I do need to polish the fuel, but it's not total sludge, either. The engine primaries have never gunked up - they've been dirty, but not a tar baby. I am changing the secondaries on the engines now because I have no idea who did it last and when - could have been when the engines were rebuilt back in 2000 or 2001 since the secondaries have engine paint on them. Changing them now will give me a baseline to fill in on my maintenance records and a starting point to monitor. Surprisingly, the secondary filters are cheaper than the Racor primary elements and because the secondaries are spin-ons and one of the easiest parts to access on my engines, it's not a big deal to change the secondaries. On my port engine, when I open the ER door, it's right there - no need to even enter the ER.
What brought this up is that I was at the store to get a couple cases of filters, and I realized that I was using 30 micron in the engine primaries and 2 micron in the genny primary and wondered if that was right or what the reasoning was. I was curious as to what the rest of you do and why. The only difficult filter to change (of all of the primaries and secondaries) is the tiny one on the genny - the one on the engine. Because 2 micron has always been used in the primary for the genny, that may be why we've only had to change the secondary once. And that was at about 450 hours, if that many.
I think my fuel levels are sufficient to get through CDR. We will either start polishing the fuel beforehand, if Ed has the polisher built by then, or we'll run the fuel level down and do it afterwards when there will be less fuel to polish. I will have LOTS of filters onboard. The current fuel condition is not disabling and the engines are burning it just fine (and they are polishing that tank, too). I may have to change the genny primary filter a few times over the long CDR weekend, but not every 30 minutes like we had to do at times last time (and that fuel is long gone!). Fortunately, the genny primary is located under the lifting steps of the companionway and there is no need to go into a hot genny ER to change it. Takes about 5 minutes to complete - it's just a nuisance when it happens in the middle of the night or when I'm cooking...something like that.
By the way, when I was at Florida Detroit Diesel last week getting parts, I asked if they had DieselKleen. They told me that DD recommends against any kind of additive whatsoever, including biocides or those used for performance boosting. Not debating the issue...just reporting what DD advised me.
