Running Diesel cars on Vegatable Oil?

The car wont last long without an inline pre heater or a two tank system.
Most diesels can be converted, VW's and Merc's are especially easy.
Conversion kits are available.
Check out the following for further information:
http://www.eilishoils.com/
http://www.greasel.com/
http://www.journeytoforever.org/

Your buddy or whatever also needs to pay a few cent per litre to Brian to keep things cosher.

trap4 if your really serious about converting your car to veggie oil
leave me a msg and ill give u my dads home number he owns eilish oils

he runs his car on veggie oil he owns a small business and has some converted trucks and cars with the Cork county council

"The only thing you need to watch out for is that bio-diesel acts like a solvent, a lot of people have bad experiences when they first use it.

When you put bio-diesel into a car normally running petro-diesel, it cleans down the tank, fuel lines , etc of all contaminants and they clog the filter so you need a couple of filters for the first 3-4 weeks. A lot of people brake down after conversion but its not what they think."

so right man

http://www.revenue.ie/services/tax_info/vatrate/T01249.htm
Looks good to me

You're friends will see problems much earlier than the winter, svo needs to be heated to 80-90 degrees C for any sort of modern engine.
My own preference would be for SVO with the engine conversion unless you like to change your car regularly.
Less hassle / equipment needed, all you need to do is filter it, let the engine pre heat & away you go.

Is it possible to run a home oil boiler on biodiesel obviusly the prices are similiar at the moment (but i guess its not getting any cheaper and i can't afford a wood chip boiler) but would it be possible without your house smelling like a chipper ?

Before anybody runs out anc chucks straight or waste veggie oil into their car there are a number of risks;

If you have a Lucas injector pump, forget about it, the pump will seize and it will cost you up to €1000to replace.

If you have a common rail (JTD by Fiat/Alfa, HDI by Peugeot/Citroen, TDCI by ford/mazda/jaguar, DCi by Renault/Nissan, CDTI by opel/vauxhall, CDI by Mercedes, D by BMW) or Pumpe Deuse (by VW/Audi/Seat) engine, then forget about it too, it is untried and the injector nozzles will be destroyed using such a high viscosity fuel and boy are they pricy to replace.

If you have a bosch distributer type pump with electronic control, it will reek havoc with the sensors in the pump and you will get various engine management faults being registered, you'll see the engine management light come on on the dash quick enough.

If you have a bosch distributer type pump with mechanical control, you really need to preheat the oil to about 80C - 90C to reduce the viscosity enough to prevent damage, this can be done using an electrical heater running off the battery or using a heat exchanger running off the engine coolant. It is recommended to use a two tank system where you can start up on regular diesel and swich over when the engine is up to temperature ie the heat exchanger is operational.

If you have a bosch inline injector pump then you're laughing. Unfortunately, they're rarely found on anything except old mercedes. You're only concern is gelling of the fuel in winter.

air wrote:

I think it's a bit more positive than that regarding conversions, most diesels have been successfully converted at this stage, although I accept the point about the Lucas pumps.
http://www.greasel.com/Vehicle.html

There are many older engines that can be converted easily, their design is crude and they have a lot of margin of error. Diesel technology has advanced sciesmicly in europe over the past 7 years or so, injector designs are much more sophisticated, the US, where that site is based has not fully caught up yet. On common rail and pumpe deuse engines, the injector nozzles are extremely expensive and have very small appertures and run at very high pressures to create a very fine spray into the cylinder. If you introduce a fuel that has a much higher viscosity than the engine is designed for you will be commiting financial suicide. Elsbett in germany are the world leaders in converting diesels to run on veg, they don't even venture into the world of common rail or pumpe deuse, they stick mostly to older indirect injection engines and some older direct injection engines like the non pumpe deuse versions of VW's TDI's and renaults DTi's. Trust me on this one, I've done a lot of research and some experimentation.

The main reason is that US diesel is some of the worst quality diesel in the world, high in sulphur and very poor quality.

has anyone got any experience with actual production of biodiesel,
i have read up a lot of it and it doesn't seem that hard to make (although the chemicals used are pretty nasty..)
more importantly , does anyone know where i can buy Methanol (one of those nasty chemicals) by the 20 litre+ at a reasonable price?

alias no.9 wrote:

Production of biodiesel is a much more costly and messy. It is also quite wasteful and as such not as environmentally sound as it may seem at first. If efforts were concentrated on designing injector pumps to handle higher viscosity fluids, straight vegetable oil would be the best solution.

yes the use of straight veg oil would be the most desirable way to go, but for the millions of older diesels out there, biodiesel is a much better option..

