Would a 2 in. or 4 in. well bailer fit down that filler pipe? Might be a way to get fuel when the power is out. Would be really slow though.

Thank ya sir, been a long while since I dip sticked a tank.  I really did think it was water on top.  




The only time I had an issue with it was when our diesel got filled and the gentleman filling it left his rag in his hose.  Mayor filled up her turbo diesel.  Much nasty comments about my station ensued.  



Makes sense once you stop to think though.  The rainbow slick in a spill is making me feel stupid for not seeing the obvious.  



 

Re the "all tanks eventually leak" - yes, modern tanks are much better, and that statement is not exactly accurate.  "Every gas station ends up contaminated" is a more accurate statement.  Even with the newest, best equipment, idiots still manage to spill fuel at the dispensers, drive off with the dispenser hose stuck in their tank, and/or delivery truck drivers manage to spill some when delivering product.  Over time, the areas around the dispenser islands and fill ports inevitably end up with at least minor soil contamination, even if the tanks themselves remain sound.  

I've seen a LUST incident caused by a drive-off with the nozzle in the tank that spilled 40+gallons of fuel, one delivery truck driver caused a release of ~100 gallons fucking up something with the hose - most of it went into the drainage ditch, then on to the low land next to the gas station (wetlands) where it spread out over a huge area, floating on the water, just all kinds of stupid that's caused problems.

Anyway, this is good info, thanks!

HA!  Now you're giving away all our trade secrets.  Agreed, most impact these days is through negligence, not engineering failures.  That being said, I have a client who site was poorly constructed, and we've had to clean up several failures of what should have been foolproof systems.  Still, the most spectacular cleanup I've had was the semi full of fuel that wreaked coming down a grade.  about 4k gallons of gasoline, and 500g of diesel into a creekbed.  Burned for three days, took us a month to reroute the creek and clean up the impact area.  Tanker trucks are giant, liquid bombs.

/Bad is good, work wise

when the station posts a "out of gas" sign in a SHTF situation, is there still any actual amount that may be recoverable with more dedicated equipment? And if so, would it be contaminated stuff with sediment etc?

I guess what I am asking is just how dry the tanks really get when the sensors read "empty"

great stuff, thanks

Very interesting stuff.

Thanks for posting it.

It might be a good idea to have a sparkless switch or move the last electrical connection or regular switch far away from the opening if you must do this.

Does anyone know if there is a grounding point for the tankers when they fill the station tanks?

Great info. Definitely answers some questions I've had in the past.

Good question ....

Ok the tank reading empty .... that depends on the tank monitor , tank tilt and STP location . As a rule a tank with STP I program the first alarm at 24" to 18" for delivery needed on most tanks and the 2nd alarm and product shut down if the tank monitor has the capability at  18 " to 16" . Below that point pump cavitation is a major concern along with pump over heating issues . So when most stations are out they still have 500 to 1200 gallons in the tank if they are running 8000 to 12000 gallon tanks which is the norm for most stations built in the last 20 years .... theres alot of variables but that is a safe general answer . ie If they are a big station with long 12000 gal tanks and 1.5 hp STPs I will set the low product at a higher level because of the longer pump being out of the fuel and not being able to cool properly.  Another note stations on mil bases normally have alot larger tanks in my experience ... 20000 per product in some cases manifolded (connected)  so 40000 for product especially for reg and diesel . This is the normal stations not the mil equip ones.  

ETA: missed the second question in there.
Theres always issues with that ... but closer to the drop or the stp the cleaner the bottom of the tank will be just do to the flow. water issues will be even across the tank but normally do not exceed 2-3 inches from the bottom.  Of course with ethanol theres phasing issues that may become a problem after a time of inactivity .


HTH

Sorry for that lack of updates , worked a long day yesterday and have forgot my camrea the last 2 days so I have not got some pics I want to help describe more stuff.


Thanks Feral.

I also built and serviced gas stations for about 12 years, I don't miss it, I was gilbarco, Wayne, Schlumberg and Veeder Root certified and a few others. Remember if you decide to use an electric pump to transfer fuel make sure it is intrinsically safe, as in can be used for fuel, best bet is a hand pump with a piece of 3/4" pipe 8' long. Best story I have from those days was one of my guys was working in a sump and fuel had spilled inside, he decided to cut some conduit with a sawzall while standing in the sump, all you saw was a fire ball when he turned on the saw, it scorched his beard and eye brows and what hair was sticking out around his hat, he jumps out and starts running yelling fire, everyone takes off, I run over to the sump and hear a whirling noise it is a fire ball going down the stinger for the fill, I grab the cap and put it on the stinger and walk away. Everyone is looking at me like i'm crazy, the inside of a tank is all vapors and it needs oxygen to burn so if you close it off it has no oxygen to explode.

I always wanted a vault for my backyard perfect bunker........

