posted 11-02-2007 12:14 PM ET (US)        

Re: IS STARTRON SNAKE OIL?

I am Bill Lindsey, the VP of Marketing & Advertising for Star brite, the manufacturer of Star Tron, among many other items. After reading your post, we asked one of our consultants to answer it. His response is a bit technical, but I suspect you won't have any trouble understanding it. We welcome feedback on our product, either in public on forums such as this or via e-mail and our (800) tech line. Here is his response:

Dear boater: Additive chemistry is not readily performed dockside by boaters with jars by "shaking and looking". It is performed in labs with graduated cylinders and test tubes with measured amounts of water and fuel, measuring water dissipation by distillation recovery and centrifuges, measuring emulsions by viscosity, specific gravity, by light diffusion, etc. And microscopes. Hence the term “microscopic”. You can’t see microscopic changes with the naked eye. I'm afraid your dockside test did nothing to demonstrate Star Tron's effects in reducing large water droplets to microscopic droplets, and it didn’t demonstrate how water and gas in a boat interact. It appears that you were expecting a massive amount of water to vanish by adding Startron. We don’t claim that. Star Tron is a maintenance product. There are microscopic water droplets suspended in your boat right now, waiting for you to burn them off. Let us help you understand what's going wrong in your fuel and how Star Tron works to reduce water contamination.

First, water and gas don't mix and that’s a good thing. If you had an additive capable of absorbing readily visible amounts of water in your jar, the gas would be completely unsuitable for use. The ounce or two of water you have in your jar would have required dispersion into about 200 to 400 ounces of gas to be safe in an engine. Second, there are three ways to rid of water in gas tanks, and they are important based on the volume of water in the gas.

1. Mechanical separation: Remove the water bottoms by drain, centrifuge, trap/filter, or pump. Used for large amounts of water and instant removal. Most large boats have at least a water trap, but sometimes, its ends up being the fuel filter that traps the water. (and stops the boat)

2. Mechanical agitation and consumption: Disperses water droplets into the fuel by vibration/agitation while burning it, which is what happens every day in boats.

3. Chemical/surfactant: Disperses small amounts of water into gas by lowering the water's surface tension, which allows formation of smaller droplets so water passes easier through fuel filters (improves above method). There are two categories of dispersions: Colloids, which are drops so fine they suspended in the gas without chemical bonding, and Emulsifications, which are larger drops permanently bonded to a chemical that also bonds to the gas.

You have described a large percentage of water to gas in your water separator, but not the percentage of water in the boat’s tank. You have no way of knowing that without sampling the tank under agitation, and then centrifuging or distilling the sample. The separator and the Startron are both doing what they are supposed to do, ridding the tank of water. That's good. You don't want water in your engine. It ruins performance in a myriad of ways. Then you describe placing this sample of water, gas, and Startron in a container (I assume a jar, or all too often, a plastic water bottle) and shaking it. Star Tron forms colloidal dispersions, which are microscopic water drops, suspending as much water into the gas as is safe to burn in an engine. That amount to your naked eye is virtually ZERO! Gasoline must be clear and bright to burn. If you can see the water throughout the fuel, you're engine's in trouble. Depending on the temperature and refinery detergent packages in the gas, that's somewhere around .55% to .6%. Since E-10 will hold up to .5% water on its own, the enzyme in Startron is going to add to that about .05%. Can you see that in a jar? No chance. In your small sample, that would be a milliliter or two. It‘s tough enough to read a 1 ml change in a graduated cylinder. In the boat, it may have been several ounces, but I don't know, because I don't know how much fuel you hold. But if you use your boat and burn the fuel, and add more fuel and Star Tron, it doesn't take long to eliminate all the water, including what is in the traps. Remember, bulk water bottoms are removed by the traps, but water dispersed by vibration is consumed during use, and is assisted by additives that reduce surface tension. It’s the lingering water hiding in baffles and corners you want to get out chemically. Once the tank is totally dried out, the Star Tron will start dispersing the water in the traps as well, and eventually dry them out as well. Does adding more Star Tron disperse more water? No. The gas is saturated with water already, which is also the safe maximum level of water in gasoline. And that is a good thing, as too much water is bad, especially in the presence of ethanol. Studies have shown that high amounts of water and ethanol can be corrosive to metal plating in fuel pumps.

Star Tron itself doesn't absorb water and adding even more Star Tron did nothing. Star Tron doesn’t remove water magically, which is what would be needed in your static jar experiment. Instead, Star Tron facilitates more efficient removal of water through the previously mentioned dispersion process. In your jar sample, you said it came from the water separators. That's not just a container of E-10 gas, it’s really a container of water with gas in it. The boat's fuel tank probably had no more than 1% or 2% water, which is chemically “saturated” with water already, but your jar probably had 10 times that amount. Just guessing... it might have been 20 times that. Gas holds .5%, maybe .55% with Startron. You had a lot of water, too much for the gasoline to hold, and too much for Star Tron to disperse in a few ounces of gas. I guarantee you, in a lab, under actual measurement, Star Tron had increased the amount of water the gas could hold, but by a very small percentage.

