Damage to fuel components from ethanol
 

Has anybody experienced or suspected that your fuel injection system has been damaged by ethanol? I buy all my gas from Costco. In the last 4 months or so I have noticed a new sticker on the pumps indicating that the fuel may contain up to 10% ehanol. ABout that time, I noticed that all three of my cars were not running smoothly at idle. I had the adjust the CO to make them right. It seemed funny they all started to act up at the same time. One of my 420's got progressivly worse. It turned out that the fuel distributor had failed slowly. I did a post mortem and found that the diaphram (rubber & fabric) was shot. When I took it apart it was all wrinkeled up like there was a reaction to the fuel. Maybe that is normal but it sure looked like some other situations where I have used solvents on rubber parts and they started to swell up. I have opened up several fuel distributors and have never seen a diaphram in as bad a shape as this one was. I am sustpecting long term exposure to ethanol.

Anybody heard anything about it?

DaimlerC officialy discourages its use but most pumps I see have the ethanol sticker. What can you do?

Not much since every gas station in the country should be using it due to MTBE being basically outlawed.

10% ethanol blend will only damage most vehicles with extended use (meaning 80,000 miles or more). I don't really know what would happen with older (meaning 20 years or more) cars though or cars that have really high milages already. It doesn't get quite as good a gas milage as regular gas. Besides the premium fuel I use in the Mercedes (91 octane or higher) not being available in a low ethanol blend, I typically pay the extra amount at the pump for the stuff without ethanol for my truck. Lately this hasn't been a problem with the price of ethanol rising.

I thought the manufacturers test their fuel components for compatibility with ethanol before production. They did at Chrysler when I worked there in the early 80s. This shouldn't be a surprise to the manufacturers that their components would contact ethanol during service. This has been known since at least 1982. I'm curious to what's going on.

Well we used to use %10 MTBE as the additive to gas, that phased out a few months ago. Now we use %10 Ethanol in all blends to replace the MTBE as the Oxygenate. 24 years ago there were not too many stations using an Ethanol Blend, now every station in the USA that is in an area that MTBE was required now pumps E10 gas basically. Although not all are labeled as such. The %10 Ethanol blend gas produces less energy than the MTBE blend as well, which means you will get less gas mileage and a small drop in performance from it compared to MTBE Blends of the past. Not to mention that Ethanol absorbs water as well so that just adds to the issue if water it introduced.

Take a look at this site.
http://www.ethanol.org/usingethanol.html

Ethanol website
 

A quote:

<<Ethanol, the high performance fuel: * Pure 100% ethanol has an octane rating of 113, so adding 10% ethanol to gasoline raises the overal octane by 2 to 3 points.* Ethanol has a lower BTU value than gasoline, meaning that ethanol burns cooler and is gentler on the vehicle's engine - less wear and tear leads to longer engine life.>>

This website reads like it's owned by a corn farmer.

It's true that ethanol has a higher octane rating than gasoline which means nothing. Plain fact is that it has 1/3 less energy per gallon which means you use more to achieve the same performance. When Washington state required a 10% ethanol blend in the winter months (long gone, thank God) my gas mileage dropped 10% and performance was down. And don't even think of E85 in an engine not designed for it. This is NOT Brazil.

Wander on down to Barnes & Noble and read for free a good article by Jim Pasha on ethanol use in the Porsche magazine "Excellence."