Make your own Biodiesel Part 1

There are at least three ways to run a diesel motor on biofuel using vegetable oils, animal fats or both. All three are utilized with both fresh and used oils.

1. Use the oil simply as it is– generally called SVO fuel (straight grease);

2. Mix it with kerosene (paraffin) or petroleum diesel fuel, or with biodiesel, or blend it with a solvent, or with gasoline;

3. Convert it to biodiesel.

The first two approaches sound easiest, however, as so often in life, it’s not rather that easy.

1. Mixing it

Vegetable oil is far more viscous (thicker) than either petro-diesel or biodiesel. The function of blending it or it with other fuels is to decrease the viscosity to make it thinner so that it streams more easily through the fuel system into the combustion chamber.

If you’re mixing veg-oil with petroleum diesel or kerosene (like # 1 diesel) you’re still using fossilfuel– cleaner than a lot of, however still unclean enough, lots of would state. Still, for every gallon of

grease you utilize, that’s one gallon of fossil-fuel saved, and that much less climate-changing carbon in the environment.

People use various blends, varying from 10% grease and 90% petro-diesel to 90% vegetable oil and 10% petro-diesel. Some people simply utilize it that method, launch and go, without pre-heating it (which makes veg-oil much thinner), and even use pure grease without pre-heating it, which would make it much thinner.

You might get away with it with an older Mercedes 5-cylinder IDI diesel, which is a very tough and tolerant motor– it will not like it but you most likely won’t kill it. Otherwise, it’s not sensible.

To do it properly you’ll need what amounts to an SVO system with fuel pre-heating anyhow, preferably using pure petro-diesel or biodiesel for starts and stops. (See next.) In which case there’s no requirement for the blends.

Blends with different solvents and/or with unleaded gasoline are „speculative at best“, little or absolutely nothing is learnt about their results on the combustion attributes of the fuel or their long-term results on the engine.

Higher viscosity is not the only issue with using grease as fuel. Veg-oil has various chemical residential or commercial properties and combustion qualities from the petroleum diesel fuel for which diesel engines and their fuel systems are developed.

Diesel engines are state-of-the-art devices with very exact fuel requirements, especially the more contemporary, cleaner-burning diesels (see The TDI-SVO debate).

They’re hard however they’ll just take so much abuse. There’s no warranty of it, however using a mix of up to 20% veg-oil of great quality is said to be safe enough for older diesels, especially in summertime.

Otherwise utilizing veg-oil fuel needs either an expert SVO service or biodiesel. Mixes and blends are usually a poor compromise. But blends do have an advantage in winter.

Similar to biodiesel, some kerosene or winterised petro-diesel fuel blended with straight grease reduces the temperature level at which it begins to gel. (See Using biodiesel in winter) More about fuel mixing and blends.