Great info, thanks for the post.

Question: is there any validity in the notion that filling up your vehicle while (or just after) a station is having it's tanks refilled will get you "dirty" gas (because it's stirred up the sediment and water in the underground tanks)? Will the filters in the dispensers/pumps take care of that no matter what's going on in the storage tanks?

nice thread.....yep this is a tag.

Very informative, thanks!

The filters should take care of most of the debris .. 10 micron is the standard for gas 30 micro for diesel and kero . But not taking in consideration of liquid contamination , water , sludge and other fuels . When a tanker drops is really stirs up a tank , normally to the point it takes 6-8 hours for my to run a leak test accurately . A STP stirs up a tank also but not to the same point ,normally a tank settles down in a hour after the stp cuts off. So short answer if you saw a tanker dropping keep going .

lol Ive saw that before here .. we have a construction, tank/line testing and clean up divisions also.

Taken from pollutionissues.com.

Leaking underground storage tanks (LUSTs) containing hazardous liquids, primarily petroleum products such as gasoline, diesel, kerosene, or oil have contaminated the   groundwater   and  drinking water  of thousands of communities across the United States.

Following the boom in automobile sales after World War II, gasoline stations mushroomed across the county to meet the demand for personal mobility. At these new stations, gasoline was stored underground in tanks made of bare steel, which were not protected from corrosion—the oxidation, or rusting, of other metals as well as iron metal in steel that can cause metals to crack or disintegrate and leak. The average life expectancy of steel tanks installed in the 1950s and 1960s was thirty to fifty years. This statistic suggests that petroleum products have been leaking from these tanks, spread throughout the country, since the early 1980s. By 2001, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was dealing with cleanups at 379,243 LUST sites in the United States.

Corrosion usually causes tanks to leak slowly. Leaks from older tanks are often difficult to detect because inventory control is imprecise. Once released from a tank, gasoline sinks through unsaturated soil and, because gasoline is less dense than water, floats on the surface of the water table . Because most components of gasoline are fairly volatile —they readily become a vapor at a relatively low temperature—leaks often go undetected until the vapors are present at the ground's surface. In addition to the risk to water supplies, leaking gasoline also presents risk of fire and explosion when vapors from leaking tanks can travel through sewer lines and soils into buildings.

Because nearly half of all Americans depend on groundwater for their drinking water, leaking underground storage tanks represent a significant public health threat. The most hazardous components of petroleum products are the BTEX compounds—benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylenes. Benzene is the most hazardous of these compounds due to the risk of cancer from drinking and bathing in water containing benzene. The maximum contaminant level set by the EPA is 5 parts per billion (ppb).

Another potentially hazardous compound in gasoline is methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE). Ironically, MTBE is added to gasoline to combat air pollution by making the fuel burn cleaner. At concentrations as low as 20 ppb, MTBE makes drinking water unfit for human consumption. (This assessment is based on standards that correlate unfitness with the taste and odor left in the water by MTBE.) MTBE is currently classified as a potential human carcinogen , but there is no maximum contaminant level for MTBE in drinking water. As many as 9,000 community water wells in thirty-one states may be affected by MTBE contamination, and many states are phasing out its use in gasoline.



I'll be reevaluating my water filtration with this in mind.

Great info.  ill have to read it a few times to absorb it all.

tag

Thanks for this info, really good stuff here

Wow. Total flashback.

I used to work for MSI and Allied in the back rooms of ALOT of those stations. I think I helped refit half the damn Texaco Stations in the US when they went over to MSI systems

Good post.

Wow.. Cool thread...





My Question:



Do The different grades make any difference on engine performance/mileage etc.. on standard vehicles?



I used to have a SRT CPU in my Dodge ram, where I had to burn 93 octane (stated that due to impurities in lesser octanes could lead to an engine ping)  Is this true?



And also, for daily drivers... why not fill up at 87?  What's the hype with filling up with midgrade or premium... does the price difference per gallon justify using it?

Gasoline is full of hydrocarbons - hydrogen and carbon basically.  They stick together different ways, but always in "chains" of molecules.  At a certain length, the chain of molecules burns more completely.  That good "chain" length is called octane.  100% pure octane in the gas would be 100 octane.  87 octane is approx 87% octane molecules, and is fine for most domestic engines in good condition.  The remaining 13% is "other" length hydrocarbon chains which do not combust as completely as octane.  If you have a lot of carbon build up in your engine, the lower octane gas may cause knocking as it continues to try to combust after ignition, out of time with the engine's cycle.  The higher octane fuels will combust more completely, and theoretically improve engine efficiency; however, it's so small you'll never see a change in MPG or anything.

