A Real World Look at Alcohol in Your Tank

Earlier this year my air-cooled 2009 BMW boxer sat for seven months with no internal combustion. A Battery Tender kept the disconnected battery charged and I had added Sta-Bil fuel-stabilizer while it sat. No float bowls to drain because it’s fuel-injected.

Ready to ride, I rolled it out, checked the tires, and connected the battery. The engine spun over perfectly, the starter motor strong and quick. In fact, I had quite a few minutes to admire the strength of the battery and the enthusiasm of the starter motor because the engine wouldn’t fire.

It's hard for me to remember the last time a bike failed to run—things just don’t break like they used to. I confirmed that there was gas in the tank, pulled a plug, and saw spark. “Can you hear the fuel pump whine?” asked my friend Chris Geiter. He had already walked me through removing a fuel injector to see if it was squirting fuel. It wasn’t.

I will admit here that there’s a perverse joy when things go wrong because of the enjoyment so many of us have in fixing things. The injectors didn’t spray, but I was having fun removing injectors for the first time. Geiter had me examine the injectors and the wiring, walking me through some basic checks over the phone. It was very similar to a college professor helping a “challenged” four-year-old learn to read.

No fuel pump whine. Geiter, a lead tech/genius at DynoJet, had found the problem.

Next call was to the dealer. “Yep,” the young man said, “those pumps go bad if you let it sit too long. They’re around $360.”

I hung up stunned and a little bit angry. I pulled all the bodywork and checked the fuel-pump wiring (no fuses on this bike). There were no visual problems, and so I started muttering something about German engineering.

Then I remembered meeting Mike Hughes, purveyor of Irish Mike's Performance in Henderson, Nevada. He was close and I figured that perhaps he could rebuild the pump, or get a deal on one, or somehow help get this boxer running again. Turns out he could, and for only $20.

“Bring me the pump," he told me in his brogue. "We’ll soak it overnight, I bet it’s gummed up with ethanol.” I didn’t believe this was the problem (two dealers had already told me I needed a new fuel pump) but I took the pump to Irish Mike’s anyway. The next day my bike was running and I started studying a problem that I had only heard theoretically: Ethanol in our fuel.

As motorcyclist, why should we care about ethanol? We should care because the EPA wants to increase the percentage of ethanol in our fuel from the current 10% to 15%, and as Mike Hughes showed me, the current level is already reaping havoc on our motorcycles. The AMA's American Motorcyclist magazine has been following the ethanol issue and the EPA's "Renewable Volume Obligations" to force more ethanol into the marketplace, but in one of its latest issues, the magazine tells us that it's our ambivalence and unfamiliarity with the downsides of ethanol that is one of the biggest problems. Until my BMW wouldn't fire, ethanol was a word I ignored at the gas pump. After spending a few hours with Hughes, ethanol is a dirty a word that is costing riders a lot of money and long-term usage will only make things worse.

Here’s the real story from a man in the trenches, as Hughes shows us the problems and offers some solutions when it comes to damage caused by ethanol.

Ethyl alcohol, or ethanol, is hygroscopic, meaning it absorbs water vapor directly from the atmosphere. It’s also a terrific solvent or cleaner. So we’re inviting water into our fuel systems and we’re either scouring all sorts of deposits anywhere ethanol reaches or attacking components that were never intended to come into contact with a solvent.

“Twenty percent of my repair business, maybe more, is due to ethanol,” Hughes claims. “I’m either replacing parts that ethanol has eaten, cleaning residue out of places like fuel injectors and fuel pumps, or fixing all the issues that water in fuel causes.”

A KTM team Hughes tunes for has lost two races due to failed fuel injectors directly related to ethanol. He has personally replaced dozens of Ducati fuel tanks due to ethanol’s damage. “Ducati flew a 55 gallon drum of America’s ethanol to Italy to study because they were having so many fuel-related issues in this country,” Mike tells us.

A MotoGuzzi California sat at the workbench because it wouldn’t run. “This Guzzi sat too long, like your BMW. My experience is that anything over 28 days has the fuel and alcohol separate and it won’t rejoin. I’ve had Aprilia RSV4s in here that won’t idle, all due to ethanol.”

Hughes spends a lot of time replacing in-tank fuel lines, filters, screens…and fuel tanks themselves. He’s seen ethanol eat foam air filters, dissolve fuel-filter screens and leave “nasty deposits” on carburetor bodies, deposits that sometimes eat the aluminum of carburetors.

Removing ethyl alcohol from our fuel, or at least reducing it, doesn’t appear to be a viable solution due to alcohol’s benefits (raises octane rating, renewable energy produced from agricultural feedstocks) and massive infrastructure. What helps is that Mike Hughes is in the trenches as a tech, but he’s also an enthusiastic rider. Those two ingredients have motivated him to find fixes and solutions as a businessman and enthusiast. I will describe the solutions in photos and captions but each of us can make our voices heard to the EPA regarding ethyl alcohol in our fuel.

I'm sorry to say that there isn’t a ton of good news to end this article. The pressures being put on the EPA are mounting and it appears as if they will stay with 10% ethanol for the time being. You have to imagine, however, that there's great pressure from the corn industry and other areas that are pushing for 15% ethanol. The goal of this story then is to put you on the offensive in your long-term-storage plans and give you some tools to fight the downsides of ethanol, thanks to Irish Mike’s hands-on research. Oh, and maybe save you $360 when you’re told a new fuel pump is necessary...

More Next Tuesday!