dowd: At the WyoTech automotive school in Laramie, Wyo., Larry Wostenburg likes to conduct experiments with engines for his students. Today's test: how much ethanol a small engine can take before it breaks down.
Larry Wostenburg: We're going to put a little choke action on here and start this baby up.
Wostenburg pours alcohol into a lawnmower's fuel tank. His supervisor Jack Longress explains why using too much ethanol can destroy this kind of engine.
Jack Longress: It's a recipe for disaster because, eventually, when those pieces get brittle they're more susceptible to breaking.
Alcohol makes engines run dangerously hot. It melts rubber components. Longress says use anything higher than 10 percent ethanol on small engines long enough, and the insides will start to rot.
Longress: The corrosive properties, what you'd see is, much like what you see on the top of dirty battery terminals.
Drivers of flex-fuel cars don't have to worry much. Their on-board computers can regulate fuel mixtures. But small engines like WyoTech's lawnmower don't have those features. They're more likely to malfunction if they're filled with the wrong blend, and broken engines can mean injured operators. That's just one of the reasons why Kris Kiser is so worried. He's with AllSafe, an advocate group for small-engine manufacturers.
Kris Kiser: What were concerned about are mid-level blends entering into the marketplace in advance of consumers being educated about their use and what their affects will be.
Kiser says millions of chainsaws, lawnmowers and boats could be vulnerable to death by ethanol. This year the government ordered the production of 9 billion gallons of renewable fuel. A decade from now, that number will grow to 26 billion gallons. As the mandate expands, Kiser says higher blends of ethanol will be pumped from every gas station in America. And unless people know what they're doing, he says they could easily fill up with a blend far too potent for their machines.
Kiser: If they drive up to a pump and they see E-20, E-30, E-40, I don't think they know what that means. Even if they do know what it means -- that E-30 means 30 percent ethanol in the gallon they're producing -- if they are selling it at the pump, I think there is the assumption that it's OK, that it's going to work in whatever I put it in.
Ron Lamberty: That's kind of a moot point. We've already got those concerns.
Ron Lamberty works for the American Coalition of Ethanol. He points out that consumers are quite capable of telling the difference between diesel and regular fuel at the gas station. He says America's well on the road to using more renewable fuels like ethanol. Small engine manufacturers can either protest, he says, or start improving their products.
Lamberty: If we always listened to the naysayers, we would still be sitting here with leaded regular gasoline in the United States. We've got to move forward and the small engine guys have to come along.
Critics say they might come along more quickly if the science were more definitive. No one really knows exactly how sensitive small engines are to ethanol. The standard threshold for lawnmowers, for example, is 10 percent, but our experiment showed it could run on a much richer mixture.
The Department of Energy published a study on ethanol in small engines this fall. You can check just how deadly the fuel might be to your old John Deere.
In Laramie, Wyo., I'm Peter O'Dowd for Marketplace.
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hey guys, check out the new kohler engines for lawn equipment for 2009, 90% of all their new engines are e85 ready, this changes everything. ethonal has been a big boon for mid america economy, and also a lot of battery tech. coming also in lawn and garden, so relax and visit year local L @ G dealer this spring not the box store.
Some of the 70's cars burning gasohol had problems. Seems some natural rubber "O" rings didn't like alcohol mixes. Since then all manufacturers switched to Viton or Buna "O" rings of superior quality.
Actually, material wise the ethanol's are friendly to more materials than petro. Meaning more to select from for product design. Also, would suggest if concerned of small engine damage from ethanol blends of gasoline....use something like Marvel Mystery oil a excellent gas additive. No one is testing utilizing a simple over the counter product to protect engine components. I would with expensive motorcycles and outboards. If they are two cycle.....use a slightly higher oil mix.
Mark Keller take reflects everything I've learned on the subject. Ethanol a excellent fuel and a no brainer upon our economy. The value of not exporting a trillion dollars for energy would be more important stimulus than all the artificial cheap money currently being thrown about.
Folks, this small engine concern is similar propaganda as Food vs. Fuel. We have a lawnmower and weedeater that have run on ethanol-blended gasoline very well for years. My parents have decades-old small engines that have used ethanol blends for many years, and they run great. Don't know about boats, but why would they be any different? I can see how something from the 1980's and before may have incompatibilities, but from the 1990's on most all engines should be compatible. If not, shame on the manufacturers for selling cheap junk.
