Siphoning gas out of a Chevy Lumina?

Sep 15, 2008 22 Replies

Apologies for the off-topic. I have a full tank in my Lumina and need fuel for the generator but gas is hard to get after Ike.



Does anybody know an easy way to get that gas out of the car? Nothing too complicated please I am not much of a mechanic.



Thanks!


Well you can get a small hose, keep low, and suck till you swallow gas and let it pour, or put a bullet through the tank and have a bunch of pans ready.

Hey, thank you for sharing your expertise. You may have overlooked that there is an anti-siphoning system in the car. Oh, well, that's not the only thing you must have overlooked in life...

probably easier, if you have the tools, is to disconnect the fuel line from the fuel rail, stick it in a can, and turn the ignition on. However it will probably time out if it does not sense that the engine is running so you'll also need to bypass the fuel pump relay. Most modern cars are darn hard to siphon, deliberately so.

If you have an older car, a handy thing to have around is a little check valve attached to a siphon hose. My friend has one that is just a little marble in a brass sleeve, you just stick it in the tank and shake it back and forth a couple times and it starts siphoning. Handy when you have a yard full of old cars and not all are capable of/legal to drive to the gas station, but you need to move them around anyway. Next time I'm at a car show and see the guy that was selling them I'm going to buy me one, my friend has already worn out one hose on his (when the clear vinyl? hose gets old enough, it loses its flexibility and it doesn't work well to siphon anymore)

nate

Here's how to use that gas to fill your generator: Drive to a gas station.

if I was in a huricanes path and new I could need a gen I would of had extra gas, its just logic kid. True smarts would have been getting a Tri fuel carb so you would never have any fuel issue. It looks like you missed the simplist basic stuff and have a worthless gen.

Speaking of worthless; why don't you just shut up when you have nothing useful to say to the OP?

Thank you Nate. It's a 1997, so it's old but not old enough I guess.

You must have time to kill. Come over here, we need volunteers to help. You are don't seem to have much of a life anyway.

Oh and learn how to spell, or get a spell checker. They are cheap, especially second hand.

I'm not too sure you'll find an easy way to do it. During the Ice Storm of '98 my nephew came over and managed to pull a fuel line and jump the pump to come on and we got gas that way, but ... it's not for the inexperienced. I've tried and tried but never gotten more than a couple gallons out of an overfull tank. Seems like it just can't be done.

I've tried many times to figure out how to do that myelf; I'd rather have my fuel storage in a gas tank than a bunch of fuel cans stashed in the shed. So far I'm still storing about 35 gallons of fuel in 5 & 6 gallon plastic containers each winter. Luckly they get used up in the lawn tractors, exercising the genset weekly, things like that, or I'd also be stuck with a lot of stale gas. So far we've needed the genset three times for more than a 24 hr period since '98; so it's been worth it, but ... . At least it's handy not having to get gas all summer. My next genset will ge a diesel!

Oh, another offspring from the same mother. Say hello to your dad when /if you ever meet him.

Driving to a gas station works only if the gas station HAS gas AND has some way of delivering it.

I put over 100 miles on my vehicle Saturday looking for a gas station. Power was out to 2.1 million customers including virtually every gas station in the fourth-largest city in the nation. I finally found some gas Sunday evening. The owner of the station had corralled, somewhere, a humongous generator to power his store. I had to wait in line for 45 minutes and cops were on the scene to diminish rioting. While I had the opportunity, I bought $140 worth of petrol.

CORRECTION TO AN EARLIER POST:

I do have natural gas but the range won't light because it has electric ignition. Evidently the sucker has some sort of fail-safe mechanism that decides, if you can't light the burner, it's not gonna let the gas go forth.

Kenmore never heard of matches.

I've lived in this town for over 50 years. Never in living memory has the power been out for the ENTIRE city. Before, with localized outages, you might have to drive a few miles for fuel so there was no need to store more than, say, five gallons. With this massive outage, you're just SOL.

Nothing

Would that depend on the year? There wasn't on the 91 Lumina.

Cheri

I have natural gas too but I'm not sure how to direct it to a cooking device aside from shoving a hose up . . . . . .

One reason I chose our range was the ability not only to light the burners but the oven and broiler also. It has no electronics, just plain old good cooking and convection oven.

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And with the hurricane, the nearest gas station with gas could be 400 miles away.

Disconnecting the fuel line at the "carburetor" may be the only way to get gasoline out, leaving no damage.

And jumpering the pump to make it run.

Disconnect the fuel return line, attach a hose into your can and turn on the key. The fuel pump will fill your can.

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