Vegetable Oil and Cars

Step One
Start with a diesel engine. Almost any newer diesel engine can be made to run on vegetable oil as long as it doesn’t have the rubber seals. The rubber seals will deteriorate when exposed to vegetable oil over time, since vegetable oil acts as a solvent.

Step Two
Install a vegetable oil fuel conversion kit. You can also have a mechanic do it for you. You should keep the original gas tank to hold regular diesel fuel for cold weather. Install a second tank for vegetable oil. These can go in the trunk. The conversion kit should include hoses from the car's radiator to the vegetable oil tank to heat the oil via a heat exchanger before it enters the final fuel filter.

Step Three
New vegetable oil is easiest to get but can be very expensive. Restaurants will often give you their waste oil for free. Chinese and Japanese restaurants are best because their oils comes out cleanest. The oil should be amber in color and any oil from other types of restaurants may also be suitable but could require more filtering. You will need a few containers for transferring the oil from the source to your filtering location. The five gallon jugs that the restaurants receive the fresh oil in work fine. Restaurants are usually happy to give you these containers since it saves them some money.

Step Four
Filter the oil. Use filter bags that are rated to 0.5 microns thick. To increase the life of your filter bags, first allow the oil to sit in a barrel for about a week to let particulate matter settle to the bottom. Then, pump or scoop the oil into a filter bag suspended above a fresh empty barrel from the top of the barrel (since most of the food particles matter and possible water is at the bottom). Start your engine using regular diesel fuel from the normal gas tank. Once the engine and vegetable oil are warm (after about 15 minutes depending on weather), switch to allow the vegetable oil to flow into the fuel source.

Step Five
Switch back to diesel a few minutes before you stop your engine for any time (about 10 minutes depending on the temperature) to make sure the vegetable oil is purged from the fuel line and injectors so that they don't become clogged when the engine cools.

After you do this you'll have a car that can run on Oil AND Diesel. Another trick to getting the earth a bit greener!

As Always, Keep it Green.