How Fuel Quality Impacts Fuel Economy, Engine Performance & Maintenance Costs in Modern Diesel Fleets
Proactive fuel quality management, including fuel testing, storage best practices, and additive use, can improve fuel economy, reduce downtime, protect diesel engine components, and lower fleet operating costs.
Episode 377: In this episode of The Heavy Duty Parts Report, host Jamie Irvine speaks with Jessica Crabtree, Director of Technical Services, and Garth Redifer, Vice President of Sales at Power Service, about how fuel quality directly impacts fuel economy, engine performance, emissions systems, and maintenance costs in modern diesel fleets.
They explain how changes in diesel fuel, including ultra-low sulfur diesel, biodiesel, and renewable diesel blends, have increased the importance of managing fuel quality, lubricity, injector cleanliness, and fuel storage practices.
The discussion highlights how poor fuel quality can lead to injector deposits, clogged fuel filters, excessive DPF regenerations, reduced fuel economy, increased downtime, and premature wear of fuel system components.
The guests emphasize the value of fuel testing, preventive maintenance, proper fuel storage, and the use of quality fuel additives to improve reliability and lower total cost of operation. They also share real-world results showing significant gains in fuel economy and reductions in regeneration events through effective fuel treatment programs.
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Transcript of Episode
Jamie Irvine
Welcome to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. My name is Jamie Irvine, and in this episode, we’re going to talk about the impact of fuel quality on diesel engines and how that affects commercial fleets. I can’t have this conversation alone, so I’ve got two guests today that I’m very happy to introduce. First, we have Jessica, Director of Technical Services, and Garth, Vice President of Sales at Power Service. Now this is a company that is dedicated to helping diesel operators improve fuel quality, engine performance, and reliability. Jessica, welcome to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. Very glad to have you here.
Jessica Crabtree
Thank you. I appreciate it.
Jamie Irvine
And Garth, nice to see you. Thanks for coming on the show.
Garth Redifer
I appreciate you having me on.
Jamie Irvine
Okay, let’s get into the conversation. I think it’s fair to say that a lot has changed in diesel over the years that we’ve been in this business. I know myself, starting almost 30 years ago, there’s been so many changes. One of the changes is diesel fuel itself. So Garth, can you explain what has changed in diesel fuel, let’s say over the last decade, and why fleet operators need to know about this?
Garth Redifer
So a lot has changed. I mean, like you said, 30 years, I’ve been around it my whole life. My family was in the timber business. I’ve been around diesel equipment back from the high sulfur mechanical injection systems until today with the high-pressure common rail with ultra low sulfur diesel. So there’s been many changes and most of our guys out in the field deal with customers that are still familiar with that old technology, but they’re having to work on new equipment, new technology, diesel, today’s diesel with the ultra low sulfur diesel. And so many changes that the mechanics, the fleet operators have had to adapt to. In the last decade or so, diesel has continued down this ultra low sulfur diesel road. There’s biodiesel blended into the fuel. There’s renewable diesel blends into the diesel fuel today. So a customer really doesn’t know what they’re truly getting. Is it straight ultra low sulfur diesel? Is it a blend of renewable? Is it a blend of bio or what are they actually using? And so what we always tell customers is like, we try to educate to the point where you don’t know what you’re going to get each time you fuel up. So here are the steps that you need to take in order to address some of those possible challenges. And so as diesels change, but the thing that’s changed the most in the industry are the engines continuing to evolve. And so, in the last decade, everybody’s now running you know, high pressure common rail, you know, emissions devices on their engines with the DPF SCR systems. And so they’re dealing with other issues, not only the diesel, but now the engines issues within their engines and fuel systems that they’ve never dealt with in their history of operating diesel equipment.
Jamie Irvine
Yeah, absolutely. And then we have EPA 27, right, which is a whole another layer on top of all of those changes. So Jessica, what is the most common fuel quality issues you see being overlooked. And at this show, we really like to talk about how it impacts lowering total cost of operation. So anything that’s threatening that we want to know about. So can you kind of fill us in?
