Best fuel siphon?

Simple question, I hope. I keep three 5-gallon gasoline jerry cans in my garage to fuel my generator. I'm trying to rotate the gas in one can out every six months into my wife's car so I can refresh it. But it's a major pain trying to lift that can up and pour it (oh so slowly) into the tank. I bought a cheap siphon at Lowe's and it worked as well as you'd expect -- that it, it didn't, and broke easily.

I'd really like to get something industrial grade, with perhaps a hand crank, reliable, reusable, etc. Any suggestions? Thanks in advance. -Gary

The Northern Tool & Equipment Co. has a lot to chose from. I bought mine from there.

http://www.northerntool.com/

Here's the one I bought.

http://www.northerntool.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/product_6970_396428_396428

I just added a section of hose to put in the truck gas fill tube and the other end just sits in the gas can. Might work for you might not, seems to work fine for me. Just a suggestion.

I also have a funnel that has a long wide round opening(10in across by 12 in deep) as opposed to the short traditional funnel design which allows me to pour large amounts at a pretty fast pace. I do hate the new design gas cans that they make you buy now, does anyone know of an adapter kit or a hose to replace those stupid fill tubes?

The Black and Decker Jackrabbit hand pump is supposed to work pretty well. Haven't purchased one to try, yet...

Harbor freight gets my vote, over 5 hurricanes and still going strong. Spent many days refilling the Generac 12.5KW from the food grade $25 plastic 55 gallon barrel. Killed me on the gas bill but was nice powering the entire house 100% for days when every body was without power. I guess you got to pay to play.

http://www.harborfreight.com/cpi/ctaf/displayitem.taf?Itemnumber=34679

I saw a really cool set up on the Discovery channel once where this guy had a length of hose connected to the neck of a 2-liter coke bottle.

He had a small hole poked in the base of the coke bottle so that when he sucked on the bottle the fluid started to collect in the bottle instead of his mouth (as I've had gas do to me once ---blech!!).

Never tried it myself and using the manufactured ones are definately safer but if you're in a crunch ....

Had not heard about using the coke bottle, will have to remember that one. Have tasted gas before too, it's something to avoid.

Have one of these and it empties a five gallon jerry can in around a minute,

http://tinyurl.com/2fojdw

But you do have to have the can higher than what you are filling.

And the fix for the California cans is a hacksaw and a cork, at least that is what i see on the back of some of the lawn maintenance trailers around here.

It's illegal to store more than 5 gallons of petrol at your home in the UK. And for a very good reason. It has more explosive power than dynamite (hence fuel air bombs devastating effect). Don't do it.
simon

Glad I don't live in the U.K.

Sorry, air fuel bombs are not just a can of gas that gets to go off. It needs to be vaporized and mixed with air between the upper and lower explosive limits, otherwise no boom. The 5 gal limit is probably more in line with insurance company ideas and houses burning down.

Bill

I have a story about this. Some of you may have already heard this but it'll be instructional for new members.

Growing up in Minnesota my mom used to catch rain water in 5-gal buckets. One winter she never brought the buckets in so the water in them froze. For some reason I decided to dump the chunks of ice out and in doing so I discovered the water had frozen from the outside towards the middle. The ice was about 1.5" thick on the sides and maybe about 3" thick on the top and bottom. I drilled a hole in the top of one of them and poured out the unfrozen water from the center. Pondering what to do next I decided it'd be really cool to see fire burning inside of ice so I got dad's gas can and poured about an inch of gas into the hollow ice block. Thinking about the safety of this setup, I tipped the block over and rolled it about twenty feet from the house, then set it upright again.

After that, things get a little blurry. I remember lighting a match and, looking straight down over the hole, beginning to drop the match in. Suddenly I couldn't see, my hand hurt, and my ears were ringing but I could hear large "WHUNK!" sounds as chunks of ice crashed out of the sky onto our house, our car, the neighbor's car, etc...

I was only seven at the time but from that second on I knew what I wanted to do with my life.

-Blast

p.s. Kids, don't try this at home! Find a gravel pit or something like that. Make sure it has cell phone coverage and is accessible by ambulance.

