Anybody can make biodiesel. It's easy, you can make it in your cooking area-- and it's BETTER than the petro-diesel fuel the huge oil companies sell you. Your diesel motor will run much better and last longer on your home-made fuel, and it's much cleaner-- much better for the environment and much better for health.

If you make it from utilized cooking oil it's not just inexpensive however you'll be recycling a problematic waste item. Most importantly is the GREAT sensation of flexibility, independence and empowerment it will offer you. Here's how to do it-- everything you require to understand.

Straight veggie oil fuel (SVO) systems can be a clean, reliable and cost-effective alternative. Unlike biodiesel, with SVO you need to customize the engine. The best way is to fit an expert singletank SVO system with replacement injectors and glowplugs optimised for veg-oil, along with fuel heating.

With the German Elsbett single-tank SVO system for instance you can use petro-diesel, biodiesel or SVO, in any mix. Just launch and go, stop and change off, like any other car. Journey to Forever's Toyota TownAce van utilizes an Elsbett single-tank system. More

There are also two-tank SVO systems which pre-heat the oil to make it . You have to start the engine on ordinary petroleum diesel or biodiesel in one tank and then switch to SVO in the other tank when the veg-oil is hot enough, and change back to petro- or biodiesel before you stop the engine, or you'll coke up the injectors.

More info on straight grease systems in my blog.

3. Biodiesel or SVO?

Biodiesel has some clear advantages over SVO: it works in any diesel, without any conversion or modifications to the engine or the fuel system-- just put it in and go. It also has much better cold-weather residential or commercial properties than SVO (however not as good as petro-diesel-- see Using biodiesel in winter). Unlike SVO,

it's backed by many long-term tests in many nations, consisting of countless miles on the roadway.

Biodiesel is a tidy, safe, ready-to-use, alternative fuel, whereas it's reasonable to state that numerous SVO systems are still speculative and need further development.

On the other hand, biodiesel can be more costly, depending how much you make, what you make it from and whether you're comparing it with new oil or utilized oil (and depending upon where you live). And unlike SVO, it has to be processed first.

But the big and rapidly growing worldwide band of homebrewers do not mind-- they make a supply weekly or as soon as a month and quickly get used to it. Many have been doing it for years.

Anyway you need to process SVO too, particularly WVO (waste grease, used, prepared), which many individuals with SVO systems use due to the fact that it's inexpensive or free for the taking. With WVO food particles and pollutants and water need to be gotten rid of, and it most likely must be deacidified too. Biodieselers state, "If I'm going to need to do all that I might too make biodiesel rather." But SVO types belittle that-- it's much less processing than making biodiesel, they say. To each his own.