TDI Engines and Vegetable Oil - Can it be used...successfully???

Really? In germany just the low sales tax for food is applied, 7% :-)

The mongrel beuruecrats reckon that people that make fuel out of vegetable oil should tax themselves at the standard petrol excise rate, and send the money off in a little envelope to parliament house to pay for their bloody cocktail parties.

When in fact the dopey bastards should be encouraging all and sundry to start using these alternative fuels.

anyway, back to the point, vegetable oil can be run straight (as in straight from the bottle you keep in your pantry) if it is pre-heated to about 80 degrees C, and used in an indirect injection diesel motor. as you stated jon, apparently direct injection motors are not as forgiving. The oil must be heated to reduce its viscosity and allow it to flow through the injectors better. there are a number of firms that offer kits to do this. i have web addresses if your interested, just have to find them again.

Sam.

Its "only" 28p /litre AFAIK, which IS less than the petrol duty

Abso-'kin-lutely. > I have web addresses if your interested, just have to find them again. Please, that would be interesting, we have the forms from the excise to pay up, but we were only intending to run mixed 66/33.

Steve

They could wait forever, when I would be asked to do so :-)

In germany they even do not encourage the peoople any more to use bio diesel, "rapsmethylester" is the german word for the stuff. When this stuff was more expensive, they told to spend those few cents for the environment, but nowadays, when costs for fuel explode and biodiesel is much cheaper, they do not encourage to use it any more; it just does not bring enough money :-(

Our Defender 90 2.5TD just runs with it like with normal diesel during the summer time.

G'day Ralph.

i think you're confusing bio-diesel with straight vegetable oil, or SVO for short.

# bio diesel is vegetable oil that has gone through some process (trans-estrification or something) which seperates the oil into biodiesel and glycerine. this stuff can be use in most diesel motors without any modification.

# SVO is just that. nothing done to it, just the oil that is pressed out of vegies. to run any diesel motor on this, the oil must be pre-heated and flushed out with diesel (or bio-diesel) before turning motor off to prevent the oil congealing in the pump etc.

hope this is helpful, and i'll get those websites tomorrow.

Sam.

No, I did not, because it is the only "vegetable" fuel what is relatively available throughout the whole contry, and the only "bio fuel" recognised as such by the politicians.

We use normal "svo" oil, without going through some processing, it is the same stuff you put on your salad, and taxes on it are the low german food sales tax.

The bio diesel stuff has some solvent characteristics and may cause trouble with some plastic parts in the fuel system, so we did not yet dare using it with our Defender. Normal diesel is almost 1.20 EUR these days, bio diesel is from 90ct up to 1EUR-something, svo is 70ct.

When we did not find a gas station but a super market, it was pure fun buying 15 bottles of salad oil and refilling the car with it on the parking lot :-) We caught some strange looks, as you can imagine.

Looks like there are a few knowledgable people in this topic around here...

Generally speaking, it would seem as though some form of pre-heater is required to heat the oil before it hits the injector pump to run 100% oil, along with a 2 tank system to allow the running on pure diesel at the start and end of each journey. I will discount this idea then.

Working on the assumption that some saving in £££'s is better than no saving:-)

Relating back to 200 & 300tdi's, these are direct injection units and this seemingly is not ideal for 100% oil motors. But can vegetuble oil from the supermarket be used as a Diesel Oil mix (5% - 10%) with no modifications? Even 5 Litres into every tank on my 90 will make a significant saving over a year.

Jon

Thanks for that question, it was one that I was planning to ask!

I have a 200Tdi and I am hoping to change to a Defender diesel (not sure what age yet). The reason is two fold - more room required for dogs and the 200Tdi doesn't have enough space for the dogs and a separate 5 gallon diesel tank (see comment later).

I have found one website that offers a conversion for around =A3475 (DIY). The only thing you need to find room for is a separate 5 gallon tank of diesel that is used to start and run the engine until the vegetable oil is hot/fluid enough.

I was planning on approaching our local chippies for their waste oil. It is suggeted that it is filtered by a 1 micron filter. Does anybody have any experince with using re-cycled oil and whether or not chippies will charge you for it, give it away willingly or refuse to as they have to meet government requirements for recycling?

