I have a 2007 chevy v6 silverado extend cab. is it better to put ethanol free gas in my tank? why or why not?
Your car should be fine with either.
Automobile fuel systems have been compatible with E10 (10% ethanol, 90% regular unleaded gasoline) for more than twenty years. Your Silverado should be OK with with it. However, only flex fuel vehicles can handle higher concentrations of ethanol, especially E85.
You should also be aware that cars get their best gas mileage on straight gasoline and do worse as the percentage of ethanol increases. With E10, the loss is usually too small to detect on the road. With E85 in a flex fuel vehicle, it can be 25%.
You’ll probably get slightly better fuel mileage without ethanol. E10 (10% ethanol) won’t hurt anything, but you’ll get lower mileage.
What gas stations sell gas without ethanol? It seems I don’t have a choice as all the stations around me (Northern NJ and NE PA) only sell gas with ethanol in it.
Full disclosure here: i work for an ethanol trade association. But all the respondents are absolutely correct, your truck will be just fine on E10.
I might suggest as a reference for all the auto techs out there this link on ethanol-blended fuels, including E85: http://www.ethanolrfa.org/resource/technicians/documents/2009CIG.pdf. It discusses all the changes in gasoline that are resulting from federal policy and an increase in renewable fuel use.
“What gas stations sell gas without ethanol?”
Almost all of them. But not in most (all?) of New Jersey or most of the Northeast Corridor. Here’s the map:
Check and see if there is a Pure Oil Co. in your area....They post labels
on their pumps that they are ethanol free. Other than that, you should use
gas sold thru major oil companies that don’t have ethanol in their fuel.If you keep a journal on your mpg with each fill-up, you can check what your cars is burning
depending on the drop in mileage or not. At the current price of fuel ($2.55)
you’ll save about 12 cents per gallon, per mile per gallon.
2 mpg difference b/n gas and ethanol is 24 cents a gallon
3 mpg difference is 36 cents savings per gallon
and 4 (about the max. is 48 cents savings per gallon.
Which adds up since I think your truck has a 25 gallon tank. Last year when gas hit the $4.00 mark the savings jumped to .66 cents a gallon by using gasoline instead of gasohol.
It will be up to you to find out who sells ethanol free fuel.
Keep up with your mileage and ask the station mgrs if they sell ethanol.
In theory it might not affect your truck only the mileage…I’ve seen the ethanol websites…which seem more like an advertisment. They need to fess up to the mpg loss instead of saying things like “you’ll notice a slight drop in mileage”…
Twenty-one percent isn’t quite what I call “slight”. Or burns cleaner? It might,
Before I go off in a tangent on the perils of ethanol, just know that SOME vehicles
seem to run ok with ethanol… Mine (Chevy 2.2, 4.3, and 4.3), are not in that group.
I guess one of my problems is I don’t understand why a 10% additive (ethanol)
causes a 20% drop in mileage. On the surface (in theory) the loss should be 10% - 11% loss. How can anyone test how much alcohol is added? If alcohol is cheaper to produce, it would cause greedy distributors to add as much alcohol as possible.
Water it down. For the condensed answer to my answer, refer to mcparadise’s.
And Good luck
Caballero
Thanks for the map site. Since NJ gas is about 30-40 cents per gallon cheaper than gas in PA I do all my gassing up in NJ. I need to take a road trip, since I see much of the country is not forced to use the “reformulated” ethanol blended gas.
While mileage is a little better with the MTBE formulation, it does present a problem in ground water contamination if the ground storage tanks at gas stations leak.