Guest Author - William Charles Vetter

In previous articles I focused on alternative fuels such as alcohol, hydrogen, natural gas and biodiesel. Based on the article on biodiesel, how you can brew your own fuel from vegetable oil but surprisingly, if you drive a diesel car or truck it is also possible to run it on straight vegetable oil (SVO) sometimes also known as pure plant oil (PPO). You could also run it on waste vegetable oil (WVO).

What are the advantages of vegetable oil
The obvious advantage to running your car on vegetable oil is that it is a renewable resource and since WVO is basically a waste product you could potentially obtain it at little or no cost at. SVO, is a raw product does not need to be chemically altered as biodiesel does, thus saving the mess and hassle of mixing and measuring.

So what’s the catch, with running SVO?
It seems that in life there is rarely if ever a free lunch and so it is with vegetable oil. There are many disadvantages to running a straight mix of unadulterated vegetable oil. The most important of which is vegetable oil tends to become thick and may even solidify at low temperatures so a heated fuel supply is required. If you run SVO you need to start your engine using diesel fuel, then switch to SVO after the engine is warm and then switch back to diesel fuel before shutting the engine off. You cannot leave raw vegetable oil in your engine or the fuel delivery system, because as SVO cools it will quagulate or harden making it very difficult if not impossible to restart your engine.

What about WVO
Waste vegetable oil which is often found near the garbage bin in an alley, is difficult to assess since it is impossible to know what its acidic content is. It may be relatively clean and have a neutral fatty acid PH level or it may be very acidic and contain water and other impurities like bread crumbs, which is very likely. Using WVO should involve filtering using a series of decreasing filter particulate mesh sizes down to about 10 microns. If you don’t filter it carefully you risk clogging your fuel filters or even worse clogging your injector nozzles. Additionally acidic PH levels and excess water could cause corrosion to your fuel injection system. Ideally PH levels should be tested using a titration PH test, but this procedure also gets you halfway to making it into biodiesel.

Should you run Vegetable Oil in your car?
These days you can actually watch your favorite TV shows right on your cellular phone, but why would you want to? Similarly you can have a two tank heated SVO system with an electronic solenoid switchover system, installed in your car or truck but again why would you want to?
Or you could just make your own biodiesel which is much safer for your engine and totally interchangeable with gas station petrol diesel. No heated second fuel tank, no switching back and forth and no expensive engine repair bills in case you forget or make a mistak. Personally I wouldn’t risk it but there are certainly people who do.
My take on BioDiesel fuel