How does one know if you get or do not get ethanol E10 crap fuel?

Curiously, farmers last winter decreased the number of acres of corn planted and chose to plant wheat and soybeans instead.

US corn decrease sparks price fears

Bloomberg.com: Worldwide

 

Yeah I have seen all these prices going up here and we use ethanol from sugar production which is a waste product of the process.
I blame E10 for the war in Iraq, the Exxon Valdez oil spill and it's the reason Kylie Minogue no longer wears G string undies. Dam that stuff.

Lets drill more oil, there is 30 or 40 years worth of domestic consumption there, enough to see me off the planet, stuff my kids and grand kids, let them cope in a hot polluted world without oil.

Selfish isn't it?

 

This "fact" is often quoted as a justification for a slight decrease in MPG.

But this fact is not the whole story. It is true that if one captures all the energy from a complete burn of E10, that it will yield 3.3% less energy. But that isn't what we're doing. We're injecting liquid E10 into a compressing cylinder, sparking one or two areas in it, and letting a chemical reaction cause an expansion that is timed (hopefully) to push that cylinder back out at just the right rate to capture a large amount of energy.

So there are a lot of other factors, for example:

1) Does the fuel atomize into tiny droplets that have access to oxygen for a smooth complete timely burn? If the fuel forms larger drops, the drop cores will burn too slowly to "push".

2) Does the smaller atomic weight and lower burn temperature of ethanol molecules reduce the random chance that gas molecules will split and burn in time?

3) Does Ethanol absorb water (or is it produced without extracting all its attendant water) and thus reduce the burn rate?

What is tragic is that we have apparently not done scientific studies with certified pure ingredients on double blind cars. This is inexcusable. And it is criminal if oil and big-agg companies blocked the EPA from doing such tests...

 

In just the last 6 days that I have used my first tank of E10 - my mpgs have dropped, the engine idles rough and revs higher. My "pride and joy" is hurting - so don't tell me to get over it. The ethanol joke has hit home - and I don't like it.

 

To my surprise I found a gas station that advertises this. I wasn't driving my prius unfortunately but the car I was using had a noticeable increase in mpg. From about 22 to 26 mpg!

 

Bruce, your first tank may have had excess water in it because it may have been the first load of E10 at that gas station. Give it a week and another fillup. I've been using E10 in mine fulltime for two years and it runs fine.

 

Ethanol acts as a detergent-getting all the gunk out of your tank and fuel system. It's possible that the lower/poor performance is due to the ethanol turning gunk back into liquid and the liquid gunk being run through your motor is causing the poor performance.

It's not uncommon for people who switch from non E10 gas to E10 gas to have fuel filter problems. They blame it on the E10, when actually it was the gunk from all the non E10 gas they've used that caused the problem (the E10 was just cleaning up the problem).

I would encourage you to try a few more tankfuls of E10 before drawing any permanent conclusions.

 

Less energy is less energy no matter how you want to slice and dice it.