Diesel additives for defenders

Shifty1962 said:

50% diesel 50% used, filtered, engine oil or hydraulic oil, in my TD5 for the last 2K miles no problem. If anything it runs smoother.

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BuzzLand said:

Is it dear for the hydraulic oil? Do you get it as a freebie?

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pos said:

Buzzland! You're well into finding out alternative fuels aren't you! I've just replied to your message with a link to a very helpful website.

To answer your question. A 200 or 300 tdi engine will burn any oil that you throw at it, even synthetic oil JUST as long as it's thinned down to a similar viscosity to standard DERV (diesel that you by at the pumps). I had been running my older diesel engine, a 2.5 N/A on a total concoction of oils. I had been given bottles of delightfully thin petrol engine oil from one of my neighbors (surplus to his requirements) so I just whacked that in the tank along with some vegetable oil, white spirit (as a thinning agent), diesel and a splosh of petrol because it was cheaper at the time.

The best thing that you can do realistically, is go to your local garage and ask them if you can take one to two drums of waste engine oil, which they usually have to pay to dispose of. They should be more than happy to give you it. Here you have yourself a rich, almost "crude" fuel if you like that needs diluting and it's totally free. The best thing is, you need to filter it out and thin it down in order to use it, which will usually increase the amount of usable fuel that you have by about one third.

The first step is to take the smallest micron filter that you can find. Your local hydraulic engineering company should be able to provide you with some fine filter sheets. If not, just buy some very fine threaded tights and then tripple filter the oil through them. This will remove any iron / aluminium shavings from the oil that may have contaminated it in the garage's waste oil storage container. The next step is to thin it down to the same consistency as diesel. Whatever quantity of used engine oil you have. Try mixing it with 10% white spirit or 15% petrol and really thoroughly mix it. Then, allow the fuel to sit in a clean container so that any water can separate and any larger unfiltered lumps of gloop will sink to the bottom (leave it for 24 hours or so). Next job is to suck the water off the top and then syphon the "good oil" out into a jerry can, leaving some thicker gloop at the bottom. Give it a stir and add a touch more white spirit (5% at most) and it's ready to go in your tank. Just make sure that you replace your fuel filter every thousand miles or so.

In theory if you produced a 50 litre batch of "black diesel", 15% of that is going to be petrol or white spirit, leaving the remaining 85% as the waste engine oil which is FREE, so:

Petrol = £1.01 per litre
15% x 50 litres = 7.5 litres
7.5 x £1.01 = £7.58 (3SF)

So it's going to cost you approximately £7.58 for the petrol to thin down 42.5 litres of oil to produce 50 litres of fuel,
which works out at 15p per litre. So even if petrol raises to £1.30 per litre, it's only going to cost you £9.75 to produce 50 litres of fuel, which works out at 20p per litre.

By the time fuel prices get that high mind, scientists will have perfected being able to produce ethanol from algae and we'll be able to literally grow our own fuel in a pond in our own back gardens.

Good thinking!
-Pos

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