rev up your engines, today I'm gonna talk about how long gasoline can last in your
car before it goes bad, now modern gasoline, hey it's a mixture of all kinds
of things, it's highly refined petroleum, it has various additives, especially in
United States where it has to meet certain government standards for burning
and cleanness, it often has dyes in it, just different manufacturers like different
colors, who the heck knows, but most modern gasoline in the United States contains about
10% ethanol alcohol, and guess what alcohol is hygroscopic, it absorbed water
so the water vapor in the air will get absorbed inside, it'll start
corroding stuff inside your car's fuel system, with this addition of 10% ethanol
to most gasoline, it's an octane booster, you can't let this gas sit around for
all that long or it will start to either corrode, oxidate, and it goes bad, now the
American Petroleum Institute says modern gas with ethanol, especially in the
United States, is good for three to five months just sitting there in your car
and they say if you add fuel stabilizer into this fuel, it can last up to a year
fuel stabilizer like the Sta-Bil, can help prevent oxidation and it can also
prevent gummy and varnish deposits from occurring inside the fuel system when
it's sitting there and not being used, because you don't want the fuel to break down
through oxidation, or from just natural separation of all the stuff as it sits
there not doing anything not being burned, modern gasoline is not made to be
stuck in your car and let it sit for two or three years and then come and start
it up, now if you're just storing gasoline and you store it in a completely sealed
container, it can last the longest of all possible times, if you put a little
stabilizer in it, it's completely sealed fill to the top, you're not gonna get any
oxidation and it can last actually more than a year, but realize your car's gas
tank is not a sealed system, it's got various vents in it, so if you pour gas
in here, even with stabilizer, it's still going to have some evaporation it's not
a totally sealed system, if you we're gonna have your car sit for
a really long time, you could go through the trouble of getting a gas cap or plug
up the gas filler with something so that it doesn't vent at all and then go
through the evap system and pinch off the hoses so there's no venting of the
gas tank and it could be stored that way, but that would be a gigantic hassle, so
if you really were going to store a car for years, you'd want to empty the gas tank
out, have all the fuel burned by running a car until it stops running, so that
there's no fuel in the system at all if you're gonna let it sit for years and
years, but let's say you're gonna let your car sit for a year or less, here's
what you would do, first you'd pour the stabilizer into your gas tank, they all
come with directions, for this you should put one ounce in for every two and a
half gallons of fuel that you're gonna have in your tank, then you go to the
nearest gas station and fill it up to the top, and the reason you fill it up to
the top is this, the less air that's inside the gas tank, the less oxidation
is going to take place, so you want to fill in as high as you can and so
there's not much air to help oxidate the fuel over time, then you want to start
the car and run it for about ten minutes
and here's why you want to run it, as soon as you have the stabilizer in there
and you fill up with gas, the stuff mixes almost instantly, so the tanks gonna be
all mixed up, but you need to have the stabilizer and fuel mixture in
everything, in the fuel pump, in the fuel lines, and a fuel filter, and especially
in the fuel injectors, so that it's all mixed up inside and you don't have any
raw fuel that might deteriorate and clog stuff up, now when I was younger
especially with motorcycles if we were storing them, there's a little screw here
and we would just take the screw out and we'd empty all the fuel out of the
carburetor. but you can't do that with a fuel-injected system, so by running the
car ten minutes after you fill it up and have the stabilizer inside, you're gonna
have the fuel and stabilizer mix and everything so it won't come apart and
destroy your car when it's time to start it later, now let's say you were a bad
boy or girl and you didn't do it, your car sat for a while you started up and
it kind of runs bad, well what you want to do is drive it a little bit and then
fill it up as fast as you can with new gas, I had a motorcycle like that years
ago, I let it sit for years without using it, when I opened the cap up, it smelled
like turpentine, it didn't even smell like gasoline, because all the volatile stuff
had already evaporated off and in that case at least it was a motorcycle, so I
just siphoned the old crap out of the tank, put in new stuff, it ran a little
rough for a while but and after the first tank was gone it went back to
normal, so now you know how long gasoline can
last in your car and since this is mechanic Monday, I'm giving away some of
this fuel stabilizer, for a chance to win just place a clean non offensive comment
on the YouTube comments below and a winner will be chosen randomly by a
computer, so if you never want to miss another one of my new car repair videos,
remember to ring that Bell!