stormchaser
New Member
Hi everyone, I'm new to the forum and to Land Rover ownership, I've also never owned a diesel engined car before. I thought I would share my Biodiesel saga with you all in case it helps anyone out.....could be a bit of a long one, but I'll try to cut a long story short. I filled up my 97 Disco at a local filling station selling B50 biodiesel, all well and good... 90 litres later at 99p per litre, cool I thought. Well all was OK until the temperature hit -7c one morning when I set off for work at 6am. 2 miles later the disco was limping into a layby belching blue smoke, called the AA cos I was convinced that the turbo had gone and oil was being burned, AA man said it was overfuelling and I got flat bedded to the garage. They didn't have time to look at it so I drove it out of the garage and home, not a trace of smoke at all, checked the oil...it was full, no movement of the level. Looking back I realised that the temperature had risen, but didn't know at the time. Next morning, same thing happened, this time as I was choking on blue smoke I realised that it smelt of chips and the penny dropped! I limped home, waited for the temperature to rise and did some research and found that in the USA the biofuel users only use B5 (5%) biodiesel / 95% petro diesel when the temp hits subzero! No wonder, anyway I now had 88 litres of chip fat in the tank and more cold weather on the way. Managed to put a few litres on regular diesel in and managed to run the tank down, vowed not to put any bio in until June! So this morning imagine my surprise when the disco started messing about again after 4 weeks of regular diesel going through it. Loads of blue smoke, no power, had to pull over. I noticed that the engine block was "steaming" and jumped to the conclusion that the head gasket had gone. Called my old friends from the AA again, and was relieved to find out that the "steam" was in fact smoke and that the wetness was diesel! Turns out that the Biodiesel came back to haunt me by eating away at some small rubber fuel hoses running along the top of the cylinder head, so it was pouring down the side and not getting into the cyclinders! The kind AA man changed the fuel filter for me (had a spare in the back but had been too scared to fit as the haynes manual makes a right song and dance out of the procedure) now I know how, it's easy! Anyway, now have more power than ever (revs now go above 2000 in 1st to 3rd) and no more chip pan smoke! And no more biodiesel for me, not even in June!