I must agree with "Home building's" comments above. This story was not well researched. As an engtineer with experience with several of the major small engine fuel system manufacturers here are the facts. The rubbers and plastics in our carbs can all tolerate the 10% ethanol in fuels. The problem is the lack of a feed back and control system to tell us how the engine runs. 10% ethanol will enlean the mixture 3.4% Ironically the regulations prevent the customer from being able to adjust the air fuel mixture richer, so while he is forced to use ethanol, he cannot adjust his engine to compensate for that! IF the engine manufacturer sets the mixture at his factory on ethanol, then IF the engine is run on regular gasoline it is too rich. If the EPA were to audit this engine it might fail the EPA audit and the manufacturer could be forced to re-call products from the field. So ROCK-HARD PLACE!
MR. Keller's 13 points are mostly wrong! The US has nowhere near the capacity to grow enough crops for our Ethanol use! Look up a great National Geographic article entitled "Growing Fuel" Brazil makes ethanol from Sugar Cane, which is 13x more sugar dense than corn. "we can't grow much sugar cane in the US" Ethanol from corn is at BEST an energy neutral product. As far as carbon sequestering, sure, you sequester it, until you burn it! But you are at least NOT releasing new carbon from fossil fuels.
I'm tiring of lazy reporting on nearly all matters relating to energy:
First, ethanol has FAR fewer BTUs/gallon than does gasoline (gasoline has 47% more energy in every drop!). Your fuel mileage will absolutetly reflect this--expect very close to a 5% drop with E10.
Modern engine systems compensate by using more fuel. Carbureted cars, mowers, chainsaws and tractors must have larger openings in the carburetor bowl "jets" to make the same amout of power (on greater ethanol fuel volume than gasoline, of course).
However, on the good side, ethanol has anti-knock capacities and compression ratios can be raised to the range of 15:1 instead of the customary gasoline maximum of around 10:1. More power is created in the same engine but there are other complicating diffulties, such as accelerated wear. Race car guys have known this and mastered the tricks of getting the most from alcohol cars (on a frequent basis) since the 1950s.
Note that alcohol is one of the best and cheapest solvents--running a bit in your gasoline engine will clean deposits from your top piston rings and from behind the heads of your intake valves--both desirable outcomes.
But older gasoline engines are very likely to have seals and pumps that are very vulnerable to destruction by this caustic solvent. It is a REAL problem, and any old gasoline engine in storage should absolutely have alcohol mixes minimized.
By the way, diesel fuel has 63% more energy per gallon than ethanol.
Please, more facts and less opinions on energy. I expect more from you than from industry hacks that have the money to go to DC and mislead our leaders.
Thank you.
We recently had an icestorm and no electricity for 3 days... fortunately I have my gasoline powered generator purchased at the beginning of a 14 day outage in 1998. I used stabil treatment and have not run the generator in ~4 years, Back when MTBE was used in gas. It started with no problem and ran the E10 gas I gave it... My neighbor's generator has been run once a year and had "old gas" maybe 8 months old. Her generator started hard and ran rough. I understand that Ethanol gas gets "old" like cheese and yogart. Once she got fresh gas (E10) it ran well. Local Small Engine repair guy says use fresh gas... This has worked for alot of his customers... dump out the old gas from chainsaw, put in new E10 gas/oil and it runs fine... Yet this is a concern for those of us with a bunch of small engines. What I have been saying is anicdotal... It would be good to do more stories from those who use and service small engines. Manufacturers want to sell new... and government is promoting ethanol... maybe not so good for small engines... I'll check out the airport option for "E-zero" gas for my small engines. Thanks.
This sounds like more miss information put out by the big oil company's. Any one wanting to know the facts of using ethonal as a fuel should get David Blume's book Alcohol Can Be a Gas!
1. Almost every country can become energy independent. Anywhere that has sunlight and land can produce alcohol from plants. Brazil, the fifth largest country in the world imports no oil, since half its cars run on alcohol fuel made from sugarcane, grown on 1% of its land.
2. We can reverse global warming. Since alcohol is made from plants, its production takes carbon dioxide out of the air, sequestering it, with the result that it reverses the greenhouse effect (while potentially vastly improving the soil). Recent studies show that in a permaculturally designed mixed-crop alcohol fuel production system, the amount of greenhouse gases removed from the atmosphere by plants—and then exuded by plant roots into the soil as sugar—can be 13 times what is emitted by processing the crops and burning the alcohol in our cars.
