Tag: fuel

January 22, 2024 – Small Engine Maintenance

January 22, 2026 /

If you are like me (probably not) then you don’t do your own yard maintenance. I never grew up with a silver spoon and my parents still do all of their own yard work. It was really hard for me to consider paying someone when I had the ability to do the work, and in some cases, desire as well. That being said, I was travelling a lot for work and I simply could not keep up. It was well worth the cost considering how much they can do in the time versus myself.

I have gone through a couple of cycles. I had everything that I needed like lawnmower, trimmer, etc. Then after a couple of years I slowly gave stuff away until I had nothing. But, when I quit my job I needed to take over that task for financial reasons. Fortunately, an uncle gave my son a lawnmower so that he could build his financial empire and he wasn’t using it, so I did. Then, my father-in-law died and I refilled my shed with the things that were missing.

We still have someone doing the yard but at the lake house, not so much. Each trip I have been hauling over yard equipment. I started mowing the grass but I could not get the edges so then I brought over the trimmer. The beach brings a lot of higher wind and now I have a lot of evergreen debris on the driveway and deck so I am bringing over my blower.

If you have ever tried to start a lawnmower after sitting for five years, you might be surprised as how much work is involved. Fortunately for me, I have been in the habit of running gas engines out of fuel when I am uncertain about the future. But, I gassed the mower up and pulled and pulled to no avail. A small engine’s best friend is a can of starter fluid, sometimes called ether. I sprayed a good shot into the carburetor and viola, it started.

Tune up kits can be purchased relatively inexpensively. They typically contain a spark plug, air filter and sometimes a quart of oil or some fuel filters or primer bulbs and tubing depending on what engine it is. What I have heard is that lawnmowers should have the oil changed once a year along with the blade sharpened. Spark plugs and filters are optional if they look plugged or black. You can bet that I haven’t done it in five years, if ever. So, that is on the future agenda for the mower.

I also had to use the starter fluid to get the trimmer going. It had an additional problem that the priming bulb cracked as I was pushing on it. The second picture is the new bulb installed and I also changed the filter and spark plug. I did this because the filter was pretty clogged and those items came with the tune-up kit. Now that is up and going again.

I haven’t been able to get the blower started yet. I think all it probably needs is a shot of starter fluid. However, it seems like my son helped himself to the bottle that I had here and so this will become another unknown project until I get to the beach. Even though it is cheap, I really do not want another thing to move considering I use it very infrequently in the first place. One can will last me for years, two would almost be a lifetime.

Our yard is small. I can mow all the grass in about twenty minutes. I think that when we do move, our days of yard service will be over. That will save a couple of hundred dollars a month. It will be important to get these things going and keep them going. One thing that I do now is only use ethanol free premium. The previous homeowners left a couple of full gas cans for the generator. I suspect that those are not ethanol free. So, it is what I have used for the mower to date but once that is gone, it won’t be.

Side note here. Gasoline should be rotated. So, if we do not run the generator extensively and I have gotten several mows from a partial tank of gas, the gasoline in the the cans will sit for a long time, possibly years. What I do is pour the fuel in my car after a year and then take the can to the filling station for the car and the can. This ensures fresh fuel is always stored.

I learned the ethanol free trick years ago. I had the lower grade gas destroy my gas line in my chain saw. I suspect that it was also the culprit for the primer bulb in the trimmer. Aside from starting the trimmer, I have never used it. Most people won’t go to the cost and effort to get ethanol free gas. It’s not like I can ask my father-in-law. In summary, ethanol damages the rubber or whatever the plastic parts are made of.

Side note two. Ethanol is water soluble. If your gas has ethanol then likely it will also have water if it sits around long enough. Fuel additives called stabilizers help prevent that as well as replace the lightest components that tend to evaporate over time. If you are not going to use ethanol free gas, you should highly consider using a stabilizer product. Regardless of stabilizer, I think the ethanol is going to attack the plastic.

You would think that ethanol is the only problem for small engines but it is not. Sunlight degrades the plastic parts as well. What I mean is that there is no such thing as a small engine that does not require maintenance at some point. This seems like a good opportunity to make some short videos or at least articles so look for more of these as I get things going again.

End Your Programming Routine: You know what else doesn’t help? My bad neck and shoulder. Pulling on those starters leads to pain. The easier I can start things and the better they run makes life a lot better for me. I want to offer some encouragement, I don’t know a lot about these things either. But, you can try some simple things like starter fluid and tune-up kits and probably get things going again.

March 9, 2023 – Life Without Fuel

March 9, 2023 /

I was born in the mid-1970s. I do remember the gasoline shortage of 1979 vaguely. I remember asking my mom if the water could run out. My dad purchased a bicycle and started riding it to work everyday. He rode a bike to work and back from 1980-1983 (until we moved too far away). My mom rode a bicycle to the grocery store and around town.

