Where to buy contaminated petrol/diesel mix?

Sorry Lee - I thought it was a TEA. :-)

A bit of googling shows that diesel is apparently easier to ignite as you suggest, so it's the vapour thing that seems to be the real safety factor, presumably why the safety precautions for petrol involve all that underground stuff with vapour traps etc.

Tea? Well I suppose if it's strong enough ;-)

I wouldn't put tea in any of my engines or drink it. I've seen the muck that grows in teapots ;)

ive cut red diesel drums up without 'purging' them first with no problems, i shall watch out for any that might be contaminated if i do it again.

Heh, result, a local garage has a 250l container of petrol/diesel mix, they reckon that the mix is mostly petrol as diesel cars come in with people having filled the tank with petrol but they rarely see a petrol car that's had a tank of diesel put in. They stick it all into a drum and when they get a car that's going to the scrap yard then they fill the tank with the contaminated fuel and get a bit less cash off the scrap yard to cover the cost of fuel disposal. So they're only too happy for me to take the drum of fuel for nothing, and if anyone else wants to try something similar then scrap yards might be a good place to try. Another place that showed promise was a van rental depot's repair centre, I was given the number by the local van rental place who regularly have vans filled with petrol by mistake.

So all I have to do now is try the pinz on a mix to make sure it's OK, figure out what complications there are with storage and how to get around it, and then hope that the fuel is *just* petrol and diesel, and not just about every other liquid waste all mixed in. They did have different drums for different stuff though, and seemed keen to see me regularly turn up to take it away!

So all you ancient petrol burners, get testing, a source of free fuel might be around the corner ;-)

Some snippets;

-------------------- Up to 275 litres of petrol can be kept in any one storage place without a licence. The allowable quantity is reduced when the petrol is kept in or near buildings, or near public thoroughfares or other flammable substances (see below). In calculating the 275 litre limit, the petrol in the fuel tanks of vehicles in the storage area is included in the total.

Metal containers must be constructed so as to be reasonably secure against breakage and to prevent leakage of liquid or vapour. They should be marked with the words "petroleum-spirit" and "highly flammable".

The maximum container capacity for keeping petrol is 10 litres unless the following conditions are met:

a) the storage place is more than 6m from a building, highway or public footpath,and;

b) there is spillage retention at the storage place (eg retaining wall, trench), and;

c) the licensing authority is given written notice of the storage place before it is used.

If the storage place is less than 6m from any building, stack of timber or other flammable substance it can only be kept in the fuel tank of a vehicle and up to two 10 litre containers on a motor vehicle, motor boat, aircraft or hovercraft unless notice in writing is given to the licensing authority.

--------------------

Doesn't look too bad...

Failing that, fill it up from the drum at the garage I reckon, although static electricity might be an issue.

It's petrol fumes that burn, not the liquid. Diesel needs a wick to burn (uless you've got it boiling so it vapourises, i.e. in an engine).

Richard

Presumably beacuse most cars these days run on unleaded and have the restricted nozzle entry. A diesel nozzle won't fit into an unleaded hole.

Hey I don't care, as long as they keep making the mistake ;-)

Ian I have just had another customer fill up with petrol instead of diesel. So I now have about 60 litres of mixed fuel if you are interested, located jnc5 of M25.

No thanks, I'm out Dorset way and I'd burn that much just getting to you! People make that mistake often enough for there to be a plentiful supply of free fuel just in my local vicinity apparently, although I've yet to look any further after my initial 250l find.

The whole experiment's on hold right now anyhow as I decided to check valve clearances and knackered three of the pinz rocker covers by misreading a torque figures table and winding 35Nm onto the cover fixing bolt instead of 15Nm... I didn't take the "ping" sound as a warning and only noticed the huge cracks in the covers once I'd done it to all of them! Nuts... Each cover is about £27 and I need 3.

I'm surprised that no-one else seems to be trying out this fuel gag. For an old, unfussy petrol engine with no catalytic converter a mix of

20% or 30% diesel should be easy, and even if you only fill up with a two-thirds mix of contaminated and free fuel then you'd be paying 30p/l for fuel.

I'll be over on Saturday with some jerry cans !

The Range Rover is smoking a bit anyway ;-)

Make sure you check the ratio of diesel, but even on more than 30% the pinz didn't smoke much, when slowing down I'd often get a chuff of white smoke. I did get pinking but retarded the ignition enough to get rid of it but did seem to lose some power, before trying to regain that I broke the truck with some unrelated fiddling. The experiment looks like it'll fly though.

If you've done this kind of thing before and have any advice, do share!

Its for a offroad only V8, so it can smoke as much as it likes, within reason, if its too Smokey I suppose you can add more clean petrol.

I ran 60 ltrs of contaminated fuel, people kept telling me the engine was knackered due to the smoke at high rpm, back to straight petrol, no smoke and no obvious side effects.

Even in my 1972 s3 a little parafin made it pink like hell and it stank in the exhaust so I never retried that experiment with diesel!

AJH