Jessica Crabtree
So I think the most commonly overlooked issue is injector deposits. I know that that’s talked about a lot as well, but injector deposits don’t just affect injectors, you know. So if you have deposits on your injectors, you know, you’re not getting a nice, you know, finely atomized fuel spray. And so in the combustion chamber, it’s not combusting like it should. And then you’re getting, you know, more heavier exhaust at the end, you know, unburned fuel and everything like that. So that can also cause higher emissions and that can fill up the particulate filters quicker. And so you’ve got emissions equipment that’s threatened by that, injectors that are threatened by that. And then the other really hot button issue is lubricity, which that can affect injectors and fuel pumps. But those two things are really probably the most common issues that we see in regard to fuel quality.
Jamie Irvine
Boy, if you know anything about all of those systems you talked about, the upstream, downstream, and the trickle-down effect that that can all have on your total cost of operation can actually be huge. So Garth, how does the fuel quality impact these systems and how does that affect things like fuel economy in modern diesel engines?
Garth Redifer
These engines, even to follow up with what Jessica was saying, there’s issues out there that the general consumer. One, they’re not aware of, and two, they have very little control of, you know, it’s where they’re fueling, the fuel quality of what they’re getting out of the tanks. Is there water? Is there bacteria contamination in these fuel storage tanks? You know, and those type of things affect overall, you know, components life. It affects, you know, the fuel economy. It affects everything to have to do with that highly complex diesel engine. So when we’re dealing with these high pressures, tight tolerances of these engines, there’s a number of issues that the customers can face because of one fuel quality, you know, with water and bacteria, like I said, you know, lubricity, you know, detergent packages that we offer. And so what we’re trying to continually educate the customers is the fact of we’ve been doing this as a company for 70 plus years now. In the last 15, 20 years or so, it’s become more prevalent of the cost of ownership, the cost of repairs, the downtime. You know, when we look at like over the road truck fleets with e-logs and they’re trying to say, okay, hey, we can only operate X number of hours per day. Well, if they’re sitting there because of some fuel filter issue, that’s just increasing your operating costs, you know, flat out. And so what we’re trying to do is get ahead of these issues and educate to the point where, hey, if you follow these couple of steps, check these couple things as a maintenance intervals, you can maximize your uptime, which is going to decrease your expenses and your costs of operation. And so we’re always kind of educating, trying to show customers the way of, we’re not just trying to sell you a product, we’re trying to solve an issue that is crippling your fleet and costing you a ton of money that’s unnecessarily being spent.
Jamie Irvine
We work with a lot of repair shops. So you can think of the shop foreman and the service advisor and the technician, or you think about even in a fleet where they’re running their own repair facility, they have technicians, they have a fleet manager. And back in episode 373, we talked about shotgun repairs and how a lot of times technicians are just changing parts, trying to fix the problem. They’re not getting to the root cause of the problem. And really they only end up treating the symptom, which costs everybody a lot more money. So what indicators should service technicians and maybe service advisors or shop foremans look out for to say, hey, listen, we’ve replaced these components that you guys have talked about that are affected by this. Like what would trigger in their minds that maybe they need to go a step further, do a root cause analysis that would lead them to talk about fuel quality?
Garth Redifer
I think the first indicators are, you know, if they’re tracking fuel economy, which a lot of fleets are, have we drastically reduced our fuel efficiencies? Are we burning more fuel than we ever have? There’s a, there’s reasons for that. Dirty injectors, you know, that just, you know, DPF, excessive regens are happening. Well, that’s affecting fuel economy. It’s affecting uptime. You know, but the easiest thing is fuel filter replacements. They all know every fleet that I talk to, every customer, they know an estimated amount of miles or hours that they’re going to run between a typical fuel filter service. We’re seeing a lot more customers seeing a shortened life of fuel filters. Well, why? If they’re buying fuel over the road, which they don’t have a lot of control over that quality, but they can be made aware of, hey, if you’re seeing these issues, it’s something that’s kind of a red flag that you need to look at. But if a fleet’s operating their equipment out of their own storage tanks, which a lot are, well, you know what, that’s where our guys can come in and pull samples, show is there bacteria, is there water, and shortening the fuel filter life. And we help not only look at the reasons, but hey, what’s causing it? Is it bacteria and water? Is it an asphaltine issue that the fuel is getting hot and cooking and the carbons are plugging that filter? And so those are the things that our crew goes out there and really focuses on is here are the steps of what you’re doing. Here’s what you can do to minimize your repairs or looking at the performance issues that you’re having and really look at the root cause of why.
