Manufacture your own diesel

SheffGruff

Much of this website is dedicated to saving money by producing your own goods or using your own enterprise: You can grow your own food, distill your own beer/wine, mend your own clothes and more.

I've come across many websites that advocate or advise you on creating your own fuel for transport. For diesel car owners, there seems to be two options:

1) Modify your car to run on vegetable or similar oil. This involves adding an extra tank, some heating elements to keep it at a higher temperature and possibly changing fuel filters and other components.

2) Create your own diesel from vegetable oil or similar and put it into your diesel car as biodiesel. This means you don't have to worry about heating it or filtering it in your car. It does however mean that you have to perform a number of chemical processes at home.

I've looked over some of the advice and have been quite tempted by option 2. I've been put off however by the fact I'm in a shared house with limited space to set up a small chemical lab for the creation of diesel. It seems a good idea, because I'm allowed to avoid fuel duty on small (enough) quantities of fuel for personal use (according to HMRC) and in theory I should be able to obtain veg oil for less than the prevailing £1 a litre for diesel.

I was hoping someone who had done this before could shed some light on the practicalities and economics of this.

Some of my questions are - does the set-up cost and experimentation warrant the savings? Is it extremely time-consuming and space-hungry as an operation for someone living in a shared house, to the point of making it inviable? Have I got my tax facts right? Generally, is it worth it or just too expensive?

I drive a VAG-group TDI car and have to do about 1500 miles a month at present. I often wonder if creating my own fuel would be the best way to save a huge amount of cash but I'd like to know if others have been successful before I spend a huge amount of something that may not work for me.

Rolandtheroadie

Biodiesel production may take a little bit of space as would filtering (useful)quantites of waste veg oil. (i take it you have a supply of waste oil?)
If your talking of using new oil, mix it with normal diesel would be the cheapest option.
Join a forum that deals with it specifically. They'll have all the info you need (yahoo groups, search for wvo, biodiesel etc)
A tdi SHOULD be ok but double check on the forums.
2500 litres a year can be used without paying tax.

hewhoisnotintheknow

what year vag engine is it

if it is anything newer than say 1998/9 i wouldnt bother as the new engines are rubbish!

Gothicfairy

I ran a 1998 Rover TD on half and half> Well it also use to get to 3/4 oil and 1/4 diesel in the summer, as one of the problems can be poor starting when cold.
There was nothing modified or changed but I would not recommend that until you are sure your engine can cope
You can buy cheap second hand oil from ebay and filter it yourself or buy clean/ new oil when it drops below say 95p per litre and mix it.

The one thing I found though and I kid you not, the car use to smell of chips all the time.Not good on long journeys when hungry.

Try something like this site

http://www.vegetableoildiesel.co.uk/forum/index.php

terryya

Have a read through this thread from on here.

Mark_Hewitt

Most of these things about people making their own diesel seem to rely on them having a supply of waste oil from a chip shop etc. Which 99.9% of the population will not have!

What about the rest of us who don't have a chip shop owner as their best mate?

Rolandtheroadie

A m8 got some from the local Wetherspoons and now gets 20 litres a week from the local Takeaway. Just walked in and asked.

They have to get rid of it. If no-one else is getting it, they'll probably say yes.

Igol

I looked into the whole biodiesel thing a few years back. Its dead easy to do if you've a working knowledge of pipe fitting.
The only problem I found was the methanol, only way I could get it was in IBC sized quantities which was a tad excessive for my needs.
I ended up going for an SVO diesel mix and altering the % of SVO to diesel depending on the time of year (its thicker in the colder months).

Bookers do 20l for about £17