Anybody can make biodiesel. It's easy, you can make it in your cooking area-- and it's BETTER than the petro-diesel fuel the big oil companies sell you. Your diesel motor will run better and last longer on your home-made fuel, and it's much cleaner-- better for the environment and much better for health.

If you make it from utilized cooking oil it's not only low-cost however you'll be recycling a troublesome waste item. Best of all is the GREAT sensation of flexibility, independence and empowerment it will offer you. Here's how to do it-- whatever you need to know.

Straight veggie oil fuel (SVO) systems can be a tidy, efficient and cost-effective option. Unlike biodiesel, with SVO you need to customize the engine. The finest method is to fit a professional singletank SVO system with replacement injectors and glowplugs optimised for veg-oil, along with fuel heating.

With the German Elsbett single-tank SVO system for instance you can use petro-diesel, biodiesel or SVO, in any mix. Just start up and go, stop and change off, like any other car. Journey to Forever's Toyota TownAce van utilizes an Elsbett single-tank system. More

There are also two-tank SVO systems which pre-heat the oil to make it thinner. You need to start the engine on common petroleum diesel or biodiesel in one tank and then change to SVO in the other tank when the veg-oil is hot enough, and change back to petro- or biodiesel before you stop the engine, or you'll coke up the injectors.

More details on straight vegetable oil systems in my blog.

3. Biodiesel or SVO?

Biodiesel has some clear benefits over SVO: it works in any diesel, with no conversion or adjustments to the engine or the fuel system-- just put it in and go. It also has much better cold-weather residential or commercial properties than SVO (but not as excellent as petro-diesel-- see Using biodiesel in winter). Unlike SVO,

it's backed by lots of long-lasting tests in numerous nations, including countless miles on the road.

Biodiesel is a clean, safe, ready-to-use, alternative fuel, whereas it's fair to state that numerous SVO systems are still speculative and require additional development.

On the other hand, biodiesel can be more pricey, depending just how much you make, what you make it from and whether you're comparing it with brand-new oil or utilized oil (and depending on where you live). And unlike SVO, it has actually to be processed first.

But the large and quickly growing worldwide band of homebrewers don't mind-- they make a supply weekly or when a month and soon get utilized to it. Many have actually been doing it for years.

Anyway you need to process SVO too, especially WVO (waste grease, utilized, prepared), which numerous people with SVO systems use due to the fact that it's cheap or free for the taking. With WVO food particles and pollutants and water must be eliminated, and it probably needs to be deacidified too. Biodieselers state, "If I'm going to have to do all that I might as well make biodiesel instead." But SVO types scoff at that-- it's much less processing than making biodiesel, they state. To each his own.