Isuzu Trooper Owners Club UK™

p1azt1ck · Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2008 12:01 Post subject: BIO FUEL

Watched the documentary on fuel cost and running of different cars / mileage etc last night. £5 gallon any time now... any one running on bio fuel? or where can you get in Essex.
I work at facility that burns 20,000 ltrs gas oil per week and we going over to Propane - looked at industrial bio fuel which is cost effective at this turnover.
Any one done any research for 4 x 4 users? Currently on £200 per month in the Big Horn normal running cost. I will not give in to government - might as well be communist state. Twisted Evil

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dxmedia · Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2008 12:14 Post subject:

Try running on 50% veg oil - there's a lot of people round here who do...
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Topvaux · Posted: Sat Mar 15, 2008 18:46 Post subject:

I run 50% veg oil, only I got a shock when I went into Tescos for a trolleyload of their veg oil yesterday. When I first bought a 3ltr bottle from them a year ago maybe it was £0.54 per litre. A little while ago it went up to £0.75 per litre but yesterday they'd whacked it up to £1.00!! Shocked

After a bit of rummaging around I found they had some 1 litre bottles at just 0.55 so I cleared the shelf of the 38 bottles they had, only to be accosted by "management" before I got to the checkout! Seems they only want you to buy 10 of any item that's "on offer" at a time! Not that they were marked up as being on offer or anything, but I was very polite and bit my tongue so he let me go with my haul.

Worrying, though, that the price of veg oil is obviously going through the roof - it's nearly as much as diesel now if it's not "on offer" it seems........

Have to investigate a wholesale bulk supplier doing maybe 25 litre cans at a decent price, maybe?

the flower man · Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2008 13:50 Post subject:

i have heard that the price of food will follow coz the space in the fields is being taken up for the biofuel growing Crying or Very sad

so you cant win ether way.do you think this is the reason that veg oil has increased or is it the supermarkets catching on that we use the veg oil in the motor and we havent increased our fryup intake Shocked

lotustower · Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2008 16:15 Post subject:

Seriously considering making my own biodiesel from WVO as there is a 2500ltr allowance for home producers with no registration and no duty.

Financially I would recoup the capital after just 750 ltr, based on WVO at £0.25. It seems cheaper here in the South than other locations though, and dino diesel is 113.9. Capital costs are around £500 and chemicals about 12p/ltr. But I think mentally it will feel even better running around recycling the WVO and not paying any duty. Twisted Evil

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dooley · Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2008 20:08 Post subject:

Hi I run mine on pure bio-fuel at 75p a litre in a can so no road duty, just had to replace my fuel filter after 6000 miles but running on bio-fuel I save £21 a week so £3.50 for a filter every 6000 miles of even every service I can live with it.

markymoan · Posted: Sun Mar 16, 2008 20:16 Post subject:

Ive just started running svo/diesel mix at 50/50, i stopped at the begining of winter due to waxing in the filter but at 40p a litre difference i'll carry a spare filter Very Happy

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the flower man · Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2008 13:37 Post subject:

be carefull with bio fuel! i have been on an oz site and running bio they recon it brakes down the dev pump seals. all petrol stations are now i beleve bio diesal for the last 6 to 8 years and my pump seals have gone! was it that? petrol and injector cleaner do the same apparently in the derv pumps. has anyone stripped a pump down after using veg for more than a year. the oz site said the pumps can be a bit gunky but no damage was ever found Very Happy

dxmedia · Posted: Mon Mar 17, 2008 13:46 Post subject:

Natural rubber will deteriorate (think about laxex gloves and diesel), but anything in the fuel system should be pretty protected against it anyway, veg oil is a lot kinder than diesel, it doesn't soak the oils out in the same way (get diesel on your lips and you'll know what I'm talking about Shocked

)

A lot of people put bio in older cars, so you have to expect there to be a certain amount of ware due to the age of the vehcile, it isn't always due to the 'new fuel' which has just been put through, quite often it's the 100K miles on the clock which is the problem.
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hensoni · * Joined: 10 Mar 2008 Posts: 15 Location: Somerset

When using new vegetable oil, do you filter or chemically modify the oil before filling your tank, or do you plonk it straight in? Clean sunflower oil has a longer hydrocarbon chain than diesel (circa 18 versus 13). Do you rely on the mineral diesel to "dilute" the effect and let the fuel filter with a shortened life deal with the rest?

