What Happens When You Put Diesel in Gasoline?

greetings viewers and thank you for tuning in today and I'm sure you're all curious about the question what happens when you mix diesel fuel with gasoline and this comes up because recently I read an article about a service station out in California I believe it was where the delivery company that delivers the fuel had accidentally put diesel in place of gasoline in one of the tanks and several of the customers there ended up inadvertently putting diesel fuel in their vehicles and suffering issues as a result so I'm going to talk about a little bit about what happens to your vehicle if this happens and also just actually physically see what happens when you mix diesel with gasoline stay tuned now the auto manufacturers and the filling stations have taken steps to try to prevent you from doing this accidentally one of the things that they've done is everything at least here in the states and I believe also Canada that as diesel is labeled in green so if it's labeled in green it usually means that it's diesel additionally what they've done is the size of the filler neck and the sides of the dispenser for the diesel fuel are different sizes in fact the diesel fuel dispenser is larger and won't go down inside of a gasoline filler neck and they're done this to try to prevent you from doing it but well from my experience this doesn't stop everybody from trying to put diesel fuel in their gasoline-powered vehicles so now let's go over to the bench and see what happens when you mix the two fuels now there are different physical properties between the gasoline and the diesel the gasoline is a lot thinner in fact it's more like a solvent and it has that distinctive odor diesel fuel is more like a very lightweight oil in fact I think the first fuel used in a diesel was a form of peanut oil these physical differences come into play if you get diesel in your gasoline-powered car it's also not as combustible as gasoline gasoline has a lot more combustible 'ti than diesel and the reason for that is how a diesel engine works a gasoline engine used as a spark plug to ignite the flame front and get things moving a diesel uses the pressure created by the compression within the engine to ignite the mixture so in other words it's gets squeezed a whole lot heats up a whole lot and then this mixture ignites unlike this that gets lit off by a spark plug so what happens when you get diesel in your gasoline system well because it is thicker like this the fuel pump is going to struggle to move this through the system then if you have an external fuel filter it's good pretty much get clogged up with this oily substance and then when it finally makes it to the engine this will pretty much clog fuel injectors and make them inoperable and that's what causes your engine to stop running so you can run for a little while on diesel but you're not really running on the diesel you're just running on the rest of the gasoline that's in there until a diesel gets up there what you need to do if you get diesel fuel in your gasoline vehicles you need to completely drain the fuel system completely drain the tank if you had one of those external fuel filters as I mentioned it's going to need to be replaced and then you need to put the gasoline back in and start it up and hope everything is okay a lot of times engine damage doesn't necessarily result in a gasoline system because like I said the engine doesn't run on diesel so your catalytic converter and all that kind of stuff won't necessarily get fouled out because I suspect your engine will stop running before the diesel gets to the point where it's being combusted but those are things that you've got to watch out for pretty much it's going to be your fuel system that's going to get wrecked in this process and once you drain it out and run the gasoline through it hopefully everything is okay after that now let's see what happens when we mix these all right now I'm going to do this just like it would be if while you went to a filling station and you accidentally put the diesel in your gasoline so I'm going to turn this over to the side so you can see what's happening so the diesel is going in look at that you can actually see a reaction between these two you can see them sort of not necessarily mixing and maybe they did a little bit because the gasoline will sort of dissolve it to a point like I said it's something like a solvent so it will go in there it doesn't look like it'll separate or anything but trust me when this starts going through your fuel system that that engine will not run for much longer once this reaches injectors like I said it's all over I feel I should add this in at this point and that is a question that you might have is how much diesel fuel contamination is too much and and what is that tipping point and I think that's a very difficult question to answer but based on what we've seen earlier when we mix the two fuels and how easily they mix together I would wager that a 50/50 mix is the most dangerous situation so meaning if you had half a tank of gas and you added a half a tank of diesel fuel you top stood up it almost seems to me like that might allow the engine to run for a period of time and I think the real takeaway here is how long the engine runs with diesel fuel going through it that's a really tough question to answer but in my mind based on what I just saw here with the two fuels mixing it seems to me that as long the longer the engine runs on diesel fuel the more potential for damage that you have so if you do accidentally put diesel in your engine in your gasoline-powered vehicle just do not run it have it towed wherever it needs to be towed and get that fuel system taken care of that's what I would recommend in that situation now when we poured these two things together it's sort of look like they play nice but they don't trust me it may look like a diesel dissolved in this gasoline but from what I've seen on the other side of this is whenever you get diesel in your gasoline system it wrecks the fuel filter and sometimes fuel injectors and hopefully the engine didn't run for any period of time and cause damage to things like the catalytic converter or something like that the fix is to drain all the fuel out of the system flush everything out refill it up with fuel gasoline and start it up and hope for the best it's kind of where you got to go what's a real real issue is if you happen to put gasoline in your diesel vehicle so if you put gasoline where diesel is supposed to go like I said diesel fuel ignites because of the extreme heat and pressure that that squeeze that's put on this fuel it gets hot enough and then it ignites gasoline is very volatile and will ignite way before the diesel fuel would and as a result it will detonate pre-ignition not to mention a diesel fuel system is extremely sensitive and you run gasoline through it it's going to wash everything out so you get gasoline in a diesel engine the failure could be catastrophic if I'm honest but if you get diesel in your gasoline you might be okay once you've cleaned and flushed out the fuel system I hope that information was useful to you I'll put links in the description to additional information additional videos and things like that if you have other questions if you have automotive questions not covered in this video I asked the head to air at the cargo comm also link down in the description please be sure to LIKE comment subscribe share this video with the world because it's so cool and be safe have fun stay dirty thank you so much for watching and I'll see you [Music]

Channel: EricTheCarGuy

Views: 324,554

Keywords: Diesel in gas, gas in diesel, diesel fuel, gasoline, bad gas, diesel in gas tank, gas in diesel tank, mixing gas and diesel, engine stall, Diesel engine, gas engine, mixing fuel, automotive education, #ETCGVideo, how to video, how to auto repair, EricTheCarGuy, Eric the car guy, ETCG

Id: xhmJmCMxMS0

Length: 6min 44sec (404 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 04 2020