Cooking Oil

Sirus said:

Sensitive soul int he....must be the feminine side of him

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Sirus said:

Told yer Buster....he's charging now

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Sirus said:

See what political correctness has done....snigger

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odenne said:

you buggers, you int convertin me with yer legendary ways Buster!!! That only works on the Strapadictomists!

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robs said:

Nobody above is helping you here so i found this on another forum for you.

How to run your diesel Land Rover on Vegetable oil

Before I get into the technical bit, I ought to say that running any road vehicle on vegetable oil is illegal, UNLESS you declare it. You can do this by obtaining form EX103 from HM customs and excise and registering yourself as a bio-diesel producer, even if by ‘producing biodiesel’ you are opening a bottle and pouring it into the tank. The tax rate is 27.1 p/l for vegetable oil and biodiesel.

Why?

Why do it? Because taxed waste oil for use in a road vehicle will cost you 27.1 p/l as opposed to over 80 p/l for diesel, and because it is very good for the environment. Its a carbon neutral fuel meaning that the exhaust Co2 produced was absorbed by the plants that made the oil in the first place. The particulate emissions are also decreased dramatically.

A bit of background:

Vegetable oil is chemically very similar to diesel. The first Diesel engine (invented by Rudolf Diesel) was demonstrated for the first time running on peanut oil. It was meant to run on whatever oil was produced at the farm. Needless to say the oil industry got their hands on it as it ran very well on ‘heavy oil’ which was an annoying by-product of the petrol distillation process.

The problem:

The major issue with running vegetable oil through a diesel engine is the viscosity. It is many times thicker than diesel, especially at low temperatures. There are many ways to overcome this. One is to change the chemical composition of the oil by transesterifying it, and producing proper bio-diesel. I wont deal with this here, but there are many sites on the internet that detail how to do it.

The solution:

The other major way is to simply heat it up. This is done most easily by attaching a heat exchanger to the coolant lines to heat up the fuel as it passes through. This is the underlying principle – every conversion kit is based on this. However, there are a few other problems you need to be aware of:

Lucas injection pumps are notorious for failing on vegetable oil. These are fitted to 2.25, 2.5 and 2.5 TD engines. The reason is that they rely on the fuel for lubrication, and because vegetable oil is so much thicker, it cannot seep around the rotor head and so deprives it of lubrication. Eventually it seizes and normally snaps the drive shaft or strips the timing belt. Either way, it’s expensive.

The way to overcome this is to fit a second fuel tank. This way you can start or stop on diesel and using changeover valves, change to veg when the the engine and fuel is hot enough (normally when the engine is up to normal operating temperature).

You can also loop the return – take the return to tank line from the injection pump and plumb it into the heated fuel line. Not only does this help the fuel stay hot enough, it also reduces the stress on the injection pump. If you are really cunning, you can fit a second heat exchanger in the loop to ensure everything stays nice and hot.

In fact most DIY kits consist of a heated fuel filter from a Peugeot with the thermostat removed being used as the first heat exchanger. A second is then fitted in the return loop. Some commercial kits however use a modified glow plug arrangement to heat the fuel electrically. However – it has been shown that in a draughty engine compartment (such as your land rover) that they have very little effect on heating the fuel. Use a heat exchanger!

For 2.25 2.5 and 2.5 TD engines, this is all you need to do. Your engine will run as before, just the exhaust will smell like a BBQ.

TDi owners however, have a slightly different concern:

Both the 200 and 300 TDi are fitted with the Bosch injection pump. These have proven to be very robust on vegetable oil. However, the engine itself is the problem. As they are direct injection, it is possible for the vegetable oil to not completely combust in the cylinder when cold. It can then condense onto the cylinder walls, get under the piston rings causing coking and find its way into the sump, where it polymerises the sump oil. Not very nice!

The way around this is to use a twin tank system as outlined above. This enables the engine to heat up on diesel and then when it is warm enough you can change over to veg. Again, heat exchangers and a looped return all help.

If you have a Td4 or Td5 however, a twin tank might work….I have not heard of any Td4 or Td5 owners using vegetable oil, however a twin tank should work in theory. Anyone fancy trying it?

Some cars (not any Land Rover) will go on vegetable oil from cold with no modification. Generally any engine with a Bosch VE injection pump, or inline injection pump that is In-direct injection will be fine if you tip the fuel straight in the tank. It might go a little better if you loop the return and add a heat exchanger though.

I have converted a 2.25, and 2.5 TD and a 300 TDi, and all go very well on veg. Here are some photos of my converted SIII 2.25 and 300TDi.

Supplies:

So that’s the technical bit over with. You might now be wondering where to get your oil. It works out slightly cheaper than diesel to go to the supermarket (Tesco’s own in 3l bottles is the cheapest at the moment at 44 p/l) and then tax it giving you a total of 71.1 p/l

However, the real saving occurs when you use waste oil. If you can find a restaurant that can give you their waste oil, then all you need to do is to let it settle in drums for about a week so all the solid animal fats, chips, fish heads etc sink to the bottom and then decant the good liquid oil from the top. This can then be pumped through a filter and put into your tank. This brings the cost of the fuel down to 27.1 p/l


Kits:

Hopefully I might have convinced you to convert your gas guzzler to vegetable oil. The cheapest way to do it is to make everything yourself. However, I would recommend for simplicities sake to buy a kit. Smartveg UK - advanced diesel to veg oil car conversion system is the place to go for a kit. This kit is the best kit around – it is computer controlled and switches over to vegetable oil automatically when the fuel has reached a high enough temperature. I know of a couple of 300 TDi owners with this installed. DieselVeg Home - Diesel to Vegetable Oil engine conversions will sell you a cheaper kit, but it relies on the judgement of the driver for when the oil is hot enough – and it uses an electric glow plug type assembly in the looped return

Much more information is available on the net about running on oil and making bio-diesel. vegetableoildiesel.co.uk - Powered by XMB is a good starting forum for all aspects of this.

Other fuels:

It is possible to use fuels that are solid at room temperature as a fuel. I have been experimenting with this in my 2.25 SIII. I have a copper pipe running through my second fuel tank carrying hot engine coolant. This then feeds into a heated fuel filter and through a heat exchanger before making it to the engine compartment where it passes through a second heat exchanger in a looped return.

So far it has run very well. I have been using the solid fat that settles out from used oil. The liquid oil goes into my 300TDi. Solid fat has about 5% extra energy above diesel, so it is a very easy way to get a little more power! Unfortunately this still isn’t quite enough for me, so I have a 3.5 V8 lined up to go in the front

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VEGGIELANDEE said:

What a complete and utter nutter

Baco foil is fer fkin cookin.

Vege oil-bacofoil next yerl be puttin fkin carrots in the headlamps soze yer can see at night

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nickh75 said:

oooooohhhhh! never thought of that

i'll try it an let ya no how i get on

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