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Drive a Greasecar - DIY Biodiesel
TinyTim writes "Sure, you could buy expensive biodiesel for you car - or you can hack your diesel to run on filtered vegetable oil. Kits take a few hours to install and cost about $800, but you can get your fuel free from restaurant deep-fryers (the filters are ~$10/2000mi). Supposedly no loss of performance or mileage, and you can change between diesel and veggie oil with the flick of a switch. A previous article mentioned the theoretical possibility, but it looks like kits are now available from greasecar.com."
I distinctly remember watching a show on Discovery Channel (I believe it was Invention) from several years ago about a guy in the US who drives to various fast food outlets to get used vegetable oil for his car. He said the only problem was that his car always smells like french fries. Here are a couple links to related stories that are more recent. July 2001 and October 2001
Planetes
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promo Ad
"Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Fuhrer" - Adolf Hitl
Most restaurants with friers, dump the old oil into a large bin out back. Every few months a tanker truck comes and picks up the oil. Then they make crayons and other shit out of it. Point is, restaurants get money for their old oil. Why would they give it away?
The site and the explanation is here: BioBus
Berkeley, CA runs recycling trucks on this stuff.
There is a place in SF where you can buy it for your car. $3 or something a gallon (bit pricey, even for our ridiculous $1.75 87).
-Sean
I live near Hampshire College and there are several of these cars driving around with the www.greasecar.com printed on the body. Volkswagens... Rabbits and a Bus I have seen. Our local rag did a srory on these pioneers. I am thinking about buying my neighbor's diesel Rabbit for $250.00 just so I can try the kit out.
pronoblem
Making Vegetable oil isn't very difficult. You can buy high quality presses. Or even make your own. I mentioned this in a previous article, but From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank has instructions on not only how to make your fuel, but how to build a cheap oil press with a diesel engine of course :). This book also has really helpful tables on which plants will produce the most oil.
I just went 601.4 miles on my last tank, which used 13.3 gallons. That's around 45 miles per gallon.
The car is awesome. Same mileage as a silly little econobox such as a Metro, but with the power of an ordinary car. In fact it's probably got MORE torque than an ordinary car. I can pass gasoline cars easily in 5th gear on a hill, and I can let out the clutch from a stop without even touching the throttle!
And yes, I guess I can run it on grease!
I scoff at all you gasoline slaves.
Carl
Vote Libertarian
because you really could end up charged with grease theft if you just pull up and fill your car up out of their oil dumpster.
there was an article about such a thing at Salon, but it no longer available i guess, though you can read it with google cache...
Grease Rustlers
Companies like Griffin have contracts with restaurants to come around regularly and pick up their grease. From Griffin's point of view, the grease is theirs the minute it enters the container.
So i'd definitely think it would be wise to at least ask the restaraunt you wanna fill up at before doing so.
The most critical part of the diesel is the fuel pump and injectors. They run at 3000-5000 psi with very low volume per stroke, so leakage cannot be tolerated. The fuel has to be filtered extremely well (sub micron). My worry with biodiesel is that it might plug filters due to microbial growth [always a problem in diesel], or the vegatable oil hydrolyze into organic acid plus glycerol. The organic acids will cause corrosion of the injector pump plungers and injector tips. Not good at all. The fuel will also have different rubber swell characteristics, so you may get fuel leaks. I'd try this first on a imetal-to-metal Mercedes with simple to replace rubber rather than a Peugeot or VW with a fuel-lubricated pump and that main O ring soaking in fuel.
I expect vegatable oil could be made to work with additives: a biostat, acid neutralizer plus seal swell control. But it would have to remain a separate product becauase petroleum oil and vegatable oils aren't miscible. If you wanted a blend, you'd need an emulsifier, and the results might be too viscous.
guess we didn't read the article.
"James Kliesch, researcher for the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, a nonprofit think tank in Washington, agreed with that assessment.
He said bio-diesel is interesting, but there isn't nearly enough of it to keep U.S. motor vehicles moving. Instead, the automotive industry is moving toward hybrid-electric cars to boost gas mileage."
straight from it.
please read before u make comments otherwise u look like a fool, if this happens.
Having worked with the development of high-pressure direct-injection diesel engines at both Volkswagen and Volvo, I am quite critical towards any replacement fuel that has not been widely and thoroughly tested.
To begin with, some links for self study:
- Dieselnet.com has a great glossary and provides some excellent links
- Delphi has some nice PDF's on Unit Injectors and Common Rail
- Here some information from Bosch - Siemens has some nice pictures of injection systems, mainly common rail
Due to the very high pressures (up to 2100 bars) and therefore high temperatures with modern fuel injection systems, you really go to the limit of what diesel fuel can do: You use it simultaneously as fuel, coolant and oil and it takes a good blend to fulfill all these requirements! The chemical formula is important as well as the physical properties. The DOE has a webpage about diesel fuels. Have a look at their online diesel fuel property database and see which properties are essential for characterizing fuel. Other important factors are
- durability
- particles/filtration
- compressability/resistance against cavitation
Not to forget resistance of all sealings etc against the fuel. Think RME and you know why almost everybody in the industry (e.g. SCANIA) only approves blends with max 5% alternative fuels...
Don't get me wrong, but if those fuels are ruining the car, we really can't talk about environmental advantages then, now can we? On the other hand, serious life cycle analysis like this one and field studies will hopefully help to develop cleaner cars. If those are then driven by gas engines, diesel engines or fuel cells... who knows?
Excellence: Moderate (mostly affected by comments on your karma)
Caveat: Although I have friends who run diesels on various fuels, I myself do not. So I'm a friend of experts, not an expert myself.
Rudolf Diesel designed his engine to run on vegetable oil. That's how it was originally supposed to work, and it was originally demonstrated at the World's Fair running peanut oil.
Modern diesel engines are slightly modified to optimally burn the refinery waste products we call "diesel fuel". But only slightly...
If you want to efficiently burn vegetable oil in an unmodified modern diesel, you should use biodiesel (easily home-made, see Tickell's site for details).
If you want to run straight veggie oil, you need to preheat the oil (no problem when the engine is running, plenty of heat easily available, but you will need a preheater or a small tank of "starter fuel" at startup time). You also need to make sure that your filters are very efficient, and that you have bacteria/fungi controls, and that you have a water trap. These are the same considerations with regular "diesel fuel", but since the latter is nasty hostile petrowaste and the former is edible bio-friendly fryer grease you will have to be much more careful and vigilant.
Most people running straight vegetable oil are uber-geeks. They like to tinker and they aren't afraid of breaking things, because they know they will be able to get something to work if they need to. If you don't feel like that is a description of you, try biodiesel instead, and you won't have to make any modifications to your vehicle at all. You can even mix biodiesel and petrodiesel with no problem.
From www.m-w.com's def'n of "atomize"
2 : to reduce to minute particles or to a fine spray
Ever seen a perfume atomizer? It just makes a really fine spray.. doesn't break any chemical bonds. (:
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
Actaully, that isn't far off from reality. Pretty much all fast food chains have to pay someone to take the used veggie oil to some disposal facility. If you ask the managers if you can have a few tanks, they're usually more than happy to give it away.
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