Flying Finn

Stumbled upon a Finnish website of cars that manufacturer does not recommending fuel containing 10% ethanol.

When selected Porsche as a manufacturer, here's the list of models & years that Porsche does NOT recommend using 10% Ethanol gasoline:

356 1950-65
912 1965-69; 1976
911 1965-89
911 (964) 1989-94
911 (993) 1994-98
959 1988-89
914 1970-77
924 1976-88
944 1981-91
968 1991-95
928 1977-95

In Finland, the E10 gas is 95 octane which would be too low for 993 anyway so maybe that's the reason Porsche doesn't recommend, but I'm not sure.

What do you guys think? Anyone have any info? I know some of the racers have complained about fuel cells going bad etc.

matt777

I used E10 94 octane last year. The car ran better than with the 91 octane premium regular stuff. I'd be interested in why they do not recommend it. ps you're probably talking RON octane ratings which are higher numerically

dave morris

Do we have a choice?

Brent Spinks

Unfortunately, I don't have a choice anymore. Lost our last conventional fuel only gas station months ago.

freeman

Gasoline is not available without ethanol in Florida

race911

http://buyrealgas.com/

http://pure-gas.org/index.jsp

Though these both appear to be user submitted, who knows how accurate the lists are.

Flying Finn

Correct, the 98 in Europe is basically 93 here.

I looked at those lists and there are stations that have non ethanol gas but at least in Florida, in most cases, they only have 90 octane which I'd think (but don't know) is not as good as using 93 with ethanol?

Brent Spinks

The place I used to use was on the buyrealgas site, but, as i said, they switched to ethanol a while back. So that site at least WAS accurate at one time.

Quadcammer

no choice up here either. E10 shouldn't cause any drastic problems, but the life of fuel system components certainly won't be improved.

geolab

Yes, that is exactly what it says, 95 octane in Finland is regular gas in US
porsche recommends 98 octane or 93 RON and it is on every gas filler cap as you know.
Please do not forget that lower octane rating in the whole world is better fuel than higher rating
contrary to what 99 % of people believe.
everybody says ****ty this and ****ty that but 91 RON is better fuel than 93 RON
It is not ****ier fuel, in fact , it is better. The higher the RON the less the energy content.
for a reminder, the lower the octane, the higher capacity of auto-igniting under pressure, the purer the fuel.
higher octane was developed for high compression ratio applications, and because the regular gas is prone to auto-ignite easily under high pressure ( thus knock and Anti Knock Index), they added additives to 91 RON to retard the Knock or auto-ignite. (one of the first additives was water some time ago)

But the environment molds us.....
"Regular gas" is the better gas in fact.
"Super or Premium" is no more than regular gas with **** stuff to lessen its capacity of auto-igniting.
Why is it more expensive? because all refineries produce 91 RON or 95 octane around the world. Later, there is extra procedure to mix additives to the good gas, thus treated and more expensive.
heard this whilst I was skiing in sophomore

Makmov

Probably true.

I was listening to a Chemical engineer talking about octane. I worked at a shop that did TF TA and he would come over for ethanol and occasional some nitromethane.

He said it didn't matter what the octane was. You could have bad gas with a high octane rating. Or good gas with low octane. It all came down to the density of fuel, which could only be measured by specific gravity with an hydrometer.

He was one of these guys at the University of Wisconsin trying to break the 17% ethanol limit that you could mix with gas because ethanol was water based and gas oil and more than 17% separates too fast and anything more than about 3% would separate eventually.


But he basically said the gas station octane rating had no real standard or value to it as a performance indicator.

Flying Finn

Thanks geo for info, I was suspecting it's the octane rating rather than something else although it seems in Europe at least, they are starting to study more what E10 gas does.

geolab

mind you !!! I am tooootaly against ethanol.
Ethanol is corrosive, and the 993 is not equipped with appropriate fuel delivery system to counter it's actions, starting by our plastic fuel tank.
At 7% ethanol in 98 octane or 93 RON we are OK. But 10% is starting to be killer to me.

User 41421

I have used Star Tron Enzyme additive on my small motor engines to get them going after sitting all winter. I've also used it on an old 1980 BMW I have that sits outside all year and is driven rarely. The results were so impressive, the BMW went from running out of battery cranking it to start to turning over in just a couple revolutions, that I now put it in all of my engines regularly.

I've also used the diesel version on a Kubota that is not used often. Both formulas worked great. I'm usually skeptical of these type of products, but if it addresses issues resulting from Ethanol I'm going to keep putting it in all of my vehicles, including the 993. Maybe there is some kind of drawback to using this type of chemical, but it sure worked wonders for me.

Technical info: http://www.starbrite.com/whatsnew/Startron_Story_V2.pdf

gaby1088

here in FL we have 10% or less