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

If you make it from utilized cooking oil it's not just low-cost however you'll be recycling a troublesome waste product. Best of all is the GREAT sensation of flexibility, self-reliance and empowerment it will give you. Here's how to do it-- whatever you need to understand.

Straight grease fuel (SVO) systems can be a clean, effective and economical alternative. Unlike biodiesel, with SVO you need to customize the engine. The very best method is to fit an expert 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 example you can use petro-diesel, biodiesel or SVO, in any combination. Just launch and go, stop and turn off, like any other cars and truck. Journey to Forever's Toyota TownAce van utilizes an Elsbett single-tank system. More

There are likewise 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 after that change to SVO in the other tank when the veg-oil is hot enough, and switch back to petro- or biodiesel before you stop the engine, or you'll coke up the injectors.

More information on straight vegetable oil systems in my blog.

3. Biodiesel or SVO?

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

it's backed by numerous long-term tests in lots of countries, consisting of millions of miles on the roadway.

Biodiesel is a tidy, safe, ready-to-use, alternative fuel, whereas it's reasonable to state that numerous SVO systems are still experimental and require further development.

On the other hand, biodiesel can be more costly, depending how much you make, what you make it from and whether you're comparing it with new oil or used oil (and upon where you live). And unlike SVO, it has to be processed first.

But the big and rapidly growing worldwide band of homebrewers do not mind-- they make a supply weekly or once a month and soon get utilized to it. Many have actually been doing it for years.

Anyway you have to process SVO too, specifically WVO (waste grease, utilized, prepared), which numerous people with SVO systems utilize because it's cheap or totally free for the taking. With WVO food particles and impurities and water must be gotten rid of, and it probably ought to be deacidified too. Biodieselers state, "If I'm going to need to do all that I may 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.