I dont know bout the rest of you but diesel goes up every day round here. Now its at 2.65/ gallon. With that price I am thinking vegetable would pay for its self in a month or two very easily.

Heres my idea:
Since our trucks are already equipped with two tanks and the switching solenoid why couldnt I just get a couple inline fuel heaters and a good filter to run on that restaraunt oil that they throw away out back in the dumpster?
I have been reading about kits and all they have are a heater, a filter, some hose and a tank and our IDIs are perfect canidates for free fuel.

I dont know anymore than anybody else so advice is very welcome.

 

I don't know much about that either, but man that would sure save me some cash. My truck is my daily driver. About 30 miles a day round trip, 13 MPG and diesel not under 2.80/gal. that equals a whole lot of $$$$! I think I'm going to get a little POS gas getter or else I'm going to end up broke

 

Veggie oil, straight or waste, doesn't have the additive package or the lubricity that pumps and injectors need for long life. These folks are currently looking at biodiesel, WVO and SVO: http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_make.html#2svo. It's a good place to start. This fall, after the weather cools down a bit, I plan to try making my first batch of biodiesel.

 

Don't forget the WVO is still untaxed fuel.
The fine is the same as red fuel.
WV Department of Tax and Revenue sent its Criminal Investigation Division (the nice folks that do the red fuel checks here in WV) to Columbus Ohio this past entire week for seminars on how to catch homemade Biodiesel and WVO in trucks. The last diesel check I went through the guy asked what my exhaust smelled like, I pointed to the stacks and said check it out. Thought real hard about rapping the throttle for him, but they don't have much of a sense of humor.

With Federal money getting tight, the states want their road use tax....all of it.

 

There are red fuel checks around here but mostly on grain trucks or at the livestock sale barns. Even if they do check they would just see something that wasnt red and figure its legal.
I plan on mixing some diesel and some power service in with the oil (at least in winter) so it wont be completely untaxed.

ive read many sites including that one listed above but I cant find the temp that it has to be to pass through the injector pump and injectors.

 

I seem to remember around 160 degrees.
I have also have read the glycerin in WVO is bad news for the oil and rings, also the acidity of the WVO is bad for the rings.

When they have a diesel check here, there is a sign posted at the check that directs all diesel vehicles to the side of the road for sampling. They check diesel cars here as well. They were just red fuel checks here last year, but they are wise to the fact that diesels will run on a wide variety of fuels that are not taxed for road use. The day is coming when they will be able to tell you exactly what is in your tank. Also if they stuck their probe in WVO it would be easy to tell it was not diesel fuel. Biodiesel would be a bit harder to prove since it is available as a highway fuel. But the area I live in would make that impractical since the nearest place that sells biodiesel is about 100 miles away. There is a 5000 dollar flat fee plus court costs for refusing to let them sample your fuel.
As posted above Department of Tax and Revenue Criminal Investigation Division is doing the fuel checks. They are not the kind of people you want to get mad at you.
Tax evasion fines and penelties could leave you very broke for the rest of your life, if not in jail. They would take your truck and house along with any other possesions you own to apply toward the owed balance of your fines.

I will pay the highway fuel price till I go broke, then I guess I will have to live on welfare for the rest of my life. I am glad I am old, the way things are going in this country I don't want to see what is going to happen in the next 30 years.

 

I've done some research on biodiesel. You have to get a proper PH with every batch of oil. Then it has to be mixed with lye and methanol and allowed to settle for about a week. What settles is the glycerin. But lye is dangerous to handle and methanol is poisonous, so this isn't something to be entered lightly. If using waste oil, it has to be dewatered as well, which involves heating it. All of these things can add up, so it would be prudent to see how much the total cost of making biodiesel compares to buying regular diesel. If you can really make it for less than 2 bucks a gallon, it might be worth it.

Oh, I almost forgot. If biodiesel isn't processed properly, it can cause metal corrosion (from acidity), clogging of fuel injectors (from glycerin reversion), and fuel filter clogging. Also, even properly processed biodiesel gels in colder weather, much more so than regular diesel. It should be mixed with regular diesel or preheated (or both).

