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Silver Cervy · 01-17-2017, 12:29 AM

I'll start off with a bit of a story:

Last week I had a lot of bad luck with my BRZ. On Thursday my battery went dead for no good reason leading me to believe that it had gone bad, which meant I had to miss work and take it in to the dealership. It had indeed gone bad and I got it replaced under warranty (the only good part of this story). Two days later I'm trying to get to work again and the car can't get ignition, I heard it trying to crank but it would just sputter out. With the engine being completely stock and the only thing being changed recently was the battery, I immediately assumed that it was causing the issue. I had a tow truck take it back to the dealership while a friend drove me to work. I was certain that it was some sort of electrical issue with the new battery that was causing the spark plugs to not fire, or maybe a bad alternator, but the real culprit ended up being something completely unrelated. As it turned out, I had filled up the tank the night before at a Shell station really close to my house, and apparently the gas tanks there had been heavily diluted with water, so much so that according to the Subaru technician about 70% of what was in my tank was water. As you can guess this meant that my entire fuel system had been corrupted and a lot of labor was needed to fix it, which of course meant a big service bill. I'm still without my car and having my friend drive me around, and I'm currently trying to get the Shell station to admit fault and pay for my expenses but they are being difficult. They claimed that they checked the fuel 2 days prior to the incident and that it checked out, and when I asked if there had been any other reports or complaints from customers that day, they wouldn't answer. And as the dealership won't release the car without receiving payment, I'm in a real bind right now.

That's not the point of this whole post, though. One thing I remembered about my stop at the Shell station was that the fuel was pumping very slow. I tried one pump and it was coming out so slowly that after at least 2 minutes I had only gotten 0.3 of a gallon, so I moved to another one which pumped faster but still slower than normal. I did a bit of searching to see if this was related to the diluted fuel or just a coincidence, and I read one thread where someone claimed that the pumps have a sort of "dilution detection system" which is basically an apparatus around the tube that expands when it detects water or some other foreign liquid and restricts the flow of the fuel. I don't know what to think about this theory because I've dealt with slow pumps in the past and never had my car break down on me, so I'm wondering if anyone here knows if this is true or not, or can actually explain why some pumps are slower than others.

I've also heard other conspiracies about gas stations, like how the advertised "cheap" price is only given on half of the pumps in a station, and that those pumps are programmed to flow a bit slower than the others so that people will be less inclined to use them, and instead use the "faster" pumps with the higher price. Another one I've heard is that many stations purposefully dilute their fuel to a certain degree to save money, which wouldn't surprise me at all if it turned out to be true.

What do you guys think? Any of you have an interesting gas station tale?

01-17-2017, 12:29 AM	#1
Silver Cervy Some really cool title Join Date: May 2016 Drives: 2014 Subaru BRZ Limited Location: Matthews, NC Posts: 343 Thanks: 39 Thanked 211 Times in 125 Posts Mentioned: 2 Post(s) Tagged: 0 Thread(s)	Discussion on gas stations I'll start off with a bit of a story: Last week I had a lot of bad luck with my BRZ. On Thursday my battery went dead for no good reason leading me to believe that it had gone bad, which meant I had to miss work and take it in to the dealership. It had indeed gone bad and I got it replaced under warranty (the only good part of this story). Two days later I'm trying to get to work again and the car can't get ignition, I heard it trying to crank but it would just sputter out. With the engine being completely stock and the only thing being changed recently was the battery, I immediately assumed that it was causing the issue. I had a tow truck take it back to the dealership while a friend drove me to work. I was certain that it was some sort of electrical issue with the new battery that was causing the spark plugs to not fire, or maybe a bad alternator, but the real culprit ended up being something completely unrelated. As it turned out, I had filled up the tank the night before at a Shell station really close to my house, and apparently the gas tanks there had been heavily diluted with water, so much so that according to the Subaru technician about 70% of what was in my tank was water. As you can guess this meant that my entire fuel system had been corrupted and a lot of labor was needed to fix it, which of course meant a big service bill. I'm still without my car and having my friend drive me around, and I'm currently trying to get the Shell station to admit fault and pay for my expenses but they are being difficult. They claimed that they checked the fuel 2 days prior to the incident and that it checked out, and when I asked if there had been any other reports or complaints from customers that day, they wouldn't answer. And as the dealership won't release the car without receiving payment, I'm in a real bind right now. That's not the point of this whole post, though. One thing I remembered about my stop at the Shell station was that the fuel was pumping very slow. I tried one pump and it was coming out so slowly that after at least 2 minutes I had only gotten 0.3 of a gallon, so I moved to another one which pumped faster but still slower than normal. I did a bit of searching to see if this was related to the diluted fuel or just a coincidence, and I read one thread where someone claimed that the pumps have a sort of "dilution detection system" which is basically an apparatus around the tube that expands when it detects water or some other foreign liquid and restricts the flow of the fuel. I don't know what to think about this theory because I've dealt with slow pumps in the past and never had my car break down on me, so I'm wondering if anyone here knows if this is true or not, or can actually explain why some pumps are slower than others. I've also heard other conspiracies about gas stations, like how the advertised "cheap" price is only given on half of the pumps in a station, and that those pumps are programmed to flow a bit slower than the others so that people will be less inclined to use them, and instead use the "faster" pumps with the higher price. Another one I've heard is that many stations purposefully dilute their fuel to a certain degree to save money, which wouldn't surprise me at all if it turned out to be true. What do you guys think? Any of you have an interesting gas station tale?