Takeshi_Kovacs wrote:

yes the use of straight veg oil would be the most desirable way to go, but for the millions of older diesels out there, biodiesel is a much better option..

On the contrary, older diesels, particularly indirect injection or swirl chamber type engines, common across all marques up until the late 1990's are ideal for conversion to SVO provided they have bosch injector pumps. DIY conversions are not difficult but off the shelf conversion kits are also available from Elsbett in germany. Newer common rail and pumpe deuse type direct injection diesels are not suited to SVO because they operate at much higher pressures and within much finer tolerances so the high viscosity of veg oil will mean certain death for the injection system.

trap4 wrote:

you will be found out, if not here by
the smell coming from your car's exhaust pipe!

Anyone know what the exhaust smells like? Just out of interest.

Takeshi_Kovacs wrote:

does anyone know where i can buy Methanol (one of those nasty chemicals) by the 20 litre+ at a reasonable price?

According to this thread on the biodiesel now forums you can buy it from Corcoran Chemicals in Dublin for €110 + vat per 55 gal. drum (01-6778163).

This is about 200 litres, so your methanol would be costing you about 66 cents per litre including VAT.
I have a vague notion that you will need about 1 part methanol for every 5 parts finished biodiesel, so your costs should be about 13.2 cents per litre of finished fuel assuming you can get your oil for nothing (which should be easy enough).

You will also however have to deal with the disposal of the glycerol generated in the production of the biodiesel.

With the latest tax breaks then, am I correct in thinking that a home user can just make the fuel and use it away without fear of prosecution or does one need to be registered etc?

You make a petrol out of some wheat crop as well. Its being tested over in wexford I believe.

air wrote:

According to this thread on the biodiesel now forums you can buy it from Corcoran Chemicals in Dublin for €110 + vat per 55 gal. drum (01-6778163).

This is about 200 litres, so your methanol would be costing you about 66 cents per litre including VAT.
I have a vague notion that you will need about 1 part methanol for every 5 parts finished biodiesel, so your costs should be about 13.2 cents per litre of finished fuel assuming you can get your oil for nothing (which should be easy enough).

You will also however have to deal with the disposal of the glycerol generated in the production of the biodiesel.

With the latest tax breaks then, am I correct in thinking that a home user can just make the fuel and use it away without fear of prosecution or does one need to be registered etc?

thanks for the link, i will check up on this crowd, see what the story is... also find out how much delivery would be, if they deliver..
on the cost of the finished product, it might be lower.. first off 55 gallons = around 250 L , therefore you are looking at around 53 cent a litre for the methanol (excluding delivery costs e.t.c.)

Now what you said about the 5:1 ratio of veg oil and meth is correct, in that this is the most widely used ratio because you need an excess of methanol to drive the reaction towards biodiesel and glycerin as the finished product.

But from what i have read, only 12.5 % methanol is used up in the reaction itself, therefore most homebrewers recover the excess methanol (by distilling) to bring cost down even more .
Now if you succesfully recover all or most of the meth, then you are looking at ratio of 8:1 (oil to meth).
Therefore assumin all goes right for ye, and you get reasonably clean chipper oil for free, then you are looking at cost of round 7 to 8 cent a litre of biodiesel, (which to me sounds riduculously low, so feel free to point out any and all mistake with the math)
Even still, if you had to use virgin oil (at around 62 cent a litre in lidl, aldi ), your finished product would still only cost around 70 cent a litre.

Note: I am excluding all other costs such as cost of the caustic soda, heating of oil to reaction temp, blue barrels for storing the stuff in e.t.c. (also this also relies on the quote of the meth from corcoran chemicals as being correct) , but still seems a lot cheaper than paying upwards of 1.10 euro and rising, a litre....

Takeshi_Kovacs wrote:

first off 55 gallons = around 250 L

Google apparently uses US gallons by default in its conversion, 55 Imperial gallons is indeed 250L. I would assume that they would be using imperial measurements.