Diesel round us is now £1.15 a litre - shocking. Carbon neutral vegetable products have got to be the way to go - but we do need to be careful that the rainforests don't suffer like they do at the hands of soya and coffee cash crops.

Ian H

PS I wonder if it will really snow this weekend? - I need to find out how good my new Troop is in the snow (General UHPs unfortunately...)

Topvaux · Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2008 12:46 Post subject:

dxmedia · Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2008 12:48 Post subject:

The problem with most bio diesels are they are made from palm oil, which is a major cause of deforestation at the moment. Alge isn't being really concidered at the moment, and corn has a very low oil yeild, dunno about rape? mosly animal feed I thought?

You 'can' run a diesel engine on straight veg oil, it's just a little viscous compaired to mineral diesel, hence the diluting, and it's also prone to waxing in cold weather (mineral diesel has a number of addatives in to stop the waxing). If you want to run on straight oil, then you'll need to preheat the fuel line in some manner (glow plug / water heater....)

The main reason for the shorter filter life with running bio (pure bio) is that part of the process for making bio is to create glycrol as a by-product, glycrol basically being soap. 99% of this is removed, but some stays diluted in the fuel, so it has the effect of washing all the old mineral diesel deposits out of the fuel system, hence the blocked filters - although this should only happen a couple of times till the system is flushed - also this isn't something you'll get running on veg / diesel mix. I think that the reason for blocked filters running a mix is due to a small amount of waxing taking place, and the filters pulling this out.

Just my tuppence worth anyway...
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hensoni · * Joined: 10 Mar 2008 Posts: 15 Location: Somerset

The length of hydrocarbon chain determines the "explosiveness" of the fuel. Most crude oil contains many types of Hydrocarbons (as well as loads of other nasties - cadmium, etc). The shortest HC is methane. The short chain fuels - petrol, diesel, light fuel oils, etc are cracked off earlier in the refinement process. Longer chain fuels such as kerosene, heavy fuel oils and tar take more processing and are (much) less explosive. Generally, the "heavier" the fuel, the longer the hydrocarbon chain.

Although the length of hydrocarbon chain has some effect on viscosity, the main viscosity difference between mineral diesel and straight vegetable oil is the glycerol (soap). This is an alcohol product that exists as a natural "filler" between the burnable bits. Glycerol is molecularly large and solidifies at a relatively high temperature. You wouldn't chop up and throw a couple of bars of Fairy (other soap bars are available...) into your tank without expecting some ramifications, but essentially, this is what you are doing by adding vegetable oil to your diesel.

The conversion of vegetable oil to EN spec biodiesel replaces the larger alcohol with an alcohol similar in size to the alcohol(s) found in diesel. In the case of bio-diesel, this is methanol.

dxmedia · Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2008 13:54 Post subject:

Yup.

So you swap your filters out a couple of times whilst the glycerol cleans out the deposits.

Don't think that the engine is names after the fuel. The engine was invented by mr diesel as an engine which could run on any heavy oil. The fuel is named after the engine. If you had big enough injectors you could probably run a diesel engine off crude...
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TimBanham · Posted: Thu Mar 20, 2008 13:58 Post subject:

you could always get yourself one of these

http://www.greenfuels.co.uk/

based on current price of diesel and assuming reuse oil free of charge will take just under 15K mikes to pay back if you get 26mpg - not bad

most probably nearer 24K miles if you have to buy the oil - but still not bad about the same break even as LPG systems
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