Fill it up with fry oil

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Yothu
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Fill it up with fry oil

Post: # 6921Post Yothu »

Grease Is the Word: Fill It Up With Fry Oil
ON a recent return trip from Massachusetts to my home in New Jersey, a distance of 160 miles, I burned a total of two cups of diesel fuel in my 2001 Volkswagen Jetta TDI.
Since that would indicate fuel economy of more than 600 miles per gallon, something didn’t quite compute.

The missing part of the equation was this: I was returning from Easthampton, Mass., where Daryl Beck, a mechanic well versed in such matters, had just installed a secondary fuel system in my car. The main fuel I used on the drive home was not diesel, which the Jetta was designed to burn, but straight vegetable oil.

I used diesel fuel for only the first 10 miles of the trip. After that, the diesel gauge stayed right where it was while the VW sped happily along on soybean oil — the same stuff that restaurants use for deep frying and salad dressing. I used less than three gallons of oil for the final 150 miles of my trip home, which calculates out to more than 50 miles per gallon. Not bad.

The conversion kit that Mr. Beck installed was produced by Greasecar, a manufacturer of vegetable fuel units for diesel cars; gasoline engines cannot be converted to burn vegetable oil. The kit cost about $900, including an optional temperature gauge and audible warning signal, and another $1,000 for the installation, which takes an experienced mechanic about seven hours.
Vegetable oil, of course, is a renewable resource that emits no more carbon dioxide than next year’s crop will absorb and requires no drilling for soybeans in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or anywhere else. The environmentally aware will give you even more points in the game of green for using oil previously used for cooking.
There are a few things I must be attentive to: I have to remember to purge my fuel lines of vegetable oil and switch back to diesel a few minutes before ending a trip. If I forget this on a cold night, the oil could congeal and make starting the next morning impossible without the aid of a hair dryer.

I have to remember to use the purge function on my dash-mounted fuel selection switch for no more than 20 seconds or so. If I leave it in purge position, it can allow diesel fuel to flow back into the vegetable oil tank and overfill it until it flows through the air vent, a mess I would rather not experience.

Add a few factors to the category of minor inconvenience that accompanies my energy-independence euphoria: I have to carry a spare vegetable oil filter for that inevitable moment when the original says it has had enough. I also have a filter wrench and a pair of oven gloves to let me change filters while the engine is still hot. And I mustn’t forget the turkey baster: that’s to fill the new filter with vegetable oil from the tank, so I don’t introduce an air bubble into the system, causing the engine to stall.
A common concern about converting a car for vegetable oil is that it could harm the engine. But some people who have done conversions say they’ve seen no damage, even after many miles. Phil Gibbs, a New York City firefighter who makes a 75-mile commute twice a week from his Putnam County home, said he had driven his 2002 Jetta 75,000 miles on vegetable oil with no trouble.
I was surprised to learn that Rudolf Diesel, inventor of the combustion cycle bearing his name, originally intended his engine to run on vegetable oil. In 1912, seven years after he introduced his engine at a Paris exposition, he said: “The use of vegetable oils for engine fuels may seem insignificant today. But such oils may become in the course of time as important as the petroleum and coal tar products of the present time.”
Since the article might only be available to NY Times subscribers some time I quoted large passages of the article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/23/autom ... wanted=all
If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you always got.
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