You've obviously never read what's printed on those bottles. Nope, it was summer and I had just gotten gas at a little out of the way station just before it started. I stopped at another station and "Heat" was the only product they had. But, it worked.
HEET's not a bad choice. It'll correct a variety of "bad gas" conditions as long as they're not too severe. It absorbs water, which is what it's marketed to do. It'll also raise the octane a bit if the gas is borderline stale and the lighter hydrocarbons that they use as antiknock additives have started to evaporate. The methanol component also reacts with some of the hydrocarbons to form azeotropes, which increase the RVP of the gasoline, making for easier starting (especially in the winter). So it's really not a horrible choice if a station is only going to carry one gas-drying product.
Where I live, stale gas and wet gas are recurring problems in between the tourist seasons. The stations have big tanks to deal with the short but busy tourist seasons, but that means that the gas also tends to get a bit stale and sometimes wet during the slow seasons in between. In fact, both stations had to have their tanks completely replaced within the past three years because of rust, and a third station a few miles north was shut down entirely for the same reason.
Once in a while I get a tank of gas from a low-volume station that's so far gone that the car immediately starts running like ****, followed by an intermittent MIL and P032x codes, with detonation and PCM compensation for same when the engine's under load. I can surmise that it's the gas causing the problem because the symptoms will start about a mile or so after I fill up.
I suspect that what's happening in these cases is that the lighter hydrocarbons in the gasoline have evaporated, lowering the effective octane of what remains. I suspect that because adding literally any additive that increases the octane helps tame the problem until I can run the tank down. Usually it will at least extinguish the CEL and demote the code to "pending" after a few drive cycles. Running the tank down a quarter to halfway and filling up with 92 or higher octane gas from a high-volume station in one of the nearby "cities" also works.
But burning through the tank and filling up with known-good gas is the cure. There are other things that start happening when gas gets old that won't be solved by raising the octane.
One time several years ago, I got such a bad tank of gas that I wound up siphoning it into cans and taking it down to the county waste management facility to get rid of it. It really was that bad. I wouldn't even use it in the lawnmower.
The stale gas problem is one of the reasons why I'm pretty happy that the local Hess station has become a Speedway station. They have an
extremely generous rewards plan, so they're attracting more business from the surrounding area. It's actually the talk of the town. (Obviously, we don't have a hell of a lot to talk about here.) The reason I like Speedway's reward plan, other than saving money, is that more turnover means fresher gas.
The other thing I learned shortly after moving up here from The City was that STA-BIL is a wonderful thing. It won't do anything for gas that's already stale, but it will help prevent borderline gas from getting any worse after you buy it. It's also a pretty decent fuel system cleaner and helps prevent ethanol-related nasties. One ounce of the marine flavor per 10 gallons of gas is what the locals swear by.
Rich
