Categories: Fuel Quality

Importance of Winter Fuel Additives for Your Business’s Backup Generator

If your business or facility relies on a large commercial generator or standby generator, you probably have a good amount of diesel fuel on hand in preparation for the winter. You want to know that you will have heat and light when you need them most, should your main power supply fail.

But if that fuel has been sitting in your tank for a while, you may be concerned about its condition. Should you be concerned, and will fuel additives help?

The Value of Fuel Additives in the Winter

It is true that if you allow a large amount of fuel to sit in your generator tank throughout the winter, you could run into some problems. For example, when it gets cold, the paraffin wax in your diesel fuel could crystalize, and these wax crystals can clog fuel filters and prevent your generator from running. It’s also a simple fact that fuel can go bad, and if your emergency generator fuel has been sitting in the tank all year or even through multiple winters, there’s a good chance that it has taken on contaminants and suffered a considerable drop in quality.

Fuel Additive Solutions for Commercial and Standby Generators

To ensure that your generator has access to high-quality fuel when you need it, you should have a professional test your fuel so you can take the proper steps to ensure its quality. Foster Fuel Mission Critical has a number of reliable services for maintenance of your winter generator fuel, including:

Fuel Testing and Analysis – If your fuel hasn’t gone bad, you don’t want to waste it. We will send our experts to test your fuel to make sure it has not exceeded an acceptable level of contaminants and that it has not taken on too much mold, condensation or debris. We can test your fuel on a case-by-case basis or set up regular fuel test maintenance.
Fuel Additives – If we do discover that your fuel isn’t up to snuff, we don’t want you to have to toss it all out. We can recommend the right fuel additives to get your fuel back to where you need it to be. Rather than trying to find additives yourself and risk making the wrong choice and wasting money, let us give you the benefit of our years of expertise and continuous research. We can recommend a fuel additive that is the right product for your tank.
Fuel Polishing – Another service we offer that can help restore your fuel to like-new condition is our fuel polishing service. This is a special process that can make your fuel purer, cleaner and brighter, turning seriously degraded fuel into fuel that will behave as if you just purchased it.
Fuel Tank Cleaning and Maintenance – Fuel lasts longer and works better if it comes from a clean tank. We can reduce or eliminate mold and contaminants in your tank that could hurt your fuel’s quality.