Can my gasoline get old and cause problems?

I am NOT arguing "the system".
I AM arguing your description of it and how it works.
The system is fine; YOU are WAY off base.

 

No. You are the one being ridiculous and way off base.

As I computed for you in a prior thread, the amount of moisture that can be carried in by the initial make-up air is very small, and easily handled by a small about of gas line drier. E10 fuel comes with plenty of such drier.

One needs a continual air flow or exchange with the outside atmosphere to get enough water to matter. The PHEV industry has dealt with this with their new evaporative control measures, a substantial step up from what is used in regular non-plug-in gassers. See links in the old thread.

 

SIGH. This is getting REALLY old.
The ONLY thing I objected to was a statement that the fuel system is COMPLETELY SEALED....which it is NOT and can not be.
That's it. Nothing more.
This protracted pissing match is ridiculous.

 

He did not say "completely" sealed. Only you used that term, just now. That word appears nowhere in this thread prior to post #23.

Please quit creating disputes over words that YOU put into other people's mouths, as you did a few days ago over at "First 5 minutes MPG".

 

Yes he DID.

Please quit twisting what other people said......yourself.
And butting into other people's conversations isn't nice either.
Especially when your only motive seems to be creating hate and discontent.

 

That choice made this a teaching moment. You'll find on forums it is quite common for a discussion to turn into an argument of semantics. It's breaks the spirit of the information attempted to be shared. Wording is easy to stumble on, but the message remains clear. Suggest better language and move on. Remember, this will happen again. Learning how to handle it, then leading by example, is a gain for everyone who participates.

 

^ You should re-type it in all caps...



Rob43

 

Perhaps you could lead by example, rather that reserving each of those traits as your exclusive prerogatives.

 

One way or another - if one lives in a humid area, humid air is getting into the system. This wouldn't be the big problem that it is until two things are put into the fray: alcohol in the fuel, and a pandemic that has some people not using their fuel for months on end. Exposed to just every-day air, degradation of American corn-infused gasoline has been noted to start happening in months when exposed to air.

This is a retailer of fuel savers, so take it for what it's worth: "In general, pure gas begins to degrade and lose its combustibility as a result of oxidation and evaporation in three to six months, if stored in a sealed and labeled metal or plastic container. Ethanol-gasoline blends have a shorter shelf life of two to three months. Fuel stabilized gasoline can last between one and three years under optimal conditions. Gas stored in a car tank begins to degrade in just about a month." -- Does Gasoline Go Bad? |

A better read can be found here: Does Ethanol-Free Gas Go Bad? Fuel Shelf Life Comparisons

 

Here is a relevant refresher from an item I posted last year (please don't look at who I was replying to back then):
======================================

Autoblog: How desiging the Chevy Volt's sealed gas tank brought automakers, CARB together

"... but now we've got the scoop on the gas tank used to keep liquid fuel in the Volt from evaporating or going stale for up to a year.

Back in 2009, we learned that the Volt can move without gas in the tank, but that's only part of the problem that GM engineers had to solve. They also needed to figure out how to keep fuel from simply evaporating away. Standard vehicles use charcoal canisters to trap the gas, and then return it to the tank once the engine starts running. In the Volt, though, the engine could potentially remain off for a very long time even under daily use – up to six weeks, before the Volt's "maintenance mode" automatically kicks in. That's why a special sealed steel tank was developed. ...

Recently, we spoke with Jon Stec, fuel system integration engineer for the Volt, about the sealed tanks came to be. ... GM began talking with other OEMs and CARB to figure out how to design a fuel system that would work with a plug-in vehicle, because a conventional system wouldn't work. The most important thing to figure out was how to handle evaporative emissions and prevent hydrocarbons from getting into the air.

Typically, in a standard vehicle, the fuel system captures errant hydrocarbons in a canister and, when the engine runs, it purges that canister. "This time," Stec said, "we don't have the engine running all the time, so what do you do? Do you put a gargantuan canister down there and hope that whatever hydrocarbons you're going to develop – typically because of temperature changes and fuel fill – will be caught? That's not very feasible."

GM knew other technologies were possible. On earlier Prius models, for example, Toyota tried a bladder tank, where there was an outer shell with a flexible shell on the inside that would shrink to try an reduce the space where vapors could form and deal with emissions this way. "That didn't work so well for them," Stec said.

This time around, the OEMs involved collectively decided to make a pressurized vessel, to seal it and then to give the the powertrain the controllers to open and close the system. The reason that GM worked with others to develop this system was because having each manufacturer come forward with its own proposal and hoping that the regulations concerning the tank emissions were flexible enough to allow for the different solutions seemed unlikely. "It had to be an agreement between all the OEMs, and it was resolved three or four years ago that we do this process (use a sealed system)," Stec said. "All the OEMs, as far as I know, are going to pursue this technology."

Of course, if your fuel tank can't be sealed all the time. Since the Volt uses gas, drivers were going to have to open it up at some point to refuel it, so "we had to develop a whole new control process to unseal the tank without getting any hydrocarbons in the atmosphere and allow the customer to refuel the tank," Stec said. ... "

This article ends with a copy of a GM Press Release:

"Special Gas Tank Caters to All-Electric Chevy Volt Drivers
Pressure-Sealed steel fuel tank contains gasoline vapors from sporadic engine use
..."

 

It comes down to not letting fuel you have get excessively old. That means drive using the engine from time to time.

A suggestion to use the tank contents faster is to run with Charge-Mode.

 

I have been thinking about E0. There's a Marathon "Recreational" 90 (which is supposedly E0) pump near by. But I am not sure how busy that pump is. Is there a way to test the staleness of E0 gas?

 

Does anyone know if the Marathon "Recreational" 90 gas is top-tier? If it's not top-tier, what would be a good additive to add to bring it up to top-tier?

 

You are worrying WAY too much......about the wrong things.

Regardless of the marketing claims made for whatever brand of fuel you think you are using.......the only additive that you will ever need in your gas is a shot of Techron every oil change or so.

Then.....you will likely pay enough extra for the E0 90 octane to more than make up for just burning a little extra gas over time.
Really. Honestly.

If you just can't MAKE your brain stop worrying about stale gas, just put in the recommended amount of fuel stabilizer at each fill.

 

I am wondering if anyone knows if the fuel pump draws from the bottom of the tank. If it does, then we can be sure, it will draw in any water that got phase separated from E10.

Also, one thing I noticed with the new 2020 I picked up last week was that the fuel meter was sitting at the first bar, which it must have sat at since 03/2020, so Toyota leaves the tank with very little (likely E0 stabilized) fuel during manufacture, which we probably can mimic like @Rob43 has reported doing. The dealer did fillup the tank at delivery though.

 

Just think about that for a minute or so.
It is pretty much guaranteed that it draws from very near to the bottom......for reasons that should be obvious.

 

If you have any hope of using all the tank's capacity, it would HAVE to draw from the bottom. If it drew from the middle, you'd only be able to use half the tank. If it had some sort of float that kept the pickup just below the surface, you'd suck air if the car sloshed the gas too much AND water would gather at the bottom creating big problems when you got close to empty rather that being continually drawn off in the extremely minute amounts that actually do occur.

My advice is to quit worrying and do what the car's designers and engineers worked so hard to make possible. Drive the car.