Great Forum! lots of info. I posted my first post yesterday about " Fuel Choice " stating how I have been using used hydraulic oil for about 15K miles now and was inquiring about wether anyone else has had any experience with this idea. I too wondered wether or not there were any leagal issuues involved.
Great stuff guys!

 

No FarmbOy it wasn't me. It is one of the guys in my Bio-Diesel "Co-op" though. He didn't get "caught", he did recieve some media attention and VERY shortly thereafter a NASSSTY letter from the Dept of revenue and finance wondering where his road use taxes were. He is brewing 3 gallon batches on his stove a couple of times a month! The unpaid taxes are literally a couple of $$ a month!!! I told the little ******* if he didn't pay up I would kick his *** God forbid anyone other than Saudi Arabia be permitted to supply fuel for Americas gas tanks. A group of folks met a couple of months ago to discuss Bio-Diesel and decided it would be neato to take a waste product (used vegetable oil) and turn it into fuel. Bio-Diesel has no sulfur and a high cetane rating, very clean fuel, your exhaust smell like french fries or popcorn. I manage a restaurant and have some used fryer oil, Sooo... I decided to throw together a processor and make my own because I can no longer afford to pay the $3.30 a gallon the local farmersa Co-op charges for commercial Bio-Diesel. My PSD LOVES it!

 

I'd like to talk to you more about your biodiesel. I'm a senior at ISU, did my senior design project on the differences of soy biodiesel and regular diesel. I know the freshmen in our department made some biodiesel, I never had the opportunity to do it, but wouldn't mind learning how.

 

are any of you running WVO at percentage with regular diesel. do you think it would need to be heated still in the winter. i was thinking of running a 50/50 mix.

Thanks
tim

 

hey i was wondering, how do the exhaust fumes smell, they must stink like hell, or does it still smell like deisel?

 

Actually, it smells good, almost a sweet smell. You'll hear it all the time that it smells like french fries.

 

I'm sure you realize that the federal excise taxes on fuels and the local fuel taxes (usually called road taxes) have nothing to do with trying to convince you to use one sort of fuel or another, as they are not dependent on where the fuel came from. It's just a mechanism they came up with to have the people that use the roads pay for the roads. (Thus the lack of tax on fuel intended for farm use, which is totally off the locally or federally maintained roads.)

Just because a fuel comes to you from outside the normal channels (which are all set up to collect those taxes) doesn't mean you don't still legally owe them, if the fuel is being used to power a vehicle on public roads. (Though I fully agree that it is hard to find a way to pay those taxes even if you wanted to...) But they're not doing it to support Big Oil or Saudi Arabia or anything, it's just a user tax.

Duncan

 

The NREL chem eng. doesn't know what he's talking about.
""NO ONE should be mixing any crude vegetable oils into fuels for vehicle use. The glycerin in the soybean oil acts like sugar in the fuel tank and will eventually ruin fuel injectors without special management. Engine durability is also poor. There are no long term studies (on engine performance and maintenance requirements) because the engines don’t last that long."

First , he's probaby talking about an unheated system, and using more than 10% may lead to deposits in the combustion chambers in some engines.
However, on older IDI engines, there are several examples of M-B owners going for years on unheated SVO.

As for newer engines, go to www.fmso.de or www.vegburner.co.uk, and check the databases of 100's of vehicles that have run SVO long term w/o problems in HEATED systems. One TDI went 200,000 miles!!!!!
Severla dozen have gone 60,000 miles.

So it can be done. Fuel quality is the most important factor.
biodiesel.infopop.cc the SVO forum for the best info.

 

If a person added propane on a low setting, would that keep things clean and prevent coking? Probably too many things in the mix!

 

i AGREE 100% on this... we are being hosed...! The truth is the govt is supporting the oil companies... at our expense... anyone is capable of making their own fuel for their psd's, but you have to pay taxes on it..? come on... i am not some kind of anti govt radical... but don't the oil companies make enough money..? just look at their annual profit statements...! It is true that some of this revenue goes towards maintaining the roads... but not all of it... so... where does the rest of it go...? It's time for a little more accountability here...!

 

", but not for those using a pioneering "Green" fuel."

The problem is that since the engine runs fine on biodiesel or petro diesel, there is no way to verify or enforce biodiesel usage. Remember the "sly dogs" who took the tax rebate for SUV conversions in Arizona, only to fail to follow through as expected.

 

This is the Guinea Pig just checking in. I now have logged 27,000+ miles on my '96 F-250. 99% of them on pure waste vegetable oil. I have not had a single problem that can be attributed to running the truck on vegetable oil and the truck had 224k when I converted. We'll see what I'm saying at 50,000 miles.

 

Cameltoe, please keep us advised about your progress. I'm working with a friend to set up a biodiesel conversion setup. I'd like to run mine on a combination of biodiesel and waste oil, so I'm very interested in your long-term experience.

I'm very, VERY tired of watching the oil companies make record profits on the backs of ordinary people. Diesel seems to have stabilized here - but they have caused a call to arms. Diesel designed his engine to run on a variety of fuels - it is high time we took advantage of that.

 

Yes, Rudolph Diesel did design HIS engine to be able to run on most any kind of fuel. But the diesel engine has evolved so much, it takes great effort to get our current diesel engines to run on a variety of fuels. His engine was a combustion chamber with a big pump injectiong fuel into it, with a piston compressing the fuel/air mixture to combustion. Now-a-days, we have fine tuned injectors that precisely atomize fuel to obtain optimized fuel/air mixture and those injectors rely on oil and electronics to make them work, not quite the same as the original diesel engine.
I am all for alternative fuels, especially soy-biodiesel just because I grow it, but we have to be sure we are adding alternative fuels that are compatible with our high-tech engines, and won't hurt them.

 

I agree, that's partly why I'm willing to be a guinea pig. On the other hand, maybe we need to start designing our engines to be more compatible with alternative fuels. Sooner or later it WILL happen.

I will share all my experiences - good and bad. Fortunately I have not yet had a bad experience. I've made several mods to the vegoil system and truck (Diesel powered block heater, large heated vegoil filter, thermostat in heater line to the tank, coolant heated battery blankets) that allow me to run on vegoil at any temp. Last January the truck sat for 4 days in Canada. Temp never got above -25 deg F. The morning we left it was -56 Deg F. After firing the block heater for an hour the truck started right up. 30 miles later I flipped to vegoil and made the rest of the 600 mile trip on vegoil. That day it did not get warmer than -35 Deg F.