A question for you diesel guys....

[JCL]

Originally Posted by genew

came across some interesting news..was talking with a long time guy that is in diesel additive sales. He said the diesel that comes up to the middle of the US has different refinery specs than northern US or Canada. Our diesel comes from the Southern US via pipelines ( most of it ) and has more pariffin because there is not a problem in the south with that spec. When the cold snap hit here additives did no good in helping the gelling. We actually had trucks that used additives and had a 50/50 blend of 1 and 2 and still gelled. I guess that answered my original question that most everything up here using diesel was screwed unless the fuel came direct from a refinery instead of thru a pipeline from the south.

I used to work for a fuel distributor, many years ago. Our diesel at the pumps here was #2, same as home heating oil. Winter diesel has additives to prevent gelling, as you note. We generally cut the #2 with #1 to handle lower temperatures. Problem with that is that is that you sell it by volume, and some customers note that their mileage has dropped significantly due to the lower energy content.

We generally didn't have trouble with vehicles in cold weather, as we don't often get very cold in Vancouver and vehicles have small tanks so they are getting fresh fuel regularly. There was a significant exception. If it got below -12C, we had lots of problems since many customers had not used up their summer diesel, and it gelled. That tended to happen with home heating oil customers who had above-ground tanks, and with those that kept private tanks for diesel (such as the truck or contractor fleets) and didn't go through enough fuel to use up the summer fuel in time.

Further north, we use heat tracing on all diesel fuel lines to keep it flowing, but that is in much colder climates.