The sound of a diesel to a trawler or motor yacht owner is like music to our ears.
But problems can occur with diesel fuel stored in your trawler or motor yacht fuel tanks, affecting those diesels?
It is important to know what diesel fuel is to begin with. Diesel fuel is refined from crude oil. In oil refineries, crude oil is heated, and various hydrocarbon molecules are extracted to create the fuel. Diesel is much heavier than gasoline and evaporates much more slowly. It's often 
referred to as "fuel oil" because of its consistency. Often forgotten, diesel is an organic matter.
Today as part of our continuing Spring commissioning, I had our trawler, the Patricia Ann, fuel polished or simply cleaned.
It was a rather simple task actually with Steve bringing a large pump and a centrifugal cleaner and 5 micron filter system. The system will polish about 1000 gallons per hour or 16 gallons a minute.
The polishing process is simply pumping the fuel out of the trawler tanks, cleaning and filtering it and then returning it to the same tank. Steve likes to circulate the fuel about 10 times constantly checking the filter for contaminants.
I had purposely let my fuel level fall to about 100 gallons so the process would go much faster; even so, Steve was at my trawler for 5-1/2 hours. So by my calculations, we ran the fuel through the filters 55 times. Steve recommends NOT polishing a full tank of fuel.
As it turned out, the fuel was not very dirty after all and the tanks are rust free and in good shape.
We found only some small asphalt droplets, about the size of pencil lead which are always found in old fuel. The fuel in our tanks was over 2 years old and the tanks had not been cleaned in over 8 years.
So all things considered, we could have lasted much longer without any trouble but now we have piece of mind.
You can learn more about understanding and caring for your diesel fuel at this post.
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