If you are looking for a gas station to fill up your tank, you might be searching for the station with the cheapest prices or with easy access to get in and out quickly. But there’s another consideration that you might not have thought about before: if you see the refueling tanker at the station. It’s something that’s important to consider, because getting gas from a station which recently had its own tanks filled could mean trouble for your car.
Gas stations store their gasoline in underground tanks. Over time, massive amounts of sediment can stack up in these tanks over time. The process of refueling empty gasoline tanks can loosen and stir up this sediment and put it into the gasoline you get from the pump. Over time these sediments will sink back to the bottom of the tanks but are mostly likely to make their way through filters and into your car immediately after the underground tanks have been filled.
So if you see a large tanker filled with gasoline refueling the underground tanks at your local gas station, it’s a good idea to drive past it for a day or two until any loosened sediments have had a chance to settle to the bottom of the tanks again. You don’t want your fuel lines being clogged with that type of debris.