Hearing a lot aabout using various types of cooking oil instead of diesel? Your views please. TIA
It's not simply a case of shoving cooking oil straight into the car. You need to add something or another and leave it to 'ferment'. It's also only usable on direct injection engines, AFAIK. Your best get is a google. However, it's illegal to use the stuff and I certainly wouldn't use it.
There's a chap who posts in the alt.autos.citroen group whos run his Xantia on a 50/50 diesel/sunflower oil mix for the last 4000 miles at temperatures down to -7 Celcius. Claims not to have had any problems so far.
That's basically B50 biodiesel (they use a catalyst to break that down though rather than using pure sunflower oil.. ). It's perfectly legal as long as you pay the tax on it... Wouldn't bother making my own - just find a local producer and buy some. Tax is 20p/litre less than standard diesel, but the production costs are higher so you don't save a lot, if anything. The original diesels were run on peanut oil and (later) vegetable oil... it's taken us 100 years to come full circle. Gotta love progress Tony
You can get a lot of information here http://www.bio-power.co.uk/index.htm Ignoring the legality issue in many countries, there are lots of ill-informed opinions around. Pretty well all diesels will run on bio-diesel, either direct, or indirect injection. You can also run on 100% neat sunflower oil, but you will need to start on normal fuel, and be able to switch over to the veggie when the engine is warm. You will also require an additional heat exchanger on the veggie fuel line to heat it slightly. Thus you need an additional small tank for normal diesel. There is an issue with certain types of bio fuel, depending on the way they are produced, certain additives can attack some rubber seals on fuel pumps. This is assuming you are reclaiming old frying oil.
So have you got all the stock of Sunflower oil out of Tescos Brian???/lol lol lol from Chris Addlestone Surrey
My local ethnic shop (I don't know which country the owners are from) sells veg oil in 5 gallon drums.
Most supermarkets are wise to 'alternative' uses for cooking oil and will refuse to sell it in volume. I'm suprised they haven't pioneered Bio Diesel in their pumps though as I'm guessing they are aligned nicely to do so and return a nice profit.
