Snowblower Maintenance

The weather is finally starting to get warmer. Well, at least it's warm enough that if it snows it will probably melt in a day or two and my shoveling days are put on hold until next winter. With a past weekend of warmer weather I started the daunting task of cleaning up the yard, putting away the shovels and eyeing up the snowblower.

Now before all you guys start making fun of me, just remember this when you are trying to sew on a button, or cook a pot roast, or figure out how to get a stain out of your favorite Packer sweatshirt. Let's just say power tools are not my forte.

My good old trusty snowblower has gone through many winters with me. Most years I am very good and will ration out the gasoline at the end of winter so that there is almost nothing left in the tank. Then I can easily run the motor which empties the gas tank and removes the gas throughout the engine. This spring was different. This spring I just recently filled up the gas tank because it had snowed about six inches and the future looked darn cold and snowy. But in reality we didn't get enough snow to warrant using my snowblower again.

So my question is: how do I get the gas out of the gas tank of my snowblower? How does one do this by themselves? I know I'm not supposed to leave it in there. I can't lift the snowblower up by myself to drain it out--it's just too heavy. There must be some sort of syphon that they make to do this, right? I did a search on Google and the tips there mentioned sacrificing a turkey baster to get the gas out. Not going to do that -- I've had my turkey baster for about 25 years.

Gas Syphon

What I did find out is the reason you aren't supposed to leave the gas in there is because the ethanol in the gasoline damages the internal engine parts. So you can do one of two things: you can syphon the gas out of the engine and then run it dry, or you can treat your gasoline with Sta-bil before you put it in your snowblower. The Sta-bil will protect the engine from the ethanol.

Since I didn't pre-treat, I ended up asking my neighbor for help and he had a gas syphon. We were able to get most of the gas out of the tank with the syphon. Then I ran the engine for about two minutes and that took care of the rest.

So glad that's been taken care of. I ended up putting some Sta-bil in my gas can so I won't have this problem next year. Now I need to figure out how to change the oil in my lawnmower. 

Oh, by the way, as I tucked my snowblower away in the corner of the garage, there, hanging on the wall, left by the previous owner, was a turkey-baster-gas-syphon thingy. Oh bother ...