Whether people realize it or not, our lifestyle revolves around fuel. One type of fuel is electricity. In my house that is the stove, the refrigerator, the freezer and the furnace. I would say that it is pretty important. A small amount of electricity can be stored in batteries and another small portion of electricity can be made with a generator but that doesn’t run without fuel.

We have all seen the Walking Dead where gasoline all runs out and the entire planet switches to ethanol. It’s a fun fantasy for sure but not really realistic on a large scale. Some preparedness minded people have made a huge investment in solar but this also assumes the outage is not caused by something like an Electro Magnetic Pulse. This is essentially a high level nuclear detonation that fries anything electrical. If you think that it is not possible, think about military escalation with Russia and a Chinese balloon that flew undiscovered along with who knows how many others.

I really don’t think that it is possible or practical to prepare for catastrophic events. What is smart is to deal with the typical, short term problems we see in everyday life. An ice storm knocks out power for a week or the government shuts down society for a month. You can’t leave or you don’t want to leave how is this going to work?

Can you actually stay home for two weeks? I know that examining what happened during the pandemic we didn’t. Sure, we had lots of food and we were fairly well prepared for survival. On the same hand, none of us knew what was going to happen so we went out in search of more while we could.

I remember standing in an hours long line at Costco on one of the first Saturdays of the lockdown. We waited for an hour and eventually decided that it wasn’t worth it. We ended up going to a scratch and ding kind of place called Wheeler Dealer because there were no lines. We got everything we wanted at scratch and dent kind of prices without the wait. It was mostly snacks and comfort foods, not something we stock a lot of. The truth is, we didn’t need to go out. It was a shortage fear that triggered us to react.

Leaving woulda/coulda/shoulda of that era behind, fuel is not much different the food. We may need to leave to get it, the prices are generally going up, it has a shelf-life, we can never have a lifetime supply at any one time and we use it daily. I am going to take the next couple of Thursdays talking about fuel storage, redundancy and alternative solutions.

End Your Programming Routine: This was going to be a single post but I couldn’t get my head around exactly what I wanted to say. There was too much and the topic was too broad and I wandered too much. I think I changed the title ten times before I settled on this one. Fuel is always something on my pantry list. It’s not sexy or fun but boy are you glad you have it when you need it.

November 4, 2021 – What Has Changed Since the Ice Storm in February

November 4, 2021 /

Yesterday, I had a conflict that left me away from home a large part of the day. I am also going to be travelling for business next week and I am not sure that I want to take a second laptop or not. Since I cant get this to work on iOS, I may be AWOL next week.

February 16, 2021 I wrote about lessons from a winter storm. One of my biggest holes were things related to energy. I didn’t have a lot of supplemental heat for comfort or electricity to protect my freezers for an extended outage. March 31, 2021 I wrote about the shortage of everything which now seems to be common knowledge. The linkage between those two was that I was having a hard time finding fuel storage namely propane tanks and fuel cannisters.

It wasn’t until mid-summer that I saw both of them come back. When they did, they weren’t at the prices they were before they were gone for months. So, as a good prepper watch the availability and price and buy when both are optimal and not needed.

The propane is flexible. With my little heater, it can run on 40 hours per cylinder. I also have adapters that can run the stove and other things. Combine this with my kerosene restocked (around 200 hours) and the fireplace we have way more supplemental heat potential.

I have been buying gas cans when they go on sale. This is to power the new generator that we have which was unfortunately part of Olivia’s inheritance. I really don’t have a clue about runtime here, but the strategy is all about rotation. The idea is to store the gasoline up to one year and then pour it into the vehicle and replace it. I have enough gas to swap it out every two months throughout the year.

Looking a little more long term, I still have on my list a couple more items. One is another inverter for converting vehicle power into energy. The idea is to have one inverter per vehicle so that they can be used as makeshift generators. I would also like to add a suitcase type generator because they are light and portable.

Also, I would like to build up a better supply of firewood as well. But, since we mostly burn in our firepit, most of my supply is actually garbage. Meaning, I largely burn off cuts and smallish branches from pruning. I am on the look-out for some inexpensive wood supply That takes planning and effort, so that will largely be an opportunity where I have the time to do it.

When thinking about a longer term outage, there are other considerations. For instance maintenance. The generator that we have was supposed to have the oil changed after five hours and then every hundred hours afterward. I am pretty sure the first change never happened and supplies are needed to run as long as you have fuel. I drained the fuel and then changed the oil so it should be ready to go.

End Your Programming Routine: “Two is one and one is none” is the preparedness mantra. In many cases I had one or none when the ice storm hit when it came to energy. Now, I am in the space of one at least. Flexibility and options rule the day when the cards are down. Fortunately, we have largely been fortunate when it comes to power outages over the years, As the saying goes, Fortune Favors the Prepared.