Veg Oil

Well a frind of mine has recently started running a restaurent where they get rid of between 40 and 60 L of veg oil a week.

Looking at HMRC web site they now don't need tou to register for duty unless your making over 2500L a year of fuel.

So obviously this is good news.....

But some peole tell me to just filter it and add it 50:50 to diesel, and some say to go through the whole ethanol process to covert it to biodiesel.

It's going into a 2.5TD so hopefully the injectors should take it, but advice whoud be apreciated.

it's not always the injectors that suffer, the pump can go belly up too, if the internal seals can't take it. That's the way with transits, I am sure somebody on here can put you straight on that.

the 2500 L limit was put in places years ago - and this topic has been done to death on here many many times

no offence - but try doing a fecking search

Did do a search, but most threads never came to a firm conclusion as to what wrecked the engine the least.

i imagine bio-diesel is too expensive to produce, between the effort and the minimal saving (if any) you will soon be back at the pump.

if you filter the oil correctly it should mix with diesel or work fine on its own too,

you should be able to use 100% veg oil in the summer, but at winter temps it would practically solidify in the fuel lines this is when it needs to be mixed with diesel
(prob 30% vegoil)

have you looked up elsbett conversion kits? pricey but they seem to be the business!

Some say veg oil will destroy rubber seals and that they should be replaced with a certain type (sorry cant remember the name) i get back to you with it,

i didnt want to go to the bother of setting up a whole system to find my car wouldn't run on it so i just bought a few big bottles in tesco and tried that instead, my golf ran fine on it for a week! maybe try this first? still havent gotten around to building a filtering system of my own though!!

Well thankfully the oil i got had been sitting in a large oil drum for days so most of the sediment had settled to the bottom, and I decanted 10L off the top, filtered it a few times, and then mixed it with another 10L of diesel, and added it to the 5-10L in the fuel tank.

I've been driving around all day without a problem, using fuel at 50p/L nice

Looked into the whole biofuel, mixing with ethanol etc. - it looks like i'm going to need a lot of yeast, sugar and a lot of heat to do the fermetation, and then more heat to do the esterification, so thats out the question

yeah i think for peronal use there's just too much work involved for what you save.

there's a video on youtube you should look it up, "Waste Vegetable oil filtering / dewatering v2.0"

this guy has one of the tidiest home systems iv seen. worth a look

Trouble is what with the price of diesel on the up again this whole veg oil subject is gonna have to be dragged out and repeated over again. Search, people, search for pete's sake.

Right I have done this before and I am going to copy it for those of you who cannot search.

I have been at this now for about 5 years (100,000miles combined on several engines) so I have long term experience which I will base a lot of this on, on top of that some simple chemistry and physics.

It will cost about 15ppl to make, so if the oil is free making it into bio diesel is not a cost problem, it’s a TIME problem, I used to make 80 litres at a go, would take an entire Saturday morning and the rest. Simple enough to make, big drum of methanol, big bucket of NaOH (Lye) and away you go.

I have run it in 2.5NA (which in terms of what the fuel is doing is the exact same as the 2.5TD) in the past and currently 300tdi Disco and 90.

I gave up making bio diesel after my sources dried up a bit and it was taking too long to go round all the take aways and pubs to get it all. I now get a small quantity now and again from various places and stick it straight into the tank after letting it settle out for a month or so. I take the top 18litres off and pour the bottom 2 into a big bucket, when I have enough I will deal with it.

The Bosch injection pump (200 and 300tdi) is a much more robust pump and deals with waste veg oil (WVO) without a problem. However running it on high percentages can lead to fuel starvation issues as the veg oil viscosity is much higher than diesel and it struggles to get through the fuel filter quickly. This is where these heater kits come in, however for the warmer months it's easier and cheaper just to make sure there is some diesel in with it. In the winter a drop in temp can have the LR struggling to do 15mph as the fuel is moving so slowly, this can also damage the lift pump and it means the injection pump is not getting lubricated well. I had this happen back in December and I didn't even have much veg in the tank the following morning was not that cold and it ran no problem. In the winter I don’t use much veg, maybe a gallon or two per tank.

Bio diesel however is much better for all year running as it is chemically different to veg oil once the transesterification process has been done as it removes the fats from the oil and splits the veg oil molecules in half, therefore making the viscosity of bio diesel much more like that of DERV. Bio diesel actually provides BETTER lubrication to the injection pumps (this new super low sulphur fuel is a killer for injection pumps) but it does cause - veg oil too - the seals to go hard and then they leak; older rubber fuel pipes can also be damaged. Newer polymer seals can resist the bio diesel/VO. So if you do want to use these fuels long term, be prepared for injection pump o ring replacements etc..

The Lucas CAV didn’t much like the veg oil in the winter at all, the pump didn’t cope well with it and even in the summer you didn’t want to have too high a percentage of veg. The Lucas filter system uses a smaller area filter which means even more issues getting fuel through quickly. Like the Bosch the Lucas injection pump does work fine with bio diesel although I would say not to use 100% in the winter because of the type of engine it can make starting extremely difficult even with a good 20/25second glow, this is because the cetane rating (A rating for fuel oil that indicates how easily the fuel ignites and how fast it will burn.) is much lower, so in other words it won’t ignite just so easily. This can be fixed by adding a bit of kero or petrol to keep it all above board in the tax man’s eyes.

If you want to get into using large quantities of veg oil it would be worth looking into making a filtering system so that at least you know it is clean and ready for use, but this will not deal with the viscosity issues.

In conclusion I would say, bio diesel is MUCH better in all respects to SVO/WVO, it deals with the viscosity issue, however do remember it will need the cetane level boosted particularly for older engines to aid in cold starting.

For those of you with TD5’s, I have no experience myself but I do know that it works well on both veg and bio but again make sure there is plenty of diesel in there in the winter, exact percentages I am not sure on but will find out and post it.

Thanks - as stated before did do a search but this did not come up

Chucking it down with rain and very cold this morning, and started first go, a lot quicker than with plain diesel in! but did need me to hold the glow plugs on for a few seconds after it got going to help it - running 66% diesel to 33% WVO

Made a huge mess of the garage last night filtering it, so need to get some plastic pipe and connectors to make a filtering system up that is closed so it does not go everywhere.

Guess mixing the diesel in the tank is not a problem as it soon gets sloshed around


Likely going to have a vast amount of this oil, so if anybody in Se London area is after some cheep WVO (sorry you will have to do filtering) we may be able to come to a deal, but supply is on an adhoc basis as it is coming from a university they use a lot more during term time

had a p38 running on straight bio no probs

found its machine was looking into getting when i have the money
Bio Fuel Processor - Biobot

james where in se london are you maybe able to help out. im in walthamstow
pm me