Back when my family was in the gas business, we had occasion to meet a fellow who had an RV that was setup for stealing from the USTs.  He had a 550 gallon tank, a vacuum pump, and a hose.  They'd pull a vacuum on the tank, dip the hose into the UST, and then open a ball valve.  It was kind of like a felon's honey dipper truck.  Very fast, it was.  That is why I used to shine a light underneath any vehicle I found parked on our tank field after dark.  The alarms in use now would be helpful in preventing this kind of theft, especially in a 24/7 operation.  





 

awesome.  thank you for the great descriptions and pictures

THX
I remembered my cam today ... taking pics now.

Most of our fire stations have underground diesel and unleaded tanks, but I'm not sure of the size of them.  All the underground tanks have V-R systems, but I didn't know that they could be monitored remotely.  Instead, we have to manually stick the tanks every Friday, as well as print off a TLS-350 inventory.  It's stupid.  All our cam-lock caps for the tanks have padlocks on them, but I can tell you that this is not a very secure cap.

I've noticed two different types of caps.  One has some sort of all-metal cap with a metal lever that throws from one side of the fill cap to the other, and can be locked shut.  I've seen some of these with a lock in place that have the metal broken around the lock.  It's pretty clear that you could smack these with a sturdy hammer and break the metal around the lock.  They can be opened with a lock in place once this is done.  

The other I've seen is like this:



And they have locks in place.  Without breaking them, they can be opened even while locked.  There's that much play in the mechanism on top.  And on one fill tube I've seen, there was what looked like a long brass extension that was simply threaded onto the rest of the fill tube to bring it up to a normal height.  This extension was not in any way secured to the rest of the fill.  If the fill cap were actually locked properly, you could still just unscrew this extension.  

Just some of the things I've observed.  Don't know if commercial fuel tanks have similar issues.

A lot of cool info I didn't know.

Thanks for sharing.

Yep they can be easily defeat because most have been in the field way to long and become wore out. The one you have pictured is standard equipment now , very rarely do I run into the other types . Today I had to replace a tank monitor probe so prefect timing on your post . Here you can make out the components pretty good. The cap for the probe is very similar to the fill cap but has a fitting for the wire and no locking holes. The wire goes a couple of feet down to the probe .Then is what is called a fill adapter  which is a brass quick connect fitting then is the riser which is nothing but the pipe screwed into the top of the tank. note the gap between the rock fill and the sump sides..... Black widows love that ....alot ......


Hey 4328 gals of midgrade down there .....


The bad and new probe and a pic of it all from eye level ... 8 foot probes note the 2 floats one for water and one for the fuel level .


A tanker dropping fuel .. he is dropping reg and the other hose is hooked to the vapor recovery . This site has a single recovery point , white , blue and red covers but only one orange  . Some site have a recovery for each tank some just have a single point that is connected to all the tanks.

A small update above and added a pic and a little more in OP in the dispenser section .

good stuff. keep it coming.

Question:  On the multigrade...umm..dispensers, when I want high octane fuel for my motorcycle and the previous customer got the cheap stuff, how much cheap stuff do I get before it starts pumping the good stuff?  Quart, 2 ???

Never measured it .... Ill check next time Im working on the hanging hardware of a pump.

Ok, got a question for you:

Back near the start of the thread, you mentioned that the high speed diesel pumps have really shitty filtering and to avoid them.  I asked the attendant at a local station today (until recently they had diesel at the normal bank of pumps and a second bank for the truckers.  Now, the diesel is gone from the normal pumps, and only available at the high power trucker pumps) about the filtering, and he said that their high powered pumps have the same filtration system as the normal pumps, they just work on larger diameter piping.  could this be true, or is this guy just blowing smoke up my ass?
If it is not filtered well, I would like to stay away since I have a 6.0L powerstroke which is prone to injector issues.  If it is true, then I REALLY LIKE the high power pump, looked like it was about 15-20 gpm, filled my tank from a quarter to full in under 2 minutes (I know, SFers don't let the tank drop below half, but my quarter tank is still twelve gallons and nearly 200 miles range, so forgive me this once ), plus the high power pumps don't cap out at $75 like the normal pumps, so I didn't have to stop pumping, put the card back in and start over again.

ETA: Best I could tell, these were dispensers not pumps FWIW.  Very little sound coming from the unit itself...  not sure if that matters.

Here are some pictures of the pumps:

Op's post  "Smells like .........Victory."

90% chance your rear is now full of smoke , 9% chance they have put bypass caps on the filter hosing of the standard pumps. Either way not good chances of getting clean fuel . Those are ultra high flow gilbarco highliners or legacys that have LC meters .... the plumbing in those pumps do not have room for a internal filters unless someone gets  very creative . If an ultra high flow  gilbarco dispenser is filtered it will be most likely have an adapter screwed into the side of the manifold hanging out the side of the pump with the hose screwed into that . Funny thing it is probably on the same size piping 1.5 " as standard pumps .. could be on 2" though.

