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Anyone ever hear of one of these? I was at a party a couple of weeks ago and one of my friends there had converted his diesel VW car with a kit he had purchased on the internet. This kit allows him to run his car on pure vegetable oil. He put an additional tank in the trunk where the spare tire used to go, and had to replace the windshield washer fluid tank with a device that processes the veggie oil somehow and hooks into the fuel line. He claims he can get 40 miles to the gallon of veggie oil. He has an arrangement with a restaurant that used to pay to have a 3rd party dispose of their used cooking oil. They give him the oil and he hauls it off their premises for free. He has to strain it before use, but he essential claims to be driving for free (not counting his time and effort).
I'm not proposing this as an alternative for everyone, of course, but it seemed like a cool way to benefit from recovered waste for someone with the will to do it.
Posts: 6394 | Registered: Dec 1999
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I'm skeptical as to some of the details of his story, but it sounds like an exagerated description of biodiesel. Which is not just vegetable oil, however.
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I don't know anyone personally who does this, but I know it's pretty popular in Ithaca. The tour boat runs on biodiesel. I hear that cars converted to run on this stuff smell pretty good. Posts: 1681 | Registered: Jun 2004
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Here are two examples. There are a few more where it has touched base. Just thought I'd throw that out there.
I like the idea personnally, but I move around too much to make having the equipment worthwhile. Having to pack it and go, pack it and go, pack it and go
Posts: 2208 | Registered: Feb 2004
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Yah, there was a converted school bus that drove around for a while promoting this. Let me see if I can find a link...here you go. It's definitely real.
Posts: 2149 | Registered: Aug 2000
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quote:Originally posted by Enigmatic: I'm skeptical as to some of the details of his story, but it sounds like an exagerated description of biodiesel. Which is not just vegetable oil, however.
--Enigmatic
Unless he was outright lying to me (and I have no reason to believe he was) he wasn't talking about biodiesel (as described in your link). He said he could fill his take with vegetable oil bought at the grocery store in a pinch (but would end up paying far more per gallon than for gasoline that way).
Your links about biodiesel say that it can be used straight into the fuel tank of any unmodified diesel engine. This is most certainly not the case with my friends car.
Posts: 6394 | Registered: Dec 1999
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I've totally read about this. There are whole bunches of people who do it. But it would be a bit of a pain on a road trip, I would think...
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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There is an article about this in the August National Geographic- they describe exactly that process.
Posts: 2711 | Registered: Mar 2004
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Biodiesel is a process that converts the vegetable oil into esters, which have a lower viscosity, especially at low temperatures. Biodiesel also doesn't go rancid when it's stored for a long time. A diesel car doesn't need modification to run biodiesel, unless it has rubber parts in the fuel system. These need to be replaced with viton.
With straight (or waste) vegetable oil, you need to heat the oil until it has roughly the same viscosity as diesel in order to atomize it properly. That's aobut 320 F. It also tends to clog fuel lines in the winter, because it gels up usually below about 40 F.
Cars that run on straight vegetable oil have two tanks, one for diesel, to start the car, and then once the car is warm, the vegetable oil runs through a heater, or heat exchanger using engine heat. You also have to remember to change back over to diesel before you shut down, so the system is purged with diesel for startup. The diesel tank is generally quite small.
Vegetable oil can also be used for home heating, but it requires either filtering the oil to particles less than 5 micron, or changing the pressure nozzle arrangement in your oil heater to a compressed air atomizer. In either case it still needs to be heated in order to flow and atomize properly. Biodiesel can run in an unmodified oil furnace, but the cost of the methanol, lye and processing equipment raises the cost quite a bit.
Also, all of these depend on getting your oil free of water. It's generally recommended that you try to pick up your oil from the restaurant when they empty the fryers, so the oil is still warm, rather than pulling it out of the big ol' tank in the back yard, where it's likely to have water condensate, and be rancid. Rancid oil doesn't make good biodiesel either.
Posts: 3735 | Registered: Mar 2002
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I know a bunch of folks back in Missouri who have them. They're out in the boonies, so since there's not as many restaurants around as in a city, they say there's actually a bit of competition sometimes in getting used fry oil...
One friend who has a veggie car said that it doesn't work at high altitudes -- 10,000 feet? Something like that -- so that when she's driven between the coasts, she's had to be careful about where she crosses the Rockies. (There was a technical explanation for this that I've forgotten, and I can't remember whether it just applied to her particular car or to veggie cars in general.)
Posts: 2911 | Registered: Aug 2001
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My point was merely that while I like the idea, and have looked into it in the past, it is not a practical move for me. I suspect the same is true for the majority of Hatrackers.
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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The car is the least of those issues. Yes, there are plenty of diesel cars in the U.S. Most of them are german made, Volkswagen, and Mercedes, but also Volvo. BMW makes diesels, but I don't think they import them here.
Picking up an old Jetta diesel is pretty easy, if you want to go veggie diesel.
But the reason it's not practical has to do with the amount of work you have to go through to make it work. Biodiesel requires that you process WVO (waste vegetable oil) with methanol and lye. The process is not trivial, but it allows you to use an unmodified diesel car.
If you don't go biodiesel, you've got to modify the car. And while there are kits to do this, chances are you have to do quite a bit of customizing. Again, the amount of work isn't trivial.
Right now I'm working on converting my home furnace to run on WVO, and the process looks to be as serious as the projects I worked on in professional combustion research. Again, not for the faint hearted.
But ultimately, if veggie diesel, biodiesel, or veggie home heating pan out, they will become commercially available turn-key products.
And the main reason there are not many diesel cars in the U.S. is because they have high emissions. Veggie diesel solves that in one step, because there is virtually no sulfur in vegetable oil, and it burns cleaner than diesel. Assuming the technology becomes mainstream, diesel cars might well become very common in the U.S. because, after all, diesel engines are pretty straightforward.
Posts: 3735 | Registered: Mar 2002
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A cook at my old restaurant gets paid to take the oil from some places, and belongs to a groupd of people who share the costs and make biodiesel. He uses it to heat his home, and run a VW Jetta.
He pays about .78 a gallon after all is said and done because he buys methanol in the 55 gallon drum.
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