Jamie Irvine
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We’re back from our break. Make sure you go and check out the links in our show notes to all of our sponsors. OK, let’s get back to this episode.
Jessica, many heavy-duty parts professionals are often asked for recommendations. I know when I was on the counter, people would come in or they would phone and they would say, hey, listen, we’re having this issue. What can you recommend? What parts should I be replacing on this job? So what practical advice can they give customers to protect their engines from all these issues that we’ve been talking about?
Jessica Crabtree
So you want to look for an additive that has a high concentration of detergent, and then you definitely want some type of lubrication in there. Those are the two main things that are going to be the most helpful and the most preventive when it comes to preventing all of these problems. And then I would also just look at the company as well and make sure that they are testing their own fuels and doing their own research and everything to make sure that these additives are actually going to perform the way that they say that they are going to. And an additive is really the only way that you can ensure that the quality of your fuel is where it needs to be. Just like Garth said, that there is no way to know exactly what you’re getting out of the pump. So the only way to really ensure that is to add it yourself.
Jamie Irvine
Okay, so that testing that you’re recommending, I would assume that people who are reselling your product would be able to partner with you, and especially if fleets think they have an issue, they’d be able to get some help from you on that?
Jessica Crabtree
Yeah, so we have regional managers that will go and pull samples and we run our own fuels testing laboratory where we run about 2,500 fuel samples a year through our laboratory. So we can test for things like asphaltines, water, microbial contamination, biodiesel content, all of those things that we can kind of help pinpoint what exactly is going on with the fuel.
Jamie Irvine
Yeah, and it’s that level of diagnostics that is required to get to the root cause of these problems, right, to avoid that issue of shotgun repair. So Garth, how should fleets approach fuel storage and handling today? I’m kind of thinking about how things have changed and then like what they should do today. So can you help us with that?
Garth Redifer
Yeah, so we have a myriad of products that we do that address particular concerns. Two of our products that we do are purely about fuel tank storage and stabilizing that stored fuel or a piece of equipment that gets parked. So we have a product called Clear Diesel Fuel and Tank Cleaner. It’s got a stabilizer, but it’s a water dispersant and it’s going to dry out and dehydrate fuel tanks. Make sure that if you get rid of the water, bacteria cannot grow. If somebody has bacteria in their tanks or algae, whatever they want to call it, yeah, we have a product BioClean to go in and kill that bacteria. And so a lot of the calls that we get are, hey, I’ve got this issue going on, what do I need to do? I actually just took a tech call before I got on this of a customer trying to prevent the issues from happening with stored fuel. Fuel is going to be sitting in generator tanks. Only need to be used when called on. He’s going through a process to put our clear diesel fuel and tank cleaner into his tanks to make sure that one, the water doesn’t shed, that the fuel doesn’t degrade while it’s sitting there. Because there’s a lot of people, it goes back to our very first part of this interview was people that have been dealing with this for 30, 40 years or longer, old high sulfur diesel fuel, you could put in tanks, set it and forget it, and 15 years later, it was fine, people used it. Ultra low sulfur diesel, we’re not able to do that today without some care and concern. Before, people just left it and they used it as they needed. Today, it’s going to shed water. It’s going to grow bacteria and that goes for like a combine comes through harvest and then gets shoved into a barn until the next harvest. Well, that’s shedding water. It’s condensating in that tank and it’s going to grow bacteria in that fuel. So when they pull it back out, when they need it to operate, guess what? It doesn’t operate without plugging fuel filters, having a nightmare issue trying to clean tanks. And so that’s what you have to do. So our products, we make products specifically for fuel storage and fuel tank hygiene.
