I recently met a couple who moved into town. They saw my car’s “Runs on Used Cooking Oil” stickers and knocked on the door to say hello. They have a 240D (circa 1984, I think) with a two-tank Greasecar conversion.

Here are a couple of photos.

Greasecar Secondary Tank

Greasecar Conversion

The conversion looks good. Sorry for the lousy photo I took.

It was 3 years ago, at our little Earth Day celebration in North Fork, that I saw my first vegcar. I started the blog the next day with this post.

Happy Earth Day to the Earth and to all its inhabitants!

Paul Krugman responded in his NYTimes blog today to the common impression that oil prices have actually declined in real terms over the past 30+ years. He shows the following graph which certainly dispels that idea. This graph shows the price per barrel of crude oil since 1969.

Interestingly, today’s prices for a barrel of crude oil are nearly the same as the peak price seen around 1980.

For the first time ever, light, sweet crude oil topped $118 a barrel, closing on the New York Mercantile Exchange yesterday at $119.54. The higher prices are due in part to the weakening of the Dollar against most foreign currencies.

From today’s New York Times,

At the pump, the national average price of a gallon of regular gas rose 0.8 cent Tuesday to $3.511, according to a survey of stations by AAA and the Oil Price Information Service. Prices for diesel — the fuel used for the transport of most food, industrial and commercial goods — also rose overnight to a new record of $4.204 a gallon.

Gas prices are nearly 66 cents higher than last year, when prices peaked at a then-record of $3.23 in late May, and have prompted many analysts to raise their estimates of where gas is going to go.

”I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that we could get to $4,” said Antoine Halff, an analyst at Newedge USA LLC.

Other analysts are less certain. Fred Rozell, retail pricing director at the Oil Price Information Service, thinks gas prices will rise only another 10 cents to 20 cents nationally. That would mean they would peak near $4.15 a gallon in California, where prices are typically highest, and around $3.50 in New Jersey, where they’re typically lowest.

Over at the Car Talk website, Click and Clack have answered some questions on running a car on veg oil. Here is an excerpt…

What about global warming?

Using vegetable oil can help curb global warming. Unlike conventional petroleum, the carbon dioxide is part of a “closed cycle” that is reused by plants, before it’s what? Made back into fuel again! So, the only contribution of carbon dioxide is from the conventional fuel used to grow the plants that are made into vegetable oil. When that’s factored in, vegetable oil fuel results in about a 75% reduction in greenhouse gasses, compared to regular diesel.

For more on this issue, see this vegcar.net post.

If you want to subscribe to the vegcar.net blog, click on the orange subscribe button in the upper right corner of the site or this one.

With the recent upgrade of the site and conversion to Wordpress, the old feed url is no longer working. For those of you who have been subscribers to the site, you will have to re-subscribe. We are sorry for the inconvenience but hope you will keep reading (and contributing) to the blog.

–DanR

Here is a photo of a new 12 gallon tank that a friend put in the trunk of his 2002 VW Passat. This is the car that inspired me to get my vegcar back in 2005. See vegcar.net post number 1 from April 20, 2005.

Trunk Tank

Volkswagon Passat

I just upgraded the blog to Wordpress version 2.5. It is amazing how well structured, documented and constructed this platform is. There are more cool Ajaxy features now. Check it out and enjoy!

I currently have three and have had as many as five mercedes vege oil cars. Three have been 300SD’s two are 300D’s and my newest acquisition is an unbelievably cherry 240D 4cyl 4 spd manual trans creampuff. By the way, the 300SD’s and the 300D turbo diesels all share the same 5cyl power plant, no difference in these engines, none, interchangeable.

I’ve had both one tank and two tank conversions, one of the two tanks I drove 40K on veg oil and it just kept getting better.

The bogging problem can be pretty annoying and I would not attribute it as much to the model (although the sd’s are heavier and more sluggish than the smaller lighter 300D’s). I would look to the fuel screen inside the fuel tank. Since these cars are of the one tank variety, it is likely that there may be some residue in the tank that the veg oil has dislodged and it tends to settle over the screen inside the tank. Remove it and it will probably be coated with the stuff. If so, it might be a good idea to get the tank cleaned so the problem doesn’t reoccur. When this screen clogs it can restrict the flow from the tank to the injector pump and “bogging” will be the outcome. [Read more →]

My ears perked up when I saw your posts on the hard starting problems you were having especially when things started revolving around alternators and especially when TWO were found to be faulty. This can be a pretty difficult thing to truly diagnose. The obvious conclusion when the battery drains but is a good battery would be a bad alternator. But when that is replaced and symptom still exists, then another alt is put in and problems persist, it is likely there is another cause for the problem.

A faulty glow plug relay will cause the glow plugs to stay on for longer than their 2 minute cycle time or it can come on also while driving, something that you can’t tell is happening.and because glow plugs draw more amperage than the alt can put out, the battery will drain. Cold weather just exacerbates the problem. Add injection line heaters, 8 amps or more is added to the already “draining faster” electrical system. [Read more →]