ETA: The 2nd pic in the OP is the inside of a standard disp of the same model , the ultra high flow has a shelf about half way up that the LC meter sets on then the plumbing comes out the top and makes a 90 to go out the side .

A interesting thing I see in you pictures , very nice /secure custom doors on the dispensers . Modified doors and access panels are very common at truck stops because of truckers breaking into the dispensers to disable the pulser to steal fuel . Note the ultra high dispensers in the OP have flat bar over the programing door . Thieves that drive Big rigs are right crafty and have learned about how to use the  programing access to steal fuel . I have saw a decline in this latly because of effective counter measures , changing access codes , removing programing pads ect and the new dispensers have optional alarms and the new software in them require you to take special step that have to be done at the point of sale.

OK, so how often does a busy gas station get a tanker load in compared to a small station.  Am I better off at a small place of a large volume place?  This is in reference to the issue of after the station gets a tanker the tanks are stirred up.

A real busy station can be getting deliveries daily . Im torn on giving you an answer because I have seen problems at both , low volume station vs high vol . it is way to many variables to really pick on over the other. I would note how fast the site is pumping 4-6 gals a minute filters are likely clogged up  , 6 to 10 filters are good ... note variations in pump rate when you visit . The the station seemed maintained ,,, nozzles bagged off ,, zip sorb on the ground ,,notes stuck to the pumps ,, stuff in obvious disrepair , if the maintenance is lacking on the out side of the dispensers it will be lacking on the inside of it also.  Sorry I could not give you a more direct answer on that one.
________________________________________________________________________

What happens when you are an idiot ..... aka I was in a rush and left the nozzle in the car and pulled off .
Well today is your lucky day , a little device installed on one end of the hose or the other called a breakaway is designed to do just that break away /apart and seal off both parts of the fuel line . You will notice breakaways normally near the top of the hose in hanging hose dispensers or near the nozzle on side hose dispensers . They are made to separate at 300 pounds of pull but do to wear over time or poor designs some break apart fairly easy . When they separate a spring loaded plunger slams shut. Some breakaways are designed for one use others can be reconnected by relieving the pressure on the line then pressing the 2 back together and twisting , some have a replaceable pin , and some of the newest ones have magnets but I have found these to work very poorly.

Heres a pic of one separated , note the plunger.

keep it comin!

Wowowowo...how did you get the hose to float in that pic! crazy!

I have magic skills ... lol


Seriously it was 20 degrees , that is a 1" ID hose with 40 lbs of diesel fuel pressure behind it do to a bad valve in the dispenser , or I just turn the dispenser on   lol.

A little on Credit card security
This is why I prefer major oil brand sites , most require the sites stay relatively up to date on CC software security . This is a day close report from a unbranded site running old equipment and software .
Yep full CC numbers , exp dates ..now all he needs is a name , note only 4 ppl used there cards inside ..... How well does the clerk know you? More on all of this later with what to look for at the pump ect.


Heres some pic of standard filters , the dispenser has on monitor filters which have a chem coating that will harden blocking the filter flow when water contacts it , all 7-11s run these in my area . The other 2 are just standard filters one 10 micron the other 30 micron.

Hey Checking in from the field .... drinking coffee and eating candy bars before the last 3/4s of my ride home just finishing an emergency call . Im getting caffeinated up before making the next 1.5 hour ride home on a dead stretch of road . While Im waiting for it to kick in Ill upload some pics with updates.

Ok a little bit more on credit card security ..
By Jul 2010 all stations must be PCI compliant ... What does that mean ? Basically The Credit card companies have got together and decided a bunch of new security rules ,requirements and protocols . Most of the changes will be unnoticed to the customer . But some will , new pinpads inside where you swipe your own card and shielded number pad , all CC info is masked on reciepts , new outside keypads that are tamper proof and one layout most manufactures are going to use metal key pads.
Heres a pic of a new secure door (light grey/off white) compared to the standard door I just set it up there for comparison. note the metal keys. That keeps thieves from putting fake membranes under the number pads and stealing your pin number.


Just some pics of the inside of a dispenser , 20 year old tech , newer ones are alot more roomy


The credit card board tray slid out


OK nozzles the one on top is a Vapor nozzle note the holes , at stations with these the nozzle vacuums out one gallon of vapor from your tank for every gallon you pump in



The hose connection note the size diff and the coaxal fitting on the vapor , it has a smaller hose in the large one for the removal of the vapor


Welp I guess I head to the house

Bump for the day crew

Just to show some times engineers can improve designs. This is a pump that installed in 2001 , Im the first person to work on it . Note how simple it they got it , simple is good.  Im upgrading the software in the pic.


You can see the valves on each side of the filter and solenoids that control it , note the double wall bottom to help disperse gas vapors before they make it to the electronics cabinet .