Power Your Diesel With Grease
One of the biggest problems facing Americans today is the emissions that come from car exhausts. This problem, coupled with the exorbitant cost of gas can weigh heavily on today's drivers. There is a temporary solution that minimizes these concerns, to some degree, but ultimately does not solve the problem. To solve the problem, really, we must stop driving. Since many of us will continue driving, we can drive in a cheaper, more efficient, and slightly more "environmentally conscious" fashion.
We can run a diesel car on plain used vegetable oil that restaurants throw out. All you need is a diesel car, and about $1000 to $1800. The money will be used for necessary alterations to the car, the parts that must be installed, and the oil filtering supplies. The money will be paid back once you stop paying for the gas you use. Many used diesel cars can be purchased cheaply and will run well on this system. In fact, the diesel engine actually runs better on vegetable oil. This is because Mr. Diesel originally designed the engine to run on peanut oil. It was only after some people found it to be cheaper, that diesel fuel (which is principally derived from a petroleum source) was favored. Petroleum based diesel will tax your car quicker than the vegetable based fuels. In fact, vegetable based fuels can double the life of the diesel engine, simply because they are more viscose ("oily") and cleaner. Diesel engines tend to be more efficient than regular gas engines. On my 2006 Jetta TDI diesel, I get about 50 MPG. It is not much different on vegetable oil.
There are two ways to use refuse vegetable oil to fuel your car. Each method thins the oil so that the engine can combust it. The oil can be thinned either with a chemical preparation or with heat. The chemical preparation does not require alterations to the car, and I shall discuss this process briefly. The method that uses heat is what I am focusing on in this article.
The first way necessitates mixing lye and methanol (or ethanol) with the filtered vegetable oil. After combining and mixing, the glycerin eventually separates from the vegetable oil. This is done in a container. After sitting for 12 to 24 hours, the glycerin separates to the bottom of the container and is then removed. What is left is called biodiesel. This can be put directly into the car's gas tank, and the car will run. One of the limitations of using this type of fuel is that at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, the fuel begins to gel, and your car will not start. The way people deal with this in colder climates is by blending it with petroleum-based diesel. There are various percentages of blends depending on what you want. For example, a biodiesel blend that is 20 percent biodiesel and 80 percent petrol diesel is called B20. A blend that is 100 percent biodiesel is called B100. Many industrial diesel fleets use B20 because of the benefits to the engines, economic reasons, as well as its ability to deal with colder temperatures. The disadvantage of making your own biodiesel is that most people do not have a space in which it is safe to handle large quantities of methanol, or to store the fuel which is combustible. Many states require that it be made in some form of an industrial space for this to be legal. There are quite a few people I have heard of who make small batches safely at home.
The second way to render the refuse vegetable oil usable is to use heat. This is the method that requires modifications to the car. An additional tank must be installed in the trunk of the car. The secondary tanks are not as big as you would imagine and range from 10 to 18 gallons. This secondary tank can be filled with plain old vegetable oil, used or not. It works ike this: the fuel injector lines that come from your main tank are fed to a switch. The fuel injector lines from the secondary tank are also fed to this switch. The car is started up on the main tank, which contains diesel. Once the radiator reaches optimum temperature, you flip the switch, and, the car begins to run from the secondary tank of plain vegetable oil. The way it works is like this: a line runs from your radiator to a coil in your secondary tank. This line circulates coolant through the tank, which heats the oil and makes it flow. This is one of the main reasons we wait until the radiator reaches a certain heat level before flipping the switch and alternating our fuel source. Once we reach our destination, we flip the switch back to our main tank in order to flood the lines with plain diesel before shutting the car off. The reason we do this is because, next time we start the car, the engine will be cold again, and will not be able to start on the plain oil. This method is wonderful because we only have to fill the main tank with diesel once or twice a year, since we only start up, and shut down on it. The bulk of the driving is done on the free fuel, the vegetable oil.
You need only some simple preparation to render the refuse oil ready to be put directly into the secondary gas tank. It is a process of filtering the particles and water out of the oil. You can get two cheap 55-gallon drums and put them in your garage. The oil can be obtained from restaurants that use fryers. They actually pay garbage services to take away their grease, so you are doing them a favor by taking it off their hands. You dump all of the oil into one of the 55 gallon barrels, and let the particulate (french-fries, chicken skins, etc.) settle. Heat can help settle it quicker. You then get a simple oil pump and put a 5-micron oil filter on the tube, and pump it into the next barrel. Then from this barrel, you can pump it into your tank. It is highly important that no water remains in the mix, because that will destroy your engine. This can be avoided by checking the appearance of the oil then, filtering it a second time on the way into the tank. An additional water and particle filter can be used at this last stage in order to ensure the safety of the fuel. 5-micron filters are good for the first stage, but people actually use 1 micron filters or smaller at this last stage. You are ready to go. One of the best ways to avoid water is by checking your oil from the start when you get it. If there are lots of little water droplets in it, you can let it sit longer in the first barrel so that it can separate to the bottom. Heat helps to speed up this process.
There are a lot of advantages to using this type of fuel. It increases the life of your engine; it is far easier on your pocket book; it lowers sulfur emissions to negligible levels, and it lowers carbon emissions levels that are virtually neutral to the atmosphere. The carbon outputs are considered neutral because when you use a petroleum-based diesel, it unlocks a storehouse of carbon from beneath the surface of the Earth and unleashes it upon the atmosphere, adding continually to the overall amount of carbon in the air. When you use a vegetable oil based fuel, the vegetation that the fuel is derived from took out the carbon that was already in circulation in the atmosphere. Therefore it is minimally altering the general amount of carbon in the air, at least in contrast to petroleum. As I said, it is not a final answer, just a temporary solution that is a bit better.
A note of caution: since many used diesel cars have 100,000 miles+ of mileage driven on dirty diesel, there is a significant amount of buildup in the parts. When this vegetable oil is used on these cars, it actually cleans the lines and can dislodge some of this buildup, causing problems for the engine. Take this into consideration when preparing your car to use vegetable oil.