as if high gas prices weren’t bad enough

September 1, 2008

stp-gas-treatmentToday I went to start my 2005 GMC Canyon (which has the 4-cylinder by the way) and she wouldn’t fire. Battery was good, alternator good, everything else good. But turn, turn, turn and no fire.

I let her sit for a few minutes and attempted to start the engine again. This time it fired and ran smooth just like it always has. I romped the gas a few times. No sputtering, stuttering or stalling.

There’s 2 reasons why this happened.

First, I’ve never had a fuel injector cleaning service done on her and yeah, she needs it.

Secondly (and this is the most important part), it really pisses me off that fuel stations sell shit gas and that is why you need to have fuel injector cleaning services performed on your vehicle to begin with.

After she fired over I headed to the local Circle-K and bought a 12oz bottle of STP Gas Treatment. The tank is mostly full so it was okay to dump it in there. This will mix with the fuel in there and hopefully de-crapify it enough until I get the injection service done.

. . .

Stations started selling shit gas around the early 90s when they started putting additives in the fuel. And then after that to save a buck they started putting “up to” 10% ethanol in the fuel as well. (Side note: Have you noticed that the labels have been changed to “not more than” instead of “up to”? Hilarious.) The combination of those additives, the ethanol and the gasoline does not make for a good mix. Were it not for the computer control in engines today they’d never get past 50,000 miles. Part of the programming specifically addresses the fact that the fuel we put into our cars is shit.

It is nothing short of amazing how a 12oz bottle of treatment fixes an engine that won’t fire properly. However the sad part is that if the fuel stations actually maintained and cleaned their tanks correctly (which they don’t), we wouldn’t even need to do this at all.