Dirty Jobs....................bio diesel

[zalinda]

On the Discovery Channel
Dirty Jobs

Tuesday, October 25 9:00 PM
Documentary, Reality

Bio-Diesel-Man
Working with bees; turning cooking oil into a gasoline alternative.

[mduffy31]

1. As I understand it

The Diesel engine was developed to run on vegetable oil derivative, I could be wrong, but that is my understanding. That is why you can run just about anything in them.

[DJ MEW]

2. the fuel injector

that is used on the engine is too small to run vegetable oil through it. But besides that one limitation yes the Diesel engine can run on a lot of different things.

The engine was originally designed to run on vegetable oil but when diesel petrol became cheap and available they put a standard fuel injector on it which is too small to push the thicker vegetable oil through it.

[Porcupine]

3. Oil heater kits are available. Runs fine with straight veggie oil

that is heated by radiator fluid. Some folks here in town (Chico, CA) have set up two tank systems where they pump the oil straight from the fryer waste barrel to the car.

The car starts up on diesel, runs until the veggie oil tank is hot and a dash switch flips the fuel source to veggie oil. The trick is to be absolutely sure that you switch back to diesel before you shut down for over an hour.

Summer temps. here average about 95 degrees during the day so fluidizing the vegetable oil is not really a problem.

http://www.greasecar.com/

[Dogmudgeon]

4. Chico, eh?

I used to live there, back in the middle 1980s, right before the Great Pioneer Days Riot. :)

Loved the place. I'm long overdue for a return visit.

Even then, at the height of the Reagan stupidity, there were a lot of environmentalists at work in Chico. There were several cottage industries which would install solar water heating.

As for running with straight vegetable oil, the alkali conversion process (it has a more scientific name which I have temporarily forgotten) makes the fuel a lot less problematic. I believe that filtered, alkali-processed "vegoil" can be used directly as petroleum diesel.

There must be nearly a hundred websites now that detail the process, and several books are downloadable on the web or via P2P.

--p!