Biodiesel Fuel From Waste Vegetable Oil (WVO)

Biodiesel is a fuel made from fresh straight vegetable oil (SVO) or filtered waste vegetable oil (WVO) through a process I can't begin to explain thoroughly. Fortunately for you there are many websites dedicated to that very thing (see bottom of the page for links to a few good ones). In short, WVO (that you may be able to collect from local restaurants) is run through a relatively simple filtering and chemical process which refines the oil so it can be used to operate a diesel engine exactly like petro-diesel, without any engine modifications or other further fuel preparations. I started thinking about using this idea when I saw a news blurb about a "Veggie Van" on an off-grid site. I wouldn't mind having a large, diesel backup generator someday, and my next truck is definitely going to be a diesel, which is why this idea is interesting to me. I had no idea that diesel engines were originally designed to burn vegetable oil back in the mid 1800's. Since researching this a little, I've read that you can actually run today's diesel engines on SVO or filtered WVO without any further processing. However, I guess it doesn't burn very clean without processing, so it's a good idea to warm the engine up with petro-diesel as well as warming the vegetable oil tank to make it flow more smoothly. It's also a good plan to run petro-diesel for several minutes before shutting down to clean the "coked" deposits out of the cylinders. There's much more to it than what wrote here, so read up on SVO and WVO before putting it in your tank.

Cost:  Pictured below is a manufactured processing system for making biodiesel at home without all the measuring and mixing. It runs about $3000, and they have the chemicals pre-packaged for sale to make it even easier. I wouldn't buy one of these things, but not everyone is a do-it-yourself sort.  It's impossible for me to calcuate the costs of making bio-diesel at home, whether manually or with a home-brew kit, but if I start doing it, I'll update this page with actual costs and any hassles.

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