In my experience, this is sad but true. There is a core of vegcar (and other alternative fueled vehicle) owners who are willing to pay a little more to help reduce their carbon footprint. Putting green (energy) ahead of green (backs), if you will. Most people, however, are motivated by price. This is why I believe that we are only going to see significant change in energy consumption in this country, when one of the following happens:

• Gasoline is back above $4 per gallon
• Alternative fuels become cheaper than gas/diesel at the pump
• The air is no longer breathable

Diesels, which are high-mileage rivals to hybrids, generated interest with VW’s announcement that it would sell a diesel Golf with real-world highway figures in excess of 50 miles a gallon, and with Mercedes’s plan to consider frugal 4-cylinder diesels in larger luxury cars sold in America.

Josh Tickell, the author of the book, “From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank”, has just released the documentary film “Fuel”. For many of us, Josh’s book was one of the first sources of information available on how to run a car on waste vegetable oil. I haven’t seen it yet but look forward to checking it out.

Check out the trailer…

This site has a very good and detailed, step-by-step process for diagnosing glow plug problems.

I recently asked a friend who collects, filters and sells wvo, about the longevity of the stuff. How long can I store wvo before it will go bad? He didn’t have a definitive answer but his response is informative on many levels.

It’s hard for me to give you a good answer on this because I have had similar experiences to yours. I have have had UNFILTERED oil sit for only a few weeks and smell just awful, but I also have never had filtered oil go bad on me. I think that because we are required to render the oil, and then we remove all the particles that a year [of shelf life] can easily be achieved if the container is air tight and it’s not sitting in direct sunlight etc.. If i was going to have oil sit for a while i would buy a diesel biocide (a chemical designed to prevent growth) and add that to the veggie oil. Our oil doesn’t really get a chance to sit for too long, but like i said I’ve never had the filtered stuff go bad. Hope that helps!

I get frequent questions about the best way to filter oil. After three years of filtering oil, I have tried many different set ups and arrived at a pretty simple setup that works well for me. Here is a short video tour of how to set up a do-it-yourself system for filtering waste vegetable oil.

Note: The clicking sounds you hear are from a woodpecker just outside the barn. I’ll try to redo this video to improve the quality.

One popular question I get is how to set up a home fueling station. Here is a short video showing my home filling station for filtered waste vegetable oil. It is powered by solely by gravity.

Note: This is a do-it-yourself project. Vegcar.net doesn’t sell any products at this time, nor do we have plans to do so in the future.

I am reposting this post from July 26, 2006…

For a long time I have wanted to determine definitively how much cleaner svo (straight vegetable oil) burns compared to diesel and compared to gasoline. In a post on the lovecraftbiofuels website forum, Stephen Blackburn posts the results from having his car smogged. Remember, in California diesel vehicles are exempt from smog inspections (brilliant idea, eh?).

The results are impressive and confirm what many of us have believed all along, namely that using vegetable oil as a fuel reduces dangerous emissions significantly, even compared to many late model gasoline powered cars.

Here are the highlights:

1. HC (Hydrocarbons) – 8 ppm (parts per million)
   • new cars are allowed 40 ppm
2. CO% (Carbon Monoxide per gallon of fuel burned): 0.03%
   • new cars are allowed 0.9%
3. CO2% (Carbon Dioxide per gal. fuel burned) 14.3
   • Average is 14-15%. NOTE: the carbon removed from the air while growing the plants is greater than that released when it is burned. Therefore, airborne carbon is reduced with svo as a fuel.

Read the post for more details. One of these days I’ll get my car smogged to see how it rates on these emission measures. If anyone else out there has had their vegcar smogged, please send me the results.

According to the BBC, a UN report cites rising demand for biofuels as a contributor to higher food prices. :

“Biofuels are the largest new source of demand for agriculture and are causing higher prices,” said Merritt Cluff, one of the authors of the report.

“We are very worried particularly about biofuel policy. US government incentives for ethanol producers are distorting the market,” he added.

Unfortunately, the people hardest hit by rising food prices are the poorest people in the world, who spend a larger share of their income on food.

This is the result many of us feared from the increased use of vegetable oils to make biodiesel and ethanol. I hope that we will see a rapid increase in non-petroleum oil production from sources that don’t compete with traditional food crops. The one that first comes to mind is algae.