I’ve been good and sick for the last week. Today’s the first time I’ve felt human since last Wednesday, although I did have a narrow window on Thanksgiving day during the big meal (that may have been what I was most thankful for that day). I had two unrelated things going on. And I don’t recommend either.
Sorry to those of you who saw me as away all week.. I admit I was lurking, but usually for about 10 minutes every few hours. After 10 minutes, my desire to prevent head explosion usually won out over whittling down my feeds and weeding out spam.
Now I just have to remember where I was before all of this happened..
Hey Davak, you know all those times you’ve told me “there’s no such thing as bad press?” Do you think MSFT was giddy that their Zune got some air time on CNN?
I may be a tiny bit biased, but I don’t think this press will make hoards of people race from their homes in order to buy a Zune. It was a great plug for the new and diminished Shuffle, though.
On our recent road trip to Durham for a Tech-Recipes Summit, we accidently put 4 gallons of diesel in our non-diesel vehicle. Googling the obvious keywords didn’t get us very far, so I thought I’d share our experience in the hopes it would help others. We ended up with no problems, but I’ll just warn you that this information is from a few sources, contains suggestions based on a few experiences, your milage (heh) can and will probably vary. If in doubt, please seek professional help. I’m only writing this in the hopes it can help some folks — I know more about Ghz than MPG, so take the contents of this post with caution. There are many different cars and engines and I bet that their reactions to diesel contamination will be very different. You are responsible for your vehicle and the decision you ultimately make is your own. I recommend towing your car to a mechanic if you have any hesitation. Enough gluteal coverage? Let’s continue.
If you face this situation, your solution will be heavily influenceded by a number of factors. I will describe our condition in detail and that of a friend who also had a similiar problem but with a very different outcome. Our 20 gallon tank was mostly empty (it still had 2-3 gallons of normal gas) and 4 gallons of diesel were added. We did not start the engine at this point, but instead used our phone lifelines.
We called a friend back at a home who completely filled his tank with diesel.. while the car was still running, pretty much the worst case scenario. It stopped running and would no longer start. The only solution at that point was a tow to a mechanic and the removal of the engine and fuel tank and most of the rest of the fuel handling system. Each component had to be cleaned to get the diesel out. My heart sank at the thought of this.
David knew an excellent mechanic and was able to reach him by phone. Given our situation, he told us that if it was his car, he’d fill it up with the highest octane fuel, use gas treatment and fuel injection system cleaner, and drive the diesel out of the system. He warned that the car would not like it, the engine would knock and stutter and generally not want to cooperate. After a few tanks of good gas and gas treatment and engine cleaner, he recommended replacing the fuel filter. If this solution worked, it would be the cheapest.
The only other alternative was towing the car to a mechanic to have the fuel tank drained and possibly cleaned. This was possible because none of the diesel had been pulled toward the engine as a result of starting the engine.
After much contemplation at the gas station, I concluded that there were three potential outcomes:
Fill the car with good fuel and treatments, say a little prayer and drive the diesel out. It works and the expense is $50 in extra gas cost and fuel treatments.
Follow the steps in option 1, but with too much diesel in the tank, the engine becomes inoperable. If the good gas/fuel treat plan doesn’t work, expect $2000-3000 in repairs.
Tow the car immediately to a mechanic and pay $500-1000 in repairs to guarantee no damage to your car.
Option 3 is the safest by far. We opted for #1 and it worked out well in our case. We had 4 gallons of diesel in a 20 gallon tank, a 20% ratio of diesel to gas and about 14 of the 16 gallons of gas were high octane.
If we had topped off the tank with diesel, option 3 would have been our only possibility. Diesel will not run a gas engine. Diesel != gas. With 20% diesel in our tank, it was, as David’s mechanic friend said, like getting a tank full of really bad gas. There are fuel filtration measures in place to protect the engine from some bad fuel, so we lucked out with the ratio we had. 100% diesel certainly will not work. If you have a ratio somewhere between, you have a difficult decision to make. My advice is to consider it carefully and take the safe approach and have your vehicle’s stomach pumped, especially if you are not a gambler at heart and certainly if you have a ratio much higher than 20%. At 20%, our vehicle was reluctant to start and did knock some. It also stopped a few times while driving. David suggested topping off the tank after a few gallons were burned and when we did this, the engine behaved much better.
After returning a thousand miles home and driving around here for a week, we took the vehicle to a dealership for an oil change and asked for their advice regarding the fuel filter. They suggested that if the car was behaving properly not to worry about the fuel filter as this is not a quick replacement.
Long story short, if you are in this situation, take a deep breath and stay calm. If the diesel isn’t in your engine yet, there are solutions. Even if you drive off with diesel, your car can be repaired.
My wonderful wife and excited blogger made scones for breakfast last Sunday. You can read the details in her post about them. Oh, they were fantastic! I may be biased, but I think her blog is beautiful and I’m excited that she’s excited about it. Her blog is titled Bake or Break, adventures of an amateur baker. I’m pretty sure that I’m going to have to give up my amateur standing as a baking sampler. Her coworkers are also thrilled since she takes the majority of her bakings to work with her (which is the only way I won’t have to express my mass in tons). I’m sorry for everyone out there who can’t sample her fine creations, though.
One of my favorite memories of college was spending an afternoon with a roommate making bubbles of ever increasing size. We started with little wire coat hanger loops and ended up with loops of various composition and diameters of more than a meter. When my cousin Sammy visited last summer, she was fascinated by the smaller versions of bubble makery. Leading up to this summer’s visit, we’ve both been looking forward to bigger and better bubbles.
We used a small plastic pool to hold the bubble recipe. I googled a number of recipes for large bubbles and adapted one out of them. In a 5 gallon bucket we mixed 5 gallons of water, 2 containers of soap, and 1 bottle of glycerine. We tried hoola hoops of various sizes wrapped in ace bandages, but given the bubble mixture and winds, a smaller sized hoop about 35cm in diameter. It was fashioned out of a scrap of 12-2 romex that we had leftover from the construction of our home. The loop was wrapped in elastic bandage to allow more bubble mixture absorption and a handle made it much easier to.. handle.
We had a great time making bubbles (and taking more than 500 pictures). You can see a small set of these shots here at flickr. In the photo above, the bubble is caught during its final moments, popping from right to left.
