Water in gas Tank? Symptoms

You accidentally left your gas cap off in rainy weather. Or the gas station you fueled up at has a bad water filter and delivered you a slug of water with your fuel. It's probably not condensation, since most vehicle fuel tanks are sealed systems not prone to condensation like large fuel storage tanks can be. Wherever it came from, water in your gas tank is a serious problem that needs to be addressed immediately.

How do you know?

What are the symptoms of water in the gas tank? A good indicator is a sudden change in the performance of your vehicle. You try to accelerate and the car hesitates or sputters consistently. You try to get up to highway speeds and the car just doesn’t want to cooperate. Or maybe the vehicle sputters and then revs and jolts to higher speeds when it shouldn’t. It wasn’t like that yesterday, so what’s the deal?

Those are good indicators you may have water in the gas tank. The sputtering and hesitation comes from water slugs being sucked up to the injectors. Water doesn’t burn like fuel does, so the piston doesn’t have anything to push up when the water is sprayed into the combustion chamber and turns to steam. The sudden revs to high speed are probably what’s happening when the injector gets a new slug of fuel after spraying water.

Apart from the driveability issue, water in the fuel tank can damage injectors over time. And if it sits in there for a long period of time, it can even cause rust in your fuel system.

Getting the water out of the tank

Having a small (i.e. minute) amount of water in the gas tank is normal. But such a small amount isn’t going to be enough to give the noticeable symptoms above. And since you don’t want to keep trying to burn it, you need to get it out of the tank.

Large-scale fuel users would probably drain the tank and replace the contamination fuel with fresh fuel. But that’s not feasible for most people. So the addition of a drying agent is going to be your best solution to solving the problem. Traditional drying agents like Dri-Gas have been around for years. DFS Plus from Bell Performance is also an excellent drying agent, but works without using alcohol, which can be a consideration for older vehicles that have seals and fuel system parts made from more sensitive materials.

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