Ive seen it crop up a few times that the main cause of wet belt degradation could be ethanol contamination in oil. Therefore it makes sense that using premium fuel which has less ethanol would slow down belt degredation. Can anyone speak for this or heard about it?

2 hours ago, country roads said:

Ive seen it crop up a few times that the main cause of wet belt degradation could be ethanol contamination in oil.

I've not seen the subject of ethanol mentioned before, can you point me it the direction of the threads on this forum please.

I saw it in some comments in the ford ecoboost nightmare facebook group. One guy claimed ford where testing this theory snd the results were pointing to it being true. Ive seen this theory crop up in some other places of the internet before but I cant remember where sorry.

I don't go looking for bad news on Ecoboosts, there's enough on here as it is, but I've not heard of this one either.

For unburnt fuel to be getting into the sump in the first place - wouldn't that indicate serious problems anyway?

All direct injection engines will always get a small amount of fuel passed the pistons, generally during warm up due to the extreme high pressures.

I think the key is more about how long it is left to keep contaminating the oil and belt.

Therefore i always tell customers on any wet belt engine to get the oil changed every 12 mnths or 10k miles whichever comes first. Always tell the garage NOT to use an engine flush!

Surely once the engine warms up the Ethanol would evaporate.

Problem is, it has already changed its chemical state at that point when mixed with the oil. All it does is thin down the oil.

3 hours ago, Ecosport2019 said:

All direct injection engines will always get a small amount of fuel passed the pistons,

I was thinking they were meaning more than the "normal" amount, but yes. All reinforces the need for those regular oil changes.

Yeah hopefully regular oil changes are enough to keep the engines longetiviity. I dont know weather the theory is true or not but I just wanted to see what people on here think about it. My car has a new engine in so I want to avoid any premature faliures. I'd rarther not buy premium fuel as fuel prices are bad enough already but I would if I knew it would help avoid any major issues due to the lower ethanol content I might.

Well in the last few hours of research on the web, I can find no evidence to support any theories of ethanol causing harm to engines with wet belts.

10% and even 15% ethanol has been in use for far longer in the USA and other countries than the fairly recent introduction here in the UK and Europe. If this was a cause of wet belt problems then you would expect to see far higher failures in those countries.

I have seen some comments about this in the past but no hard evidence. Recently I have seen it talked about with the perguot puretech wet belt. Things like "Many GDI engines suffer from oil dilution due to high pressure fuel injection and low tension piston rings" and something about cold starts and whatnot could wear the welt belt as the fuel gets into the oil via piston blow by so I suppose if ethanol does effect the belt (which I have no idea about) it would make sense that low ethanol fules may help conserve the belt. Then again I suppose the fuel itself and the additives may harm the belt either way so mabye the ethanol part makes little difference.