For the past five years, I’ve owned a few RVs that had to fit in my man cave with 12-foot overhead doors.

The last one was a glass coach that looked perfect, but unbeknownst to me had very little maintenance for quite a while before I bought it. In fact in hindsight its pretty obvious it sat outside in Florida for a very long time with the fuel tank only about 1/3 full.

First thing I did was take it to the local truck tire shop here in Melbourne FL and had all new Michelin tires installed and full maintenance service as I was heading to Tucson the following day. The tire shop didn’t touch the fuel filters or air filter. Quality shop - not!

By the time I reached Quincy FL about 300 miles from here, the engine started missing and losing power. The fuel pressure gauge on the dash was now indicating negative pressure. I made it to the next RV park spent the night and called road service to change the fuel filters. Because of another technical problem, I returned home and by the time I got 300 miles again the fuel pressure was negative. Obviously the tank was full of crud. This problem went on for a year as every time it seemed the last of the crud was out, but the problem arose again. Hmmm maybe I was getting bad fuel. (Mind you this coach was now parked inside an air-conditioned warehouse always full of fuel.)

The following December we headed to Tucson and had no problems with fuel the entire trip. Problem solved finally? In February we were headed to Dallas and got about 200 miles from home and it started again. Must have gotten some bad fuel again even though the Murphy station was brand new. I stopped and changed the filters, but they were clean. We turned around and got home with a few hick-ups. The problem now: the engine would cut off like it was completely out of fuel, but would restart by the time the speed dropped 20 mph or so.

Enough fooling around with the fuel tank and lines! I took the coach to an independent well know service garage in Sanford to have a new tank made and installed. When I got there he said he could drop the original and clean it and the lines for $1500 (the cost of a new tank). The tank is stainless steel. The bill he handed me for that was $3600, but that’s another story.

It turns out that the tank was full of biological growth from being parked so long mostly empty. When I parked it inside after the Tucson trip, I added Biocide as a precaution to a full tank of fuel. The Biocide killed everything in the tank and it was floating around like jellyfish in the fuel. When a glob of it got into the fuel line it went through the filters, but of course would not burn in the engine, so it was like turning the ignition off until it flushed through.

What’s the moral to this sad tale? Don’t ever park (store) your coach with a partly empty fuel tank. If you feel Biocide is needed, put it in a full tank of fuel and let it set a couple of weeks. Then get the fuel polished before you crank the engine. Had I done that it would have saved me $3600 and an awful lot of aggravation?

Thinking back, I should have had the tank pulled and cleaned after the 2nd set of filters were needed. Duh!