Jamie Irvine
Jessica, there’s an old saying, what gets measured gets managed. And so I’m thinking about it from the perspective of like a maintenance manager for a fleet. How would they set things up so that they would be able to really understand how what the choices they’re making is having an impact on lowering their total cost of operation. Like how would you help them get that all set up so that they could actually look at the data and be like, okay, we have definitely made an improvement here.
Jessica Crabtree
Yeah, so sending in a fuel sample is definitely the first step with that. We can kind of determine what’s going on with the fuel and then tracking fuel economy, tracking regens and then just tracking overall downtime, you can kind of really kind of do your own field trial and see, okay, this is what the downtime we were averaging before we started this fuel program and then what we were starting afterwards. The biggest cost factors are really downtime and replacement parts, which is kind of hard to estimate that ahead of time. But if you know that you’re, you know, on average having this much downtime per vehicle, that’s pretty easy to track. But fuel economy and regens is the really the easy one to track on every single vehicle beforehand, before and after to see if an additive is actually working.
Jamie Irvine
Yeah, and actually going back to what we were talking about before with the other components in the system, we could go back and look like how many injectors, fuel pumps. What was the situation with our after treatment? And then we could compare that data. So that makes a lot of sense. Can you share with us an example of where you were able to help someone with all of this and what ended up happening?
Jessica Crabtree
Yeah, so we actually have a lot of field trials and case studies published on our website. So if people want to go look at those specifically, but we did have one of our delivery vehicles that brings us raw materials every day. So they’re a really good subject for a case study because they hold the same load over the same route every single day, not very many variables. They fuel at the same location every time. And we were able to increase their fuel economy from 5.7 to 6.9 miles per gallon with just one treatment of our injector flush. And so that’s a pretty significant increase in fuel economy. And then also we were able to reduce their regens quite a bit by about 40%. So they were regening about 40% less often. And so those right there are pretty easy to kind of calculate how much you’re saving. But we do have a lot of examples on our website from all different sizes of vehicles.
Jamie Irvine
Yeah, those are some significant gains. You know, that even just that fuel economy alone is huge. And then the regens, I mean, that’s amazing, 40% reduction. That’s time and time is money for drivers. So that’s fantastic. So we’ve talked about this, Garth. If there’s one thing you just want people to remember from today’s conversation, what is that one thing?
Garth Redifer
Well, I think the biggest thing, like I always tell a lot of people is we’re going to provide the products. We’ll provide the expertise, but everybody, every fleet operator, every diesel consumer, whether they’re driving a half ton diesel pickup, you know, with a three liter Duramax in it to the biggest, you know, over the road truck or off highway, everybody has to take their fuel tank, you know, quality of their fuel and the performance of their engine into their own hands. You can’t rely upon a retailer to be taken care of, they’re selling you diesel. They’re not putting detergents in it. They’re not putting lubricator in it. They’re not doing anything. They’re not winterizing, you know, typically. And so every customer has to take on their fuel tank or their fuel performance of their diesel engine and reliability into their own hands. And so our products are widely available over the retail shelves, you know, many online outlets and it’s very easy to get their hands on, but they just have to understand that the diesel they’re buying is just a un-additized diesel fuel that in your engine really wants a lubricant and it really needs a detergent to keep these injectors clean and working the way they need to.
Jamie Irvine
You’ve been listening to The Heavy Duty Parts Report. I’m your host, Jamie Irvine, and we’ve been speaking with Jessica, Director of Technical Services and Garth, Vice President of Sales at Power Service. To learn more about Power Service, you can go to powerservice.com. Links are in the show notes. Jessica, thank you very much for being on the show. Really enjoyed my conversation with you today.
Jessica Crabtree
Thank you. I appreciate you having us.
Jamie Irvine
Garth, it was great to hear from all of your years of experience. We appreciate your contribution as well.
Garth Redifer
Okay, I appreciate the time. Thank you.
Jamie Irvine
And for all of you who have listened right to the end, you’re a very special class of our audience, so we appreciate your ongoing support. If you haven’t already, head over to heavydutypartsreport.com and follow the show wherever you get your podcasts. I’d like to conclude today’s episode, as I always do, to encourage you to be heavy duty.
