When it all goes south, having a hefty amount of fuel in storage, may just be a life-saver!
However, there’s more to successful long-term fuel storage than just buying a tank and topping it off with unleaded.
To get the best strategies for storing fuel, we consulted two of our favorite survival sites.
First, from Skilled Survival:
Depending upon the environment you gas is stored, gas will typically only last up to a year before it starts to become highly unusable. However, there are products that can be added to the gasoline to increase the shelf life.
Gasoline stabilizer additives are designed to be periodically added to your stored fuel to prevent natural deterioration of its ignition properties.
Just add the stabilizer to your gasoline within a year, mix well and you’re ready for another year. It generally needs to be done every year…not just once.
If you would rather not deal with additives, you could also rotate you’re long term gasoline storage.
Just pour the gas from the container into your car and use as normal, and then refill your storage containers (small, medium, large) with fresh gas from your local station.
To ensure you stay clear of any ill deterioration effects, it’s probably best to rotate your gasoline storage every six months.
And, some additional advice from The Prepper Journal:
Gas loses its potency over time and this also applies to Diesel and Kerosene. Diesel for example if stored at lower than 70 degrees will last about 12 months without any additives provided it is kept in a sealed container. If your temperatures are much above 70 that time slips by 50% to 6 months. According to BP,
As diesel gets older a fine sediment and gum forms in the diesel brought about by the reaction of diesel components with oxygen from the air. The fine sediment and gum will block fuel filters, leading to fuel starvation and the engine stopping. Frequent filter changes are then required to keep the engine going. The gums and sediments do not burn in the engine very well and can lead to carbon and soot deposits on injectors and other combustion surfaces.
Now, what can we do to prevent issues like this and protect our fuel because you don’t want to be trying to outrun the mutant zombie bikers from Mars and have your engine stop? Additives. There are two main additives that I have run across, STA-BIL and PRI-G. PRI has several lines of additives and the –G stands for gasoline. They also have PRI-D for diesel. PRI additives are designed to be added to your fuel on a yearly basis to maintain the fuel in the best condition possible and they even claim that if your fuel has aged already, just adding PRI-G has proven to restore the fuel to “refinery-fresh conditions”. I would rather not test that out but PRI-G does have a decent reputation.
Generators fly off the shelves and the prices skyrocket at the first mention of a weather event approaching.
STA-BIL is one that I have personally used and does pretty much the same thing as PRI-G in terms of conditioning your fuel to last a lot longer in storage than it would without treatment. The instructions are simple, just dump the required amount in with your fuel and Voila! You should be able to safe storing fuel for at least a year with no adverse affects. I pour in the additive first and then the gas so that it is mixed as thoroughly as possible.
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Photo by Stephen Luke licensed under Creative Commons 2.0.
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