That's how you got your handle!!!

Actually, I got my handle when I blew up my dorm room back in college when a demonstration went horribly, entertainingly wrong...

Of course, between those two events and on up until the first bombing of the World Trade Center there were many, uh, experiments with unstable molecules. After Feb 26, 1993 I decided it was best to stop playing with the homemade stuff and limit my activities to legally purchased explosives.

So I moved to Texas. Man, you can buy ANYTHING here!

-Blast, who still has all his fingers and both eyes, but a lot of scar tissue everywhere else

Blast
That cracks me up, reminds me of when I was a kid something similar.

Thanks everyone, great advice. I ordered the barrel pump from Harbor Freight. -Gary

Ok Blast that got me laughing. I think that the rolling it away from the house allowed the fuel to vaporize and mix with the air giving a nice explosive mixture. Funny when we look back on what we survived, heah?

Bill

Blast - I'm a little jealous -- I didn't do anything near that much fun when I was a kid. I'm glad you made it through OK though. I guess we wouldn't hear stories from the people who did things like that and *really* screwed up...

Blast - Good thing you didn't add pure oxygen from Dad's cutting torch like I did. Only a few drops of gasoline in a 2L soda bottle plus some O2. I had 2nd degree burns over the entire palm side of the hand that held the match.

Time to revisit this topic based on experience. I bought the barrel pump from Harbor Freight. It was back-ordered and just arrived. It's quite large and beefy. I'm including a picture of my situation. To recap, I have (3) five gallon Wedco jerricans for gasoline to fuel my Honda generator. I want to rotate the gas out every 6 months to a year (I also use Sta-bil) to prevent the gas from going stale. Since I have a diesel SUV, the gas has to go into my wife's Mini Cooper.

(The cans are Wedco WCA-520Ps. The current spouts are their T202C "spill-proof" spouts, which are anything but.)



I wanted to get a high-quality siphon to move gas from the cans to the tank door (and to the generator tank), as the plastic Wedco spigots that came with each can are really dysfunctional. Well, you can see from the picture that the barrel pump isn't quite the best solution for me!

Two questions:

1. What's a best alternate siphon for this situation? And/Or,

2. Does anyone make a replacement pour spout for these cans that would work better than the plastic ones that came with it?

Thanks in advance. -Gary

P.S. -- Would anyone in the Maryland area be interested in a used-once barrel pump? 8-)

Don't know any fix for carb cans other than getting fuel cans that are not carb compliant. Non-carb cans may not be legal where you live, there are more states adopting the not supposed to spill a drop cans that seem to have the ability to keep gasoline from going where you want it to go. Have not seen any non-carb replacement spouts that will interchange with the carb cans.

For the cans you have a large funnel will work well for fuel fillers located on top of equipment. The large equipment funnels are available from a well stocked hardware store or a place like tractor supply. For fueling your wife's mini cooper, seem to remember the fuel filler being on the drivers side, put a towel on the roof. Set the can on the towel, don't want to scratch the paint on your wife's ride otherwise you will be sleeping in the garage. I would not recommend this for a tall vehicle, to difficult to lift a full fuel can that high. Open everything up and use one of the HF shaker syphons, i use the surplus jerry cans and this empties the can in around a minute. Or use the pump you have by installing a length of flexible tubing to the output tube.

There are also smaller barrel pumps than the HF ones. I have seen small all plastic, won't rust pumps that the race car crowd uses. There is a cap below the pump designed to fit directly on the square racing gas cans. These things are not what i would call inexpensive but i'm not sure that there is much price difference between this and the wedco cans. The pumps are also by-directional turn the handle one way and it empties the can turn the handle the other way to pump fuel into the can. Very handy to remove the old fuel from the generator.

http://www.flofast.com/products.html

HTH's

http://www.tooltopia.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=28920

This is not exactly a siphon, but see if this doesn't work better for you -
http://www.ilynne.com/captaingoddammit/

Use your jerry cans as external tanks and swap them out live.

Skeptic in me had to look the vaporization point of gasoline is -40 degrees F. Sound like fun thing to do, LOL.
cheers