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Something everyone should agree on -Bring back the old style gas cans!
Or at least the old style pour spouts!
Well ... Someone did!
Quote:
The old style gasoline cans with the separate spout and vent worked fine.
You could fill your lawnmower without spilling a drop.
About ten years ago, the EPA mandated the new "environmentally friendly" gas cans.
It is almost impossible to fill your lawnmower using these without spilling gasoline everywhere, including on the hot engine.
I'll bet the new rule came from someone who never even cut their own lawn.
How does spilling gasoline all over help the environment, your safety and your wallet?
Bring back the old style cans!
I'm certainly not excusing the many nannies who work for our governments but I sort of doubt it was one of the cubicle-bound people at the EPA, or even the California Air Resource Board (CARB), who designed the new spouts. I have never read any of the State or Federal regulations but I'm guessing the regulations only provide unworkable guidelines for a safe design. It was probably the engineers at the gas can companies who were unable to incorporate the regulations into workable designs.
The worst new design by far is by the Blitz gas can company on their plastic gasoline containers. This company's new spouts take three hands and a fire extinguisher sitting close by to work right.
But like the early exhaust system catalytic converters that used to set grass fires responsible for burning down many houses and a few forests, governments and industry will eventually get it right. Of course that will be at a greater cost to the consumer.
The regulations say the spout and vent must be together, that the spout and vent must automatically close when not pouring, and the seal must be such that only a specific amount of vapors can be released when in use and when in storage. Essentially, its a Type I safety can. However, putting a Type I spout on a cheap plastic can will more than quadruple the price of the container. So, manufactures didn't want to go from $20 a container to $50 which means they had to try and reinvent a cheap to manufacture spout so the total cost of container and spout still stayed low.
Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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Fortunately my 5 gallon, 2.5 gallon and 1 gallon cans were all bought 12-15 years ago, and still work just fine. I tossed the steel 5 gallon Jerry can, a few years ago, it was getting rusty but I bought it in 1973.
Where I work, we sell gas cans, and all of them have those stupid EPA spouts on them. Every day, someone will come in looking to see if we carry an old fashioned spout that actually pours like it should.
I wanted to put gas into a car I just finished up, with fresh paint, and I didn't want the hassle of gas dripping from one of those EPA spouts, so I bought one of these:
It was the best $20 I ever spent. I pumped 5 gallons in about 1 minute, didn't spill a drop, and I liked it so much I bought a second one for my son. You just set the can on the floor, no holding a heavy can in the air, pump the bellows up and down, and the gas flows quickly and cleanly.
If you can find an old Blitz can with their spout buy it!!
Thanks Lisa. I didn't know this but I do indeed have at least two of the original Blitz cans.
This all reminds me of the recent idiotic CD discussion of whether or not government regulations actually cost consumers more. I think the discussion was in Great Debates.
Where I work, we sell gas cans, and all of them have those stupid EPA spouts on them. Every day, someone will come in looking to see if we carry an old fashioned spout that actually pours like it should.
I wanted to put gas into a car I just finished up, with fresh paint, and I didn't want the hassle of gas dripping from one of those EPA spouts, so I bought one of these:
It was the best $20 I ever spent. I pumped 5 gallons in about 1 minute, didn't spill a drop, and I liked it so much I bought a second one for my son. You just set the can on the floor, no holding a heavy can in the air, pump the bellows up and down, and the gas flows quickly and cleanly.
If you can find an old Blitz can with their spout buy it!!
That's a bunch of BS garbage they are spreading to justify their stupid action. Blitz USA was the exclusive supplier to WalMart. WalMart required them to reduce cost to below what all the other manufactures were charging their major retailers. To reduce cost, Blitz removed the flame preventer, a part costing about one dollar. As a result, the number of people burned or fried to death from using Blitz USA containers bought through Walmart skyrocketed so far above industry proportions, lawsuits were bound to have occurred. Several major class action product liability suits and defective product suits were successful. Even the one case they won, they were not found completely innocent and still ended up spending millions. So, don't let companies hide bad cost saving business decisions behind regulations and lawsuits. Blitz deserve to get its rear beaten like they did. Notice no other manufacture with those flame arresting devices have had any lawsuits.
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