Raising Gasoline Prices Watch Out for Sticking Valves

Okay everyone is hurting when it comes to gasoline prices, I just like every one else cringes when I have to fill up my tank and each day the price continues to escalate. I do not need to be spending money that I do not have and the fuel companies are making an obscene amount of money off of us.

Now I was at the station the other day and because the gas is so high I was watching the cost, to my utter amazement four cents clicked on the register before the gas even started going into the tank. I heard it, the gas was not flowing and there was a four cent charge. Now four cents isn't a lot, but what happens if for every customer who goes to this gasoline station is charged four cents and they don't get any gas for that four cents, that adds up to a lot of money.

So being the person that I am, I started to look around and do some research, I absolutely hate to lose money. What I found out is that some pumps will hesitate a second or two when the lever is squeezed and whap....there is another four cent profit for the gasoline station.

I called the number listed on the pump in Maryland and started to ask some questions. It appears that this problem is common knowledge to those inspectors. There is a check valve that sometimes sticks and needs to be replaced. Although there are mandatory inspections of the pumps, these check valves sometimes stick and the gas flowing into your car does not match that which the meter shows.

I was told by one inspector that there have been instances in which the check valve sticks intermediately while pumping gasoline and you can wind up paying up to $5.00 more for gasoline than you actually put into the tank. I was talking to my husband and we decided that the next time that we put gasoline into the car we are going to do a ten gallon test, we are going to watch the meter, when it gets close to ten gallons we are going to stop the pump and look to see if the cost that is registered matches the ten gallons that we put into the pump if not we are going to go into the station representative and demand our money back for the shortage if any and we are going to report the station to the appropriate authorities.