Fuel Stabilizers
While tires and ballast aim to maximize tractor performance, fuel stabilizers work behind the scenes to protect against performance loss due to poor-quality fuel. This applies not only to your tractor, but all your gasoline and diesel-fueled farm equipment.
It doesn’t take long for gasoline and diesel fuel to degrade. The exact processes can vary, but exposure to oxygen, light, heat or water can all be problematic. Gasoline can start to degrade within a couple of months as its most volatile compounds evaporate and reduce combustibility. Degraded gasoline can coat the fuel system with a substance compared to varnish, clogging fuel lines and the carburetor.
Diesel can also degrade quickly under the right circumstances, turning gummy or sludgy and even feeding the growth of microbes that further degrade the fuel. Suffice to say, an engine running on bad fuel might not run at all.
Bad fuel shouldn’t be a concern if you use your equipment on a regular basis, since you’ll burn through the fuel long before it starts degrading. But if you store fuel for months at a time, or if you’re concerned about fuel degrading inside seasonal equipment (such as a tractor that doesn’t receive much winter use), fuel stabilizers can save the day.
The benefits of fuel stabilizers are twofold. For one, they extend the stable life of the fuel, perhaps to as long as a year or more. Secondly, they allow you to skip the problematic step of draining fuel from seasonal equipment. Not only is draining fuel a time-consuming task, it also opens the door for water to condensate inside the empty fuel tank, which can ultimately corrode the fuel system.
On the other hand, if your fuel is stable, you can instead fill up the fuel tanks of out-of-season equipment and reduce the amount of air and water vapor that can enter their systems.
Plenty of fuel stabilizers exist on the market, and exact instructions for use may vary from product to product. But the basic idea is simple: once you mix a certain amount of stabilizer into the fuel, you’ll be good to go. If you’re adding fuel stabilizer to the tank of an engine, run the engine for several minutes to let the mixture work through the entire system, ensuring the stabilizer can work its magic while the machine is out of use.