Use Vegetable Oil If You Have A Diesel Car

wish there was some answer to this, as yesterday I was forced to pay £1.05 per litre for diesel. Unleaded was £1.00 I've never seen such a huge gap in price between the two types of fuel?!!:eek: I'd love to do what the Volvo man was doing! I have a 1993 diesel car and have often wondered if I could do it relatively cheaply?:think: I can't imagine that 'Mr Volvo' paid £895 for a conversion kit?!!! :rotfl:

There is a lot of rubbish on this thread!

Basically, cooking oil (SVO) CAN be used in MOST diesels WITHOUT a kit.

However.

New diesels (common rail) operate under very very high pressure and are NOT suitable for SVO with or without a kit. If you try this, it'll work initially but you WILL have to replace components on the car which will be very, very expensive. Think £1000's .

Older diesels can (in the main) run on SVO provided that the fuel pump has been tested OK on SVO. Lots of Peugeots & Citroens have fuel pumps that run well with SVO, but some other cars don't fare so well.

In all cases, SVO has to be mixed with diesel at a ratio which is dependant on the time of year. SVO is a lot thicker than diesel and needs to be 'thinned' down - very few cars will run on 100% SVO and even these will work properly in the summer. During the colder months, the ratio for diesel:svo is higher, as SVO will 'wax' badly and needs more diesel to thin down. During very cold spells, any SVO at all is not really advisable.

The 'conversion' kit for SVO is basically a seperate tank and a pre-heater. It is not always needed and is pretty expensive.

Best case is to check with your mechanic or someone knowlegeable first, as all different cars will react to SVO differently, depending on a number of issues. Just because your friend runs SVO in his ageing Peugeot 405 1.9D doesn't mean you can use it in your brand new £45k twin-turbo BMW 335D.

markrussell78 wrote: »

Doesn't the oil have to be mixed with methanol? Sure it wasn't just cooking oil? Can't see how that can do your engine any good at all, simply not designed for it. Diesel is much thinner than cooking oil too. Wont this have an affect on the fuel pump? It will have to work harder to pump thicker liquid etc?
Plus the smallest etruk unit is £895+vat will take a while to earn that back i guess.
Yes found out you do have to use methanol too so there is the price of that to take into consideration. Shame as we have thousands of gallons of methanol we 'dispose' of at work. Shame i cant get it shipped home!
As to my fuel pump comment above, i can see how when mixed with methanol it would thin the liquid down.

If you take the time to look through the link above you will see that the 15p litre for treating waste oil includes the cost of methanol, caustic soda and the electricity required to produce bio diesel. You could save 90p per litre, that is a saving of £4.09 per gallon. That means you would have to use 257 gallons to get your money back on the purchase price. In other words just under 5 gallons per week. So it would not take that long, would it?