It's cold, filtering cooking oil in an unheated garage sucks.
That's it.
It's cold, filtering cooking oil in an unheated garage sucks.
That's it.
The recent cold snap ('20's at night) down here really brought out the sick grease cars and borderline glow plugs. Lots of the folks down here never stop to really consider how veggie oil will congeal in the injectors so they don't switch to diesel before shutting down. Gooey veggie oil won't squirt. The home remedy: pour boiling water over the injectors to liquefy the goop and get it started on diesel.
assuming you bought quality lines after that "disaster" earlier.
look into something like this: http://www.bayteccontainers.com/barrel-heater-55-gallon.html
Jensenman, you are right. Most folks don't realize the holy grail of running cooking oil, clean, dry, hot. If you have those three things you are all right. I clean down to .5 micron, dewater to about 50-100 ppm and my grease is 165 F when I switch over. Grtechguy, I did upgrade my hoses. Then I built a containment area under the "still" to hold 35 gallons of oil. I've seen those barrel heaters before. I don't want to pony up that kind of scratch. I have a diesel-fired coolant heater, 17,000 btu. I'm going to use that with a heat exchanger in the tank. If I can get the oil up to 50 F before filtering that's fine. I just need it to flow. I have an inline water heater element right before the inlet to the centrifuge that brings the oil up to 170 F for the actual filtering.
My father does the grease car thing with his Jetta. The important thing is to run it on Diesel and get it hot before applying the grease.
Yeah, that's where the hot comes in. The temp you filter at only affects the ease of filtering, but the switch-over temp is critical.
Could you add a thinner to it for the winter? I vaguely remember Clarkson interviewing a guy on an old episode of Top Gear who added non-kerosene based paint thinner and insisted that it could start and run in all weather without a changeover at all.
do you mean http://www.dieselsecret.com/ I've seen the inside of a Duramax after the owner used this and it was not pretty but very expensive to repair!
Yeah, you can thin it and make if flow, but it still doesn't atomize properly. That's the problem with diesel secret. If the oil doesn't atomize and burn completely it will leave a deposit behind that turns into carbon and sands the cylinder walls. I could go into much greater detail and get all scientific about all of that, but I'd have to understand it better haha. If you switch over to oil at 165 or higher you are good.
a friend of mine was delivering pizza with an old benz diesel, he mixed filtered WVO and cut it with gasoline as I recall... he'd been running it for over 6 months (this was the summer of $4 gas) before I moved so don't know how well it lasted or did winter... still neat.
My Dad has a buddy who is really cheap, runs 50:50 used motor oil/gasoline, it is called the "don't ask, don't smell" variety of diesel.
donalson wrote: a friend of mine was delivering pizza with an old benz diesel, he mixed filtered WVO and cut it with gasoline as I recall... he'd been running it for over 6 months (this was the summer of $4 gas) before I moved so don't know how well it lasted or did winter... still neat.
I know a guy that has a small trucking and equipment company. and he runs all of his stuff on a 50-50 WVO and diesel mix. He ups the diesel percentage to 75-25 in the winter. All of his stuff is older, all mechanical diesels. He said that the only problem that he's had is from some sort of algae (IIRC) that grows in diesel fuel. He said it will grow in the tank and stay there, but the WVO breaks it up and clogs the filters. So if he starts using his 50-50 blend in an older machine that's never had it, he changes the fuel filter frequently for the first month, then it's smooth sailing after that.
I've been asked many many times if I want used motor oil to run. I don't want to do that. The way I see it, if a small particle of food get's through the system it's not good. But that's all I'm filtering out of WVO is food particles. With motor oil you're filtering out metal. I don't want that getting through at all.
Plus there's the solvents and detergents in motor oil that I don't think I want going through my system.
When driving school bus, we got hit by a sudden cold snap. Kerosene was the answer. Learned that while working for a JD dealer.
How long do you switch back to diesel before shutting it down? Is it a matter of 5 miles from home = back to diesel ?
I've heard of the kerosene thing before also. IIRC way back in the '80's some of the companies which ran diesel forklifts etc would cut the diesel with 10% gasoline for better cold weather operation.
When shutting off a veggie car on a cold night, you want to purge as much veggie as possible before shutown. Five miles of running on dino diesel should do the trick.
I get a lot of people with the 123 diesels with algae buildup. If that happens, you clean the fuel tank screen and replace the prefilter maybe five times in a month, then after that you replace the screen, the prefilter and the spin on filter and keep your fingers crossed. If it's really bad, about all you can do is pull the tank and let a local radiator shop scrub it good, then seal it with POR15 etc and keep an algaecide in the fuel. Sometimes it just doesn't seem worth it to run diesel. 
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