We’re Running Low on Fuel
On our way to Florida from Alabama, Boyd suddenly says to me. We’re getting low on fuel. FYI – diesel is called “fuel, not gas” – this was a dinner topic with non-RV friends last week and I learned this helpful tidbit. Boyd is always commenting on things like that, so at first I didn’t think much about it. Then I remembered that we were low on fuel when we pulled into Red Bay and we didn’t fill up on our way to Atlanta to have our Safe T Plus installed. Or on the way to Ozark, Alabama for the following 4 days. Now he had my curiosity piqued, so I asked for more information.
Oh, This is For Real
He advised that the needle was all the way in the red and by his math, we had 1/8 tank left. Since we have a 100 gallon tank, that meant we had roughly 12.5 gallons left. We get 10 miles/gallon, so should be able to go 120 miles. We were traveling highways from Alabama to Florida, so RV friendly gas stations were not as frequently available as on the interstate. Google said the closest one was 50 miles in the wrong direction. After a couple of small towns with no diesel or stations that were not able to accommodate our RV, we headed towards the interstate hoping there would be RV friendly gas stations there. As we approached the interstate, we found there were no stations (out of 5-6) that could accommodate our RV our side of the interstate. Rather than try the other side, we got on the interstate and headed back to our next RV park. Later, when we returned to this exit, we found that the other side had multiple stations that could have easily accommodated us if we would have just gone a bit further past the interstate.
Not the End of the World
There were no exits between where we got on the interstate and our next destination. We figured we’d gone 30-40 miles, so starting to sweat. The out of gas warning chime was constantly going off now (annoying insult to injury). We started working through our alternatives if we ran out of gas.
We could always take the toad (tow car) to get fuel, but where would we park the RV in the meanwhile? There were no shoulders on the roads down here and there were some pretty desolate (and scary) areas. And, running the engine out of fuel completely is probably bad for it; a planned stop would definitely be preferable. We could split up – one of us could stay with the RV/pets and the other would go get gas in the toad. We had options even if they weren’t ideal.
A Sigh of Relief and More Math
We finally ended up finding a station on the outskirts of a small town- it was actually an Exxon office building that also sold gas (who knew?). After filling up, we were confronted with another math conundrum: we should have had to fill 90+ gallons of gas. In actuality, we only filled 75 gallons. So, either our gas gauge is wrong or we have a different size tank than the specifications indicate.
So this is on our list of warranty concerns for our second trip to the Tiffin Service Center.
New Lessoned Learned
So our new rule is as soon as we hit 1/2 full on the gauge, we start looking for a fuel stop. No exceptions!