OT Alcohol and diesel


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Posted by D Sherman on Tuesday, October 21, 2008 at 14:47:22 :

I've been burning mostly antique furnace oil in my M543 wrecker all summer as I used it to reconstruct my collapsed garage. I had 3 barrels of oil pumped out of an old tank in my yard several years ago. I let it stand in the barrels for a year to settle the water and dirt, and have been filtering what I get out. Some of the last of the oil I got out had a little water in it, so I thought it would be good to put some alcohol in the tank to dissolve it so I didn't end up with a slug of water trying to go through the injectors. Instead of using that expensive "fuel line drier", I just got a gallon of denatured alky from the hardware store and dumped it in. All of a sudden the mixture turned yellowish white. After it sat for a while, it turned into bubbles and then cleared up, but with a layer of something floating on top of the diesel. I'm pretty sure the "something" is the alky, but maybe it's the stuff they put in to "denature" it. I thought they just used kerosene and methyl alcohol as denaturants. It's definitely not water, because it floats on top of the diesel and it burns when I soak some up on a stick and light it. The truck's still running fine, in fact the exhaust is a little cleaner than when it was running modern diesel when I got it, but that might be because I've also put 5 gallons of gasoline in the tank (65 gal tank).

So, anybody out there have any idea why alcohol should not mix with diesel like it mixes with gasoline? Is there something weird in hardware store alky? Is 30 year old furnace oil that much different from modern diesel? Did the oil and alky react to produce something totally new and different that I'm going to regret (nitroglycerin perhaps)?



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