Howdy folks! These crazy fuel prices have made me start wondering about making or mixing diesel fuel with used motor oil to make up some volume. For some reason (probably laziness) I have more than 50 gallons of used motor oil in my barn stored in the 2.5 gallon jugs the oil came in. All from my oil changes and mostly synthetic. Is it possible/feasible to mix it with the diesel? After proper filtering? I have a 2000 F250 7.3 with 122K miles. Anyway just wondering if it was worth it or just get off my butt and haul it to the recycling center.

Semper Fi

 

Define proper filtering.

 

Good point, what and how would proper filtering be performed?. I remember years ago someone made some type of contraption that would suck the oil through a series of filters (I think he used WIX) then finish off with a centrifuge. They sold it online but I cannot remember the name. I am just throwing it out there..

 

I've done this before without problems although lately I just take the used stuff to the local auto parts store. If it's been stored carefully in the plastic jugs with the lid tightened and it came out of my own truck or equipment (so I know exactly what it is), you can add a few gallons at a time in the warmer weather months. Put the oil in first and then top it off so it mixes up. If you just dump it in there without the fill up it will sink to the bottom and clog your fuel pick up if sits overnight in chilly weather. So you might want to hold off until it warms up just to be safe. Fuel will be $8 probably by summer.

 

Someone will most likely pick it up for free if you put an add. I know you can run it but dosent seem worth it to me at least. How much work is it going to take to really filter it/will that require buying equipment to do so thus costing you more money. People also say add 2 strike oil but cheap 2 stroke in my opinion and experience adds plenty of carbon deposits. I have a guy pick up my mixed fluids of all types and he says he just strains it and dumps it in a really old 40kw Gen. However that’s a stationary piece of equipment not something your counting on to take you where you need to go.

 

Filter the shiat out of it and then, cut it with RUG..(regular unleaded gas)

 

Will it make the truck roll coal
because I am not sure why but I have a 02 with just under 500,000kms runs like a dream no blow by or nothing but If I mix some oil with my diesel

 

the used oil has more stored energy than diesel fuel. so it runs rich.

if you pulled it from your engine, which was filtered by your oil filters that same oil was in the backside of your injectors.. it will not hurt a thing running on the front side of the same injectors.

 

The holes to admit and drain oil in the body of the injectors are a lot bigger than the holes to spray fuel out of the tips of the injectors.

Suspended soot has enough particulate mass to change the color and translucency of oil from clear amber to pitch black that can no longer be seen through.

That change in opacity is a result of particle mass. All the fines found in used oil analysis can be expected to part of that mass as well.

Now pressurize that mass of suspended particulate matter to 20,000 PSI, and blast that slurry through the tiny orifices at the tip of the injector.

 

Used to dig into alternative fuels and owned an 82 Mercedes that ran on waste veggie oil but iirc from those days, people had a LOT more luck with pre Powerstroke IDI engines due to the much lower fuel PSI

 

If the oil is from your own rig (or known provenance) I'd run it. Maybe 5 gal per tank.

If it has been sitting for a while the harmful particulates have settled to the bottom. You could use say the top 3/4 of a container and expect it's pretty clean, aside from crap in solution. I don't think anything in solution is a problem. You cannot chuck those containers in the bed and slosh them around to the station or it will mix up. So I'd siphon off the top 3/4 of the containers from where they sit into another clean container, haul that to the station, dump it in, the top off with at least 5 gallons of diesel.

Just a heads up your fuel filter might get blackened by the oil, depending on how much you run.

 

The particulates mentioned by Y2KW57 are many times smaller than the fuel filter will remove.

The combustion characteristics of used motor oil are very different than diesel.

The emissions from burning WMO are also even more toxic than diesel.

In the nearly 20yrs I’ve been ‘experimenting’ with alternative fuels, NOBODY has successfully burned more than single-digit percentages of WMO successfully for long. Just go to the alt field section of this forum and you’ll find a couple decades of WMO-burning drum beaters who have failed to pull it off. They’ve done all the things - from centrifuging the oil clean, heating it and even 2-tank systems where they crank it up on diesel. Zero long-term believable success stories in the 7.3 PSD platform. Not one yet. A few are man enough to come back and say they failed, the rest just quietly go away.

In the same amount of time, I’ve burned straight vegetable oil in a 2-tank Vegistroke-design conversion for nearly 500k miles in my own vehicles and converted several dozen other 7.3/6.0 PSD’s that have millions of cumulative miles burning the high cholesterol ‘free’ fuel.

Below are a couple of images of a Vegistroke system I installed. This kit uses coolant to heat a 2nd fuel system for dewatered and filtered used vegetable oil. The truck will start on 100% diesel and the system automatically switches to WVO when the engine is warm enough. The WVO is heated to reduce the viscosity to be the same as diesel. (Heated pickup in VO tank, heated fuel lines, heated fuel filter, etc). When the key is turned off at the end of a drive, the system purges all of the VO from the engine and leaves it ready for the next cold start. ROI on this system is currently about 20k miles at 15mpg and current diesel prices. @Bitterroot Diesel sells the kit.

Note, the F650 dash, coolant wrap on filter, Excursion fuel tank for VO and a few other things are ‘extras’ that I do when installing these kits.

 

I have done it in the past without issue merely out of convenience to get rid of the oil I drained out of the pan during an oil change, but I don’t anymore and haven’t in quite some time. I have one of those plastic black waste oil jugs and a fumoto valve on the pan…no chance of dropping a drain plug into it. Either Wal-Mart or the Indy auto parts will gladly take it so that’s where it goes now. It will dirty up your fuel filter and tank and generally speaking the newer and more modern the engine the worse idea it becomes. An old IDI it might be fine.