fuel return line?

TxChedder,

I am not sure where on the gulf coast you are located, but there is a company here in New Orleans named Filter Resources that has, and will rent a fuel polisher for a couple hundred bucks a day. You just attach it to the delivery and return lines, and a high volume pump/filter rig will clean out a tank in a few hours (They also have rediculously good prices on filters btw). There are also companies that do this all over the gulf coast (I have numbers for Gulf Port, Mobile, and Pensacola). Most charge about $1 per gallon of the fuel tank, and take about an hour per 100 gallons of storage.

A permanent fix of course is a real fuel polishing system. I would recomend one on any boat that cannot easily drain and clean the inside of tanks, or that stores significant amounts of fuel regularly. The only trick is to size on appropriatly so that the volume of fuel being moved by the pump is enough to aggitate the tank and move the crud into suspension. Otherwise you just filter the settled stuff right up until you hit big waves.



As far as puting the fuel return line directly into the filter... So long as the fuel doesn't get to hot I think you will be fine. Just have someone check the temprature of the filter housing every hour (just putting your hand on it should be OK) and if it gets niticably hot then it is probably too hot.

 

Fully concur ont the polishing system. It must not be the most expensive, a simple one is much better than none.

The fuel return line should go into the day tank, not the filter. Otherwise one could run too hot fuel at idle (low consumption, high throughput), with a lack of lubrication in the fuel injection line.

Regards
Richard

 

I have had the experience of installing clean outs in a Monel tank on a vessel approximately 30 years of age purpose of which was to remove algae/bacteria/asphaltine (pick one) from inside. Scraping was required to do a proper job. Treatments only succeeded in loosening the garbage and since there was an ample supply the process would have gone on indefinitely.

The Detroit Diesel pumps an amply quantity of fuel. Using the 35 gph number mentioned in a previous post allowing for the amount of fuel burned in 100 hours the contents of the tank have likely been emptied almost twice and recycled many times over. More polishing is unlikely to help. The solution is to do what we did. Get inside the tank and clean it out.

A DD mechanic with 30 years experience told me the tolerances are so close on the unit injectors that if they are laid out on a bench and the components vary too much in temperature they cannot be assembled due to expansion/contraction of the metals. Running the return back to the filter is a crap shoot and will likely not go unrewarded in the long term without some type of (expensive) failure caused by excessive heat.

Dance all you like but plan on paying the piper sooner or later...

 

Yep, you need the ports, you don't know what the hell is in there. You would be surprise what I found in tank. Sometimes stuff is left over and it breaks down in there. . Dual Racors, 30 micron and 10 micron to start will work on engine side.You can also create fuel bucket cleaning. A five gallon bucket fuel coming in on top, fuel going out on bottom via gravity to engine. In between use a good old sock. Replace sock every couple of hours. It works good to clean out old sock drawer.

Had to do this when a previous owner had put used oil in fuel tank and there was a lot of crap in the fuel. I now prefilter fuel before it goes into tank also.

 

Bglad,

A fuel polishing system like what you would install onboard really won't do much to cycle a tank and knock off embedded contaminates. At least not once they get to the point this sounds like. However the recomendation is still that an installed polishing system should be able to cycle 15-25% of the tank an hour. This volume is necessary to stif up the tank to some extent.

On portable units, the flowrates tend to be much higher, and the filters they use are massive. For my boat we had the fuel polished right after purchasing the boat and they showed up with a 500gph system (On a tank of 450) that scrubbed the tanks so clean we couldn't see any contaminates through the inspection ports, or in the racors after they were done. Of course is cost a bit to have done, but it was still cheaper then opening up the tank for someone to get in and scrub the tank manually. Basically they used a preassure washer, but with diesel instead of water.

 

First I have to apologize to txcheddar after going back and reading one of his later posts he says he does not have access to install clean outs

My recollection of the goo in the tank of the boat we installed clean outs was that it was like tar. We used scrapers to remove it. The vessel owner had professionals polish the fuel on a number of occasions to no avail. Possibly the rig they used was not as effective as the one used by your service provider or the stuff in your tanks was a different type of contamination.

The op describes the tank length in post #4 as 21' long with openings at either end to do the flushing. A 500 gph rig might create a strong enough current to clean even the goo we found if left to work long enough removing or reducing it to the point where he could treat the fuel ongoing and remove the remainder with a better onboard filtering set-up over time.

 

Might not be a great solution, but if you got ahold of a pump and re-circulated the fuel from the tank, through the pump, through a filter and back into the tank eventually you would get most of the crud out. I would think something like a Racor that does some of the separation before the filter would help prolong filter life for this process. Either that or else go with the sock method.

The fuel line is obviously doing a decent job of picking up the crud along with the fuel, so if you filter the crud out and return the fuel to the tank which will tend to agitate it and stir up more crud, eventually you should be able to get most of the recoverable crud out.

That said, I'd be looking really hard at finding a way to replace the tanks.

 

Might not be a great solution, but if you got ahold of a pump and re-circulated the fuel from the tank, through the pump, through a filter and back into the tank eventually you would get most of the crud out.

You would have the same time line as creating the Grand Canyon by taking a leak.

Fuel can be cleaned by filtering over and over.

The gunk stuck in most tanks requires it to be removed.

Most common is a scraping inside the tank .

I have heard of a fellow that had luck with chemicals in an iron tank.

All the fuel was drained and a solution of very caustic cleaner JEP , from Home Depot (25G) was allowed to sit overnight and removed .

Claimed it cleaned the ashpaltine stuck to the tank walls well.

FF

 

Please try to follow a Supply Fuel Circuit based to Continuous Filtering Idea.
See the attached file. More than a storage tank you need to install a smaller day-tank able to supply your engine at least for one hour. The double filtering devices on every filtering stage is useful regarding to avoid an interrupt on Engine's operation when the Filter's cartridge may be blocked and you need to change it. The Transfer and the booster pump are both driven from engine's crankshaft. The benefit of this plan is that you have available always the full Day-tank's quantity with filtered fuel and the system continues to filter the remaining into the storage tank.
I hope that may be help.