3. We can revitalize the economy instead of suffering through Peak Oil. Oil is running out, and what we replace it with will make a big difference in our environment and economy. Alcohol fuel production and use is clean and environmentally sustainable, and will revitalize families, farms, towns, cities, industries, as well as the environment. A national switch to alcohol fuel would provide many millions of new permanent jobs.
4. No new technological breakthroughs are needed. We can make alcohol fuel out of what we have, where we are. Alcohol fuel can efficiently be made out of many things, from waste products like stale donuts, grass clippings, food processing waste-even ocean kelp. Many crops produce many times more alcohol per acre than corn, using arid, marshy, or even marginal land in addition to farmland. Just our lawn clippings could replace a third of the autofuel we get from the Mideast.
5. Unlike hydrogen fuel cells, we can easily use alcohol fuel in the vehicles we already own. Unmodified cars can run on 50% alcohol, and converting to 100% alcohol or flexible fueling (both alcohol and gas) costs only a few hundred dollars. Most auto companies already sell new dual-fuel vehicles.
6. Alcohol is a superior fuel to gasoline! It’s 105 octane, burns much cooler with less vibration, is less flammable in case of accident, is 98% pollution-free, has lower evaporative emissions, and deposits no carbon in the engine or oil, resulting in a tripling of engine life. Specialized alcohol engines can get at least 22% better mileage than gasoline or diesel.
7. It’s not just for gasoline cars. We can also easily use alcohol fuel to power diesel engines, trains, aircraft, small utility engines, generators to make electricity, heaters for our homes—and it can even be used to cook our food.
8. Alcohol has a proud history. Gasoline is a refinery’s toxic waste; alcohol fuel is liquid sunshine. Henry Ford’s early cars were all flex-fuel. It wasn’t until gasoline magnate John D. Rockefeller funded Prohibition that alcohol fuel companies were driven out of business.
9. The byproducts of alcohol production are clean, instead of being oil refinery waste, and are worth more than the alcohol itself. In fact, they can make petrochemical fertilizers and herbicides obsolete. The alcohol production process concentrates and makes more digestible all protein and non-starch nutrients in the crop. It’s so nutritious that when used as animal feed, it produces more meat or milk than the corn it comes from. That’s right, fermentation of corn increases the food supply and lowers the cost of food.
10. Locally produced ethanol supercharges regional economies. Instead of fuel expenditures draining capital away to foreign bank accounts, each gallon of alcohol produces local income that gets recirculated many times. Every dollar of tax credit for alcohol generates up to $6 in new tax revenues from the increased local business.
11. Alcohol production brings many new small-scale business opportunities. There is huge potential for profitable local, integrated, small-scale businesses that produce alcohol and related byproducts, whereas when gas was cheap, alcohol plants had to be huge to make a profit.
12. Scale matters—most of the widely publicized potential problems with ethanol are a function of scale. Once production plants get beyond a certain size and are too far away from the crops that supply them, closing the ecological loop becomes problematic. Smaller-scale operations can more efficiently use a wide variety of crops than huge specialized one-crop plants, and diversification of crops would largely eliminate the problems of monoculture.
13. The byproducts of small-scale alcohol plants can be used in profitable, energy-efficient, and environmentally positive ways. For instance, spent mash (the liquid left over after distillation) contains all the nutrients the next fuel crop needs and can return it back to the soil if the fields are close to the operation. Big-scale plants, because they bring in crops from up to 45 miles away, can’t do this, so they have to evaporate all the water and sell the resulting byproduct as low-price animal feed,which accounts for half the energy used in the plant.
"Drivers of flex-fuel cars don't have to worry much. Their on-board computers can regulate fuel mixtures."
Wrong - they don't have to worry because they have parts that are designed to withstand the higher heat and the higher corrosive nature of ethanol.
The on-board computers adjust the mixture (air & fuel) because ethanol carries with it its own Oxygen molecule so less air needs to be brought in to combust the fuel. Less air in = less nitrogen in = less NOx in the exhaust.
The onboard computers also adjust the ignition timing as the percentage of ethanol in the fuel goes up because ethanol burns slower than gas and needs to be ignited further in advance of top dead center.
On board computers do not "adjust the mix" to effect the corrosive nature of the fuel.
When talking about the dangers of an uninformed public, try not to misinform them further.
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