So my mom came to visit me the other day. I lent her my Townace for an hour or so. She thought she would be so kind as to fill it up with gas for me. So she accidentally filled up the tank with gas not diesel. It had about a 1/16 of a tank of diesel in it and then she topped it off with gas. She then proceeded to drive for 5 minutes at which time she told me about her kind gesture. It was my fault for not telling her. She claimed that the van ran fine. I decided to siphon out all the gas I could. I was only able to get about ¾ the tank out. Then I filled it up with diesel and I added some diesel fuel line lubricant to the mix. In desperation I also through a liter of oil in the tank hoping it might help but it might have caused some other problem. At this point I had to move the van because of where it was parked and I didn’t have the money to get it towed anywhere. I drove it for about 20 minutes and it started out the first 15 mins. fine but slowly began to stutter until it finally stalled. I gather that I either fried my fuel pump or too high a concentration of gas eventually made it to my engine after the 20 minutes. I really don’t have a clue. Can any of you guys let me know how much damage I have done and what I should do next. I imagine that the first thing I should do is get every drop of the diesel/gas solution I have in the tank out. I also think I will have to bleed all the fuel lines and stuff. Any advice?

- (#15159) Lee, 28 Jan 05 03:22

I'd've thought that if you ran it for 20 mins on about 25% gas/petrol with 75% Diesel then it didn't finally stop because the gas got through to the engine - it got there long before. As far as I know it should've run reasonably OK on that mixture, but I don't know how quickly the injector pump would've suffered from the lack of usual lubricant. I suspect you had at least 1/5 of a tank of Diesel left in there when the gas was added, because that's about when the orange fuel warning light comes on, so it wasn't so bad.

Perhaps the gas dissolved lots of residue from inside the tank, filler neck etc and this found its way to the fuel filter, which would produce the "stutter and finally stalled" symptom. As a test wash the fuel filter element (with some of your new fuel!), put it back and see how it runs.

- (#15159) Dave Mason (Sussex), 28 Jan 05 04:08