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Comment by jdpedrie | Hacker News Reader

Is there any concern around having a tank full of gas so old? Do you add a stabilizer to keep it from going stale?

If you find non-oxygenated gas, that shouldn't be a problem. Ethanol based gas will go bad faster, and have issues starting in cold weather.

If it does run often enough to burn the fuel, the generator will actually turn on solely for that reason.

His point is that gas spoils. It polymerizes creating a bunch of hunk that clogs the fuel lines

would be a good idea to run a good fuel preserver in the gas

https://www.goldeagle.com/product/sta-bil-fuel-stabilizer/ (no affiliation, I just have old cars in storage)

This mostly happens in the presence of air. As long as the gas tank is tightly sealed, this isn’t an issue. I drive a BMW i3, I regularly have a tank of gas sloshing around for months with no issues.

All of the plug-in hybrids run maintenance cycles every month or so to ensure that the motor turns over and some fuel goes through the injectors.

His point is that gas spoils. It polymerizes creating a bunch of hunk that clogs the fuel lines

This is something that post-apocalypse fiction usually gets wrong. After a year you would probably not be able to grab any random abandoned car and drive it (even if the battery held charge)

Yeah, and the old jeeps in Jurassic World have 20 year old batteries and 20 year old fuel, and a couple of kids got one of them working again.

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