Cheers

Peter

Jon and other fellow listers Hi from Greece,

I have been using waste olive oil from our house and my wife's mother house for more than 3 years now. My wife collects the oil in big glass bottles and lets it stay motionless for around a month (or at least one week). She then filters it using a filtering cloth and they we add it to the fuel tank up to a 10% ratio (10% waste olive oil and 90% diesel fuel)

I have no problem with the fuel pump, injectors of the way the engine operates but I avoid using this 10% of olive oil when temperature is expected to fall below 5 degrees Celsius (which very seldom does in the area of Greece where I live).

The engine actually operates more smoothly, seems to pull better and yes you can slightly smell of fried potatoes from the exhaust even with just a 10% of wasted olive oil.

Now that diesel prices have sky rocketed here in Greece (1.020 Euros/lt.) using the waste olive oil (or any other wasted oil from our kitchen) makes even more sense.

Take care Pantelis

I know it would be illegal but......

could you run OK >

Didn't know where to post this, but it's something I stumbled across a fair few months ago and may be of use to folks reading this thread with interest

so Pantelis Giamarellos was, like...

Skyrocketed to ?1.02 per litre!!! In GB terms, that's 69p. We are now looking at 99.9p/litre for diesel and rising - that would be ?1.47 in Greek.

If the increase was the result of market conditions following Katrina, I could accept this. But the majority of the price is tax, which means that logically the majority of the increase is tax too. The price per barrel goes up a bit, the price at the pump goes up a lot. I have seen it estimated that if prices remain at their current levels (and who doubts that they will, regardless of the price of crude), the Treasury will benefit to the tune of £1bn over the course of a year. That's £1bn of extra taxation that never went through Parliament, never was voted for in an election - just a windfall for Gordon Brown, which will no doubt go to fund a few more speed cameras or something.

Not having a go, Pantelis, but this really hacks me off.

You'll have to put this into perspective; firstly, Greek wages are nowhere near as good as UK ones and secondly, UK fuel prices are just ludicrous and therefore cannot be included in sensible comparisons, so you'll have to compare Greek prices with other continental European ones. Still, I think that Greece has one of the cheapest average fuel prices within the EU, so it's not that tragic, even though it has one of the lowest average wages (pre-expansion) as well. Regarding Britain, what's going on in this country with pricing is beyond me and I'm not only referring to fuel (being Greek myself, the prices I see in the UK are even more impressive).

What really annoys me is the Americans complaining that prices reached 3 dollars a gallon. A GALLON!! Mind you, their cars probably make a V8-powered Landie seem frugal.

Geo

On or around Mon, 5 Sep 2005 20:37:12 +0100, "StaffBull" enlightened us thusly:

not good for the injector pumps, but yes.

I gather adding a bit of engine oil to it helps lube the pump better.

Mind, sodding heating oil is about 3x what it used to be now.

Of course, this would be no problem. Just in case someone has a lokk at your fuel and finds out that it is coloured red you are in serios trouble! Heating oil in germany is always red...

so Geo was, like...

Mind you, US gallons are *tiny* :-)

I know a few americans, and the fuel prices are hitting them hard,

the people i know drive RV's, the size of a coach to us, but normal over there, thing is these things have 200 gallon fuel tanks, and average 7 mpg (american gallons)

So when 2 years ago they were filling their tanks up with diesel at or below

1 dollar per gallon, in some places it's almost 4 dollars a gallon, that's a heck of a jump, 200 dollars to 800 dollars to fill the tanks up in a couple of years.

when put into perspective you can see the huge increase, just because we've been paying the equivelent of around 6 dollars a gallon for the last year dosent matter, we've been paying that ammount for ages,

we'll soon be moaning if our prices went upto 4 quid a litre i guess.

Have you not noticed the 20-25% increase in the last 12 months or so?

I paid 99.9 for diesel yesterday, same time last year it was about

80p.

Sorry, but I genuinely think it's about time there was another fuel strike, just to ram the message home to the robbing barsteward government!! Badger.