Running on veg Oil?..

Seen it done in a supermarket car park, but then I think the price of those 5l drums of cooking oil rose to nearly match diesel...

My Mercedes G-Wagon GDS ran quite happily on cooking oil, but it was an indirect injection diesel engine.

HMRC used to get quite ferocious about it ISTR.

Not sure todays modern diesels would cope so well.

I'm still impressed by the Chieftain engine - would run on anything from veg oil through paraffin to petrol and white spirits, apparently.

I heard a story about the Revenuers chasing Cardiff taxis whose exhausts smelled like fish and chip shops.

Yeah, the Frying Squad from the police were involved :-)

S.

there was an an allowance introduced where you could have the first 2000 miles or litres (memory fails me) duty free when running on Veg oil or home brew biodiesel.

S.

It used to be about 50p/litre, when diesel was £1/litre. Then I think it was the 2000 fuel crisis and it began to track the price of diesel.

Theo

What you need is Hydro Treated Vegetble Oil there are a few cars that can use it now, but not mine according to VW. Esso plan to sell diesel with 30% HVO to farmers. The may have started doing this now.

Tanker drivers used to be very well paid as the unions could hold the oil companies to ransom. The oil companies started using owner drivers I remember Tony Blair saying he was surprise when he learnt about this a few years ago when the drivers were reluctant to drive their vehicles passed picket lines

I know someone who does it and has been doing it for at least a decade. Taking scrap oil and cracking it to glycerol and motor fuel.

It involves some quite dangerous chemistry to turn cooking oil into a really effective diesel substitute. Get it slightly wrong and you dissolve your engine block. If you are running an almost end of life land rover it possibly makes sense but expect to have the odd disaster.

He got quite good at it after writing off a couple of engines...

Simplest solution is get up early - that's what I did to get my fuel this morning. I need to cover over 600 miles this week. Normal weeks post pandemic I wouldn't have bothered but this week is special.

And you can make hand soap out of the waste glycerol..... then sell on when the next panic buy starts on toilet roll, hand wash gel, hand soaps and shower/bath soaps!

S.

He mixes it with sawdust waste obtained from another local enterprise and burns the resulting blocks in his log burner. He's an interesting guy. He has a stone saw that any James Bond villain would be proud of!

He can cut accurate pieces straight off 3m blocks of stone with it.

Martin Brown laid this down on his screen :

Does he have a blog of some sort?

He's a stone mason. I don't think he even has a telephone line.

I might have a picture of the saw somewhere. It is a diamond based chain saw with a belt length of about 10m and some very clever tensioning and water cooling systems to lubricate the cut. It is pleasing to watch but you must never stand in line with the cut. If/when it snaps the whiplash destroys anything in its path - usually some straw bales on wooden railway sleepers to absorb the impact without damaging the chain.

I'm due to see him again shortly so if it's running I'll take a pic.

Many years ago, had a workmate who did. His son worked for a large organisation and got the used oil cooking from them. Mate had a (simple) filtration system set up for it. But it was an old diesel with mechanical injection.

I know what you mean (I think) but in reality don't all diesels have to have 'mechanical' injection? Otherwise no fuel would get into the cyclinders. Electronic injection just means mechanical gubbins of

Common rail diesels use high pressure pumps at 2500 bar instead of 125 bar that are far more dependant on lubrication properties of the fuel. The injectors are solenoid servo valves and not a spill valve that mechanical injection used. The nozzles are a lot smaller as flow is proportional to the square root of pressure. That requires the fuel to be very clean and the viscosity is critical to flow.

You won't find a Euro IV (2005), V or VI compliant Diesel with anything other than common rail. Common rail injection was required to meet Euro IV emissions standard as it cut the limits for NOx and PM in half.

Because it's got an ECM it allows programmed response to test conditions. AKA cheats.

Yes and I very much doubt oil seed rape from tescos needs to be filtered as well as DERV. The other thing is vegetable oils are triglycerides, three fatty esters hanging off one node, treating it to make biodiesel involves stripping off the glycerol and replacing the ends of three chains with a methyl group, thus lowering its viscosity.