How often do you change the water separator/filters?
 

How often do you change the water separator/filters? I just dump mine out a couple times a season. This is the third year for mine. Probably have ran a couple hundred gallons of fuel through each of them.

i replace them every year, only $10 ea. We only put about 10-15 hrs on the engines each year, but easier just knowing things are new at beginning of season.

I change mine every year. I drain them into a glass every time I do it and there is never any water or crap in them. I TRY to put about 50 hours on each year.

I usually chnage mine every season but with the recent ethanol addition to our market I will change them every fill up this season, or atleast once a month. Like they said $30-$40 to save your injectors and internals.

I changed mine for the first time in 2.5 seasons(175hrs) of running the boat. I dumped them and there was no water and no sediment at all. I was surprised. My boat is stored inside and heated to about 50* in the winter. I am guessing this has a lot to do with having no water at all due to lack of condensation in the tanks. Before I had inside heated storage, I would change them every Spring.

WE have had ethanol as long as I have owned my boat and again, I change mine once a year and they are always perfectly free of water and debris of any kind. The ethanol will still reach your injectors as the filters won't separate that stuff out. You are wasting your time and energy changing them each fill up, but you should do what helps you sleep at night!!

I'm not changing them for the water issues. Ethanol is an extreme cleaning agent that will take any kind of sediment that has built up in your tank walls over the years and clean it out. It will literally take rust off metal. When we switched our market to ethanol based fuels we had to drain and surface coat all of our tanks that we Have been using for over 40 years for fuel with no problems. I am always a preventitive maintenance guy though. As stated if you feel your methods are working fine then no harm done. I just "over" maintenance everything I own so it will last forever.

And... The longer your market has had ethanol the better.. After this season I will switch back to once a season. Once I know the tanks are clean.

BTW, If you're chnaging them that often, you can get NAPA water sep fuel filters for about $8-9 each.
Napa #18-7845

i change them on my diesel turck every 10k mi which has more water in the fuel then gasoline, so on regular gasoline i would say no more than once a year. There cant be that much water in regular gas.