Greasecar experiences?

In germany there are a lot of followers, some magazines print daily logs. A diesel car drove from the North of Norway to Egypt using salad oil this year!!

If I find a URL, I will post it for you here....

There's an owner of a Chinese food restaurant near by that uses the grease and oil from his own kitchen. He's driving a 1980 MBZ 300D. Whenever he drives by, people get hungry (smells like chinese food). From my conversation with him, I found out that he heats the used cooking oil to about 200degF, then passes it through a series of coffee filters and screens. He claims to be able to process 20gal/day and has a stockpile of usuable fuel in his back yard to last him 8+years.

By his reckoning, he gets slightly less power and slightly less fuel efficency when compared to diesel fuel, but the fact that he only fills his "grease tank" once a week and says that he drives over 300miles per 10gal of grease, and only filled his diesel tank once in 3 months makes his personal experiment well worth while.

I wonder if the same application can be applied to diesel generators?

Spotted in the charming Suffolk coastal village of Southwold last year: a Range Rover with a legend on the side: "This car is a vegetarian"!

The compression-ignition engine was originally intended to run on vegetable oil products. Since then, someone managed to produce a substitute fuel from the lower fractions of oil distillates and it has been simply more convenient to use that - until relatively recently. What a wonderful business opportunity that was.

The (in?)famous television-motoring-journalist Jeremy Clarkson ran an ancient Volvo 740 around an off-road test track for a day quite successfully on a fuel consisting mostly of strained used chip-shop oil with a couple of percent of white spirit added. The long-term effects of this fuel on any elastomeric components of the fuel delivery system were not recorded in the broadcast, and manufacturers do advise replacing certain parts of these systems should a vehicle designed solely for petroleum-diesel be run on a vegetable blend long-term. In the UK, running a car on home-made liquid fuels on the public roads is lawful provided the Excise Duty on the fuel that would otherwise be purchased at a roadside filling point is paid to HM Revenue and Customs.

There are loads of websites giving further information on this subject, which make very interesting reading for the alternative CR4 reader.

I know a bloke who run s a system on his truck- fish & chip lard heated by radiator coils thru the tank, passed thru a filter by a pick-up pump, & then injected by the standard injector pump- he can,t afford the Au$ 2,000 rebuild of the injector pump every 2,000 km-the specialists who rebuild the pump say the problem is also prevalent with those using bio-diesel- my feeling is that the problem is caused by lack of extreme pressure lube, which sulphur in distillate provides- the problem also arises when sulphur is removed from distillate- extreme wear on injector pumps & also engine components. The other BIG problem is legal-evading/ not paying excise!!. Not to mention Mr Plod " have you a PERMIT - you MUST have a PERMIT!."

You will get a lot of opinions on running WVO. In my opinion there is a price to pay for getting something for nothing. On the older IDI MB and Volvo cars you can't go wrong as long as you know how to turn a wrench plus have plenty of spare time.

When you figure out a car you may want to convert check out a parts website like rockauto.com and find out how much injectors and injection pumps cost as you'll likely be replacing them every now and again. On those older cars, the parts are cheap!

The negativity toward WVO comes with converting modern diesels with high pressure injection systems and costly parts. The injection pumps on new VW and MB engines are around $1500 to 2000 to replace whereas they are more like $50 on those old IDI engines.

Make sure to carry plenty to spare fuel filters and a AAA card! Good luck. By the way, I don't drive a WVO car. I simply don't have the time to collect and filter the oil, not to mention the high level of periodic maintenance.

Vegetable oil will more readably absorb moisture from the air. If in cold climate the moisture will freeze which may clog fuel lines. If your storing large volumes use a separator before pumping it into car.

In new york, I can make it happen, and right now, it's easy to convert, easy to obtain fuel, and free as hell.... contact me for more info, I have two friends that use oil from their restaurants, have the biggest diesel trucks you've seen, and are converting old mercedes cars as we speak. Biodiesel rules !!!!!

Bio diesel, with a 4 digit DIN number, is NOT what your friends are using.....they are burning vegetable oil in a converted diesel engine.

Bio diesel is made from Rape (Raps in Germany) seed oil if I remember correctly and has earned legally the name Bio-Diesel (rightly or wrongly).

Anything else is really only a substitute.

You may feel I am splitting hairs, but it is true.....

Your friends are stll showing a good way to both reduce CO2, reduce the usage of fossil fuels and to save money...plus the exhaust smells much, much better....

Do they have a web site?

I live in the Northeast US and have seen several valiant MB 300 series cars destroyed by cold oil. The problem is that many people forget to either switch over from WVO to diesel before shutting off the engine (one type of system) or they are unaware that the electrical preheating system (another type of system) has failed. The end result is that the residue accumulates on the cylinder wall, causing "sticky" rings, as it is called, diminishing compression.

As an owner of a 300D, it probably the most dependable car I have ever owned, and the longevity of the motor is legendary. (MB recently purchased back a Greek cabby's 2Meg mile 240D an gave him a new MB.)

Great forum.

-Brad, EE

Good call guest, thanks for identifying that hazard. I thought a bad shutdown would just require a reheat / restart or a purge. I hear that inline heaters are not the way to go where it's cold. My plan would be to devise or purchase an interlock or alarm system to prevent improper SVO transfer and shutdown. Could be as simple as a something that kept the fuel system open and car running and purging for a minute or two after take the keys out of the ignition.