 

The sites Ive read said that if the restaurant is using correct oil for frying foods it shoulnt contain acid. Couldnt you us PH paper test strips to check this? I dont know what the ph should be though either unless I test SVO first.

How can you heat the fuel to 160F? I dont know how hot regular fuel heaters are but i doubt they get that warm.

 

You can use a natural gas burner to heat it. I imagine a suitable tank would be hard to come by, though. Since that uses energy, though, that adds to the cost of producing the fuel. Maybe burning scrap wood under it would work. Some of the setups I've seen are very complex, especially Mike Pelly's system.

 

from what I have read, to neutralize the effect of the glycering, the oil needs to be heated on board to 180 degrees. The way that most acheive that is to use engine coolant circulated through the tank to heat the fuel. They start up and shut down on regular dino diesle or biodiesel, warming the fuel in the tank before switching over, then shutting down on the diesel to clear the lines.
On the acid, if what I recall seeing is correct, it comes from the foods that are cooked in the oil, not the oil itself.

 

There are several ways of running vegetable oil. If I'm not mistaken, that is...

The two with which I'm most familiar:

SVO (Straight veg. oil) - Needs to be preheated in order to neutralize the glycerin problems.

WVO (Waste veg. oil) - Needs to be dewatered, filtered, PH balanced and made into biodiesel. This process separates the glycerin from the oil, so it doesn't need to be preheated first. However, will gel up quicker than "dino diesel" (that's kind of catchy), so winter running needs a mix of veggies and dinosaurs.

The PH does come from the cooking and such. Everything has a PH level of something, though, and it has to be correct. But the WVO does require much closer attention to the PH level and will always need to be adjusted.

I can't overemphasize the hazards of working with the chemicals that are needed to make biodiesel. Even just the fumes from methanol can kill you, and anyone who got a C grade in science class probably knows what lye can do to your skin, let alone your internal organs or mucous membranes if you should accidentally ingest it.

Oh, and to answer dieseldan's question, yes, you can use regular PH strips to test it. About the heaters, I think natural gas or an outdoor setup using wood scraps would work the best (and cheapest) I wouldn't want to think about what an electric heater would do to your electric bill... your savings would go out the window.

 

there are some that simply filter the WVO and run it as is, not all are doing it as bio, but the biggest benefit of going to bio is no need to preheat the oil. The bio does gel faster, but the anti gel additives supposedly help that as well.

 

I have been running a 20% straight Canola mix since June and so far no problems,the trucks even seems to run better!I plan to run on WVO shortly but will be using an external marine type fuel tank with insulation and a Pollak 6 way valve to feed it to the 6.9 with return lines to the wvo tank,everything heated up with the hot coolant at 180°.
There are alot of good sites out there,one of the best is http://www.greasecar.com/index.cfm , they even have a few Ford mods on the site.

Saigon

 

I am trying to make this as cheaply and simply as possible. I am NOT making biodiesel, jus t burning WVO from a restarant.
My plan is to put a fuel heater and a inline filter on my truck. I figure that I can filter it down and then mix with about 1/3 diesel fuel and maybe some Power Service antigel and anti bacterial treatment. With 1/3 or 1/2 diesel I shouldnt have to heat the oil as much and make things easier but still cut my diesel cost in half.
One thing I should find out is if Diesel and Vegetable Oil mix. That could be important.

 

Dieseldan, no worries dude! Don't be skeered of the WVO. For those of you who are scared of it, thats just fine(More for me). You are thinking along the right track with the inline fuel heater. If you can set up and in-tank exchanger as well you should be ready to rock on SVO year round. Just be sure to filter the stuff to at least 30 micron but I would go to 10 if you can. Your filter on your truck should filter to 12. The only WVO I would shy from is that stuff that looks milky. Good stuff is clear but will usually be dark like honey. You can do this with any 6.9/7.3. The 6.0's will not hack it because of the super high fuel injection system. Also, be sure to start up/purge on dino. You will go through more fuel filters, but those are cheap and the savings in fuel are significant. Be a real BOOB man.