Okay, now you know why your jar test showed nothing. Star Tron doesn't remove bulk water, it controls condensation in boats in use, exactly as Star brite states. Now, what is the problem, why are your separators filling with water and white goo, and why do you need Star Tron?

Ethanol loves water, always sucking it into a vented boat tank. From the moment it first is added to the gas tank, Star Tron starts to break it down into microscopic drops and suspend it harmlessly. If you use the boat, it will burn off the water, assisted by Star Tron's reducing the water droplet size. However, if left for a really long time without being used, water will eventually saturate the gas, and phase separate. You must be sitting at the dock a lot to build up a substantial amount of water, and leaving your tanks low, with lots of air space to accumulate moisture. As the ethanol in E-10 soaks up water from the air, after it reaches saturation, (.5%+.05% from the Star Tron) the water falls out, taking the hygroscopic, "polar" ethanol with it. From the point on, the surface of the gas is no longer polar, and loses its attraction to water. The only way water can continue to build up is through ordinary condensation, which takes an awfully long time of just sitting with near empty tanks. If you use your boat, or keep it full during long periods of nonuse, it’s really tough to get more than 1% water in the tank. Of course, I'm assuming none entered accidentally. It does happen. Loose fuel caps at sea, or during deck washing, can add a lot of water.

Once too much water does get in, ethanol and water mixed with a little gas turns white, as do virtually all water/oil emulsions. Once that mixture phase separates, the gas will still be clear and bright, but octane, resistance to gum formation, oxidation stability, and other characteristics will have been compromised. Even with water traps to protect your engine, the fuel quality gets degraded. Even if the water levels have exceeded what Star Tron can disperse at one time, Star Tron is still protecting that gas from loss of these combustion qualities. Star Tron is a "control" technology, not an instant cure for excessively built up water. That's what your trap is for, and apparently, its working fine.

You mention this is an ongoing problem. If you use your boat occasionally, adding some fresh gas and Star Tron as well, you should never have a water problem. Most boaters with traps will see the water eventually disappear when they use Star Tron and the boat. If you are using your boat routinely, and put Star Tron in the gas each time, yet still have a substantial amount of water in the traps, this raises a red flag to me, and I would like some more info. Here's the fear. I mentioned another chemical method for removing water bottoms, and that is by emulsification. You've already seen a light emulsification, water/ethanol mixed with gas, which turns white. But that is pretty thin, and generally passes through all but the smallest filters. That's what lowering surface tension with Star Tron or other quality fuel additives helps accomplish. If this thin emulsion wouldn't pass through a fuel filter, no boats would run on E-10 for very long, and that's just not the case.

Over the past year or two, a couple of companies have been pushing concentrated emulsifiers onto the boating industry for E-10. By "emulsifier", I mean the chemicals that are used in soaps and detergents: surface active agents that bond to both water and gas. They are called "dipoles", as they have both a positive and negative pole, which allows them to grab onto both water and oil. I said earlier gas and water don't mix. They repel each other electrically. However, a dipole emulsifier has one side that is attracted to water, and one side that is attracted to gas, and acts to bond to both, like glue, and holds them in a thicker mixture than either separate component. That is called an emulsification. Its white, its gooey, and it can really screw up your engine. Hopefully, the traps catch it all. GM and the SAE tested gas/water emulsions, its been tried many times over the years, and always abandoned, as they are really tough on fuel systems, exhaust components, etc. Water is not fuel, its corrosive and abrasive, and at no point do you want a large amount of it in your engine.

If you have added an emulsifier, have your tanks polished immediately. Star Tron will not break it down. It will help disperse it off the tank sidewalls, but it will plug filters like nobody's business. Don't be fooled by sleight of hand sales tricks, mixing water and gas in a jar, then magically making the water disappear with the emulsifier. It takes a perfect mix ratio, temperature, and heavy shaking, to create a clear and stable emulsion. You can't mimic this in a boat, not that it would matter if you could. It’s the emulsifier itself that causes the carbon deposits, not the water. Don't take my word for it, I'm just a 30 year veteran of the chemical industry and a fuel consultant to Star brite. You can buy the SAE research papers on water/gas emulsions online, or ask your engine manufacturer about their warranty should you intentionally wish to suspend massive amounts of water in yourgas with emulsifiers.

Star brite has substantial materials out on how to handle ethanol, and many magazines have reported on it as well. E-10 can be handled safely in boats, with some basic housekeeping and the right additives. Millions of boaters use E-10 without issues, but you definitely have to step up the maintenance procedures. Please read the Ethanol Story at www.startron.com again for more detail.

If you continue to have problems with white goo, and it just won't go away, please give us more specifics, all of them, and we can often track down exactly what's wrong, and help you fix it. Forensic fuel research isn't exactly CSI MIAMI, but somebody's got to do it.

* your geographic location

* the boat's tank size and consumption rates

* how old was the gas and last time you fueled up

* hours used per month

* seasonal temperatures and humidity

* other additives used, including any performance additives such as octane boosters, biocides

* engine tune and performance issues such as cranking times, smoke, rough idle, limited top end RPM’s, etc.

* number of single water traps per tank, or double in-line traps

* fuel filter micron size

Regards,

Matthew A. Cohen
General Manager, Technical Services
Solpower Corporation
mcohen@solpower.com