She called me because she couldn’t get her car started after work. We had to get it towed out of the underground parking which is quite a pain in the ass apparently.
I spent a couple hours troubleshooting the issue (smoky exhaust, barely started, ran like shit) and I burned out the starter in the process and had to put a new one in. Starters in these little 3.7L engines are pretty pathetic.
At some point in all this she mentioned she had filled up before driving to work, so I figured out how to jumper the fuel pump and pumped out this piss-colored junk. Feels oily like diesel, doesn’t burn explosively like you’d expect with straight gas.
Fresh fuel and some Seafoam snake oil to maybe clean injectors. Since I didn’t drop the tank to clean it perfectly, she’s going to put small amounts in for a few fills and burn it off completely between fills because the solution to pollution is dilution.
Her receipt showed she uses the gas pump, not the diesel, so I’m wondering how many people got to deal with this bullshit since I’m guessing the station got an entire compartment contaminated. Haven’t bothered to talk to the company, since I did the work myself and they certainly aren’t going to reimburse me for my time.
Ah well, it’s an excuse to do a pile of other maintenance I’d planned anyway and had parts for.
Wife is happy she isn’t buying a new car. Happy wife, happy life.
I mean the pumps are just pumping from the same tanks located under the pavement, whether it’s a pump with diesel or e85 it’s not going to make a difference if the tank itself is contaminated
yeah its more im really paranoid about having some sort of brain fart and doing the wrong one. I kinda thought though they had a few tanks underground and the isles were seperate or something. I guess just one tank for each would make sense. Now im going to be looking for stations that just don’t have diesel.
That’s fair! I suppose it’s entirely possible that some stations would have multiple tanks (but it’s also entirely possible for the truck to still mess up even at a station without diesel too! They typically have compartments on the delivery truck so only one truck is needed to deliver all types/grades of fuel)
see I did not know that too. I just assumed each truck did one substance because I assume doing multiple would mean more regulations and paperwork and such.