My 13 year old, not me, just put gasoline into my diesel lawn mower. So come along with me here today. We're going to talk about some of the implications for your equipment when this happens and maybe rectify this so I can get back to mowing. So why does this happen? Is it carelessness? I don't know. My kids know the difference between a gas and a diesel engine. They're very attuned to pick out trucks and tractors and equipment. They know when they get on the machine and turn the key what a diesel or a gas engine sounds like. But my 13 year old just took my red can and filled up my mower with it. And in his defense, he looked at it and he said, "Dad, it doesn't say diesel on there anywhere." And to a point, he's right. If you look at the fuel caps, there's no D or indicator on there anywhere that says that. The side of the machine, even though it's a ZD diesel, doesn't really say diesel here anywhere and tell you that. But if you look closely up here on the roll bar, there is a little sticker here that tells you.
So if you're used to just grabbing the red can when you go for most of the other equipment that you have, it's easy enough to overlook. Now, speaking of red and yellow, if you're unaware, the red cans are always going to be gas. The yellow cans should always be diesel. The two should not mix. That's kind of how the entire industry and people that you run into treat those colored cans. They are labeled and colored that way for a reason to try to keep this from happening. So my son realized there was something wrong when the engine on the mower wasn't running right. At first, it started losing power. You could hear it lugging as it was driving around the yard through grass that wasn't long at all. But soon enough, it was sputtering and even stalled eventually. Now, I had a little cheat here.
In order to be able to get this back up to the garage to work on it, I took a pair of vice grips and clamped shut the fuel tank that he put gas into. A diesel zero turn like this has two fuel tanks on it. And so I can go along here and clamp off the one with the gasoline so that I was able to start the machine back up and get it back up to the garage in order to be able to drain it out. Most equipment, you're not going to have that luxury of two fuel tanks to be able to cheat like this, but somehow or another, you need to be able to get the machine back to a place that you can work on it. And now, we're going to take a little bit of time and go through the unit here and get the gas out of the tank.
So the first thing I'm going to do here is unhook the fuel line so that I can drain it out. Now, in order to get back here to the little clamp, I need to take the fuel filter out so I can pull this away. I've cut two zip ties that hold the fuel line onto the machine so that, once I get it loose, I can pull it away. Now, in many machines, you're going to want to take a pair of vice grips and clamp off the fuel line underneath the tank so that the fuel doesn't run out of it. In the case of this machine, there's actually a fuel caulk on the bottom of the tank that I was able to turn off so that I don't get a constant flow of fuel once I get this line unhooked. Now, with the fuel line here unhooked from the machine, we could just put this down here to my drain pan, reach back here and open that fuel caulk up, and let all $4 and 99 cents a gallon run off here into my drain pan.
So while draining the tank takes care of the gasoline that's back there in the tank, you do still have gas in the fuel lines and the fuel filters. Now, where you can, it's a good idea to go through and try to change the filters where you're able to. You can have a lot of gasoline that potentially sits in those filters and is going to get drawn back into the engine. A lot of your equipment, it's really easy to go over and unscrew the fuel bowl and dump that gasoline out again. Once you have your tank filled back up with diesel again, you just flip your key to the run position and let that electric fuel pump go and refill that fuel bowl again so that you get all the air out of the system and don't force all that up to the engine.
So now, while this line over here is draining $4 and 99 cents a gallon out of my fuel tank, you are still going to have gasoline on any filters that are on the machine. Now, these filters can actually hold a surprising amount of liquid, a really surprising amount of liquid. Some of these could be pretty large, especially the bigger your equipment gets, the bigger your fuel filters often are. These things are only a couple of bucks. If you've got extra ones on hand, it would only be a good idea in order to, at the very least, open your fuel bowl and let the gasoline out or change your filters if you're able to. That's just going to get that diesel fuel back into your engine all the more quickly. So with that drained out, we're now going to take the proper yellow can, fill this guy back up, and give it a go.
Now, I didn't get any sputtering there because I had already run the fuel because I have two tanks from my one diesel tank back to the engine. If you were starting this up for the very first time, you might have a little bit of jimmying around and stuff while your engine gets up the speed and gets that gasoline work through. You do want to minimize the amount of time that your diesel engine is trying to ingest that gasoline, especially if you have common rail fuel injectors. All the lubrication that you would expect from diesel fuel is not in that gasoline, so it can do damage to your engine. You want to keep your revs low. Don't let the thing try to go too fast. Minimize the amount of gas that works its way through the system, because it does have the potential to do damage to your engine, even microscopic damage that might not manifest itself for years down the road.
So that's a little bit on getting the gasoline out of the tank, filled with fresh diesel, getting that primed and plumbed the entire way through the filters and fuel lines, and back up to the engine where it belongs. Not a big deal, took me maybe a half an hour out here to do this today and correct the problem here that my son caused, but we've all done this from time to time. So if you need any help with your equipment, if you need some filters because you've done this, we're here to help.
Schedule Your Equipment for Service
Sometimes it's really cool to see companies doing things simply because they can, right? Because of the things that are possible today, because of what can be engineered, kind of throwing normal conventions and normal sanity out the window and making something awesome because they can. This mower is kind of that for me in the zero turn mower space. The real heart of this machine is down here underneath this back hood, and it is a 48 horsepower CAT diesel. 48 diesel horsepower in a zero turn mower. That is a lot of power. We're very used to selling diesel machines of half this amount of power. Diesel zero term mowers is something that we've been a proponent of for a very long time for a couple of reasons, fuel economy being one, though I'm sure this thing is pretty thirsty. Your typical diesel engines are going to be more torquey, and in a zero-term mower where you got a good constant load of trucking along through the grass, the torque does really help these machines perform well.
But also longevity and that longevity was one of the things that really jumped out at me. When I was going through Ferris's kind of glossy brochures for this thing, they call this out as a 4,000 to 5,000 hour engine being twice the life of a typical gas engine. That I think is cool. That's something that we have told people for a very long time, that you get much better longevity and stuff out of these diesel engines than you do out of just about any air cooled or liquid cooled gas motor. But it's very rare to see that put into print. So very cool to see that, four to 5,000 hour engine, frankly, probably would go pretty far beyond that, but by the time you're getting there, the rest of the machine is probably getting awfully tired by that point.
