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by David Whiteley

Before diesel became modern slang for somebody big and robust or just hardcore, it mostly applied to vehicles that were big tough work horses. Trucks, tractor-trailers, earthmoving machinery, some German cars. But it was never that popular as fuel for conventional everyday cars, which is really a shame, because diesel could have saved the consumer lots of money.

Essentially Diesel a less refined version of gasoline, Costing the oil companies that manufacture it something like twenty five percent per gallon cheaper to manufacture desiel, although in saying that the end product itself usually costs a bit more than gasoline.

The advantage’s of using diesel is that it gets a lot better when it comes to fuel economy and produces far less pollution than the regular gasoline, which is few of many reasons why it’s very popular in the industrial sector (mining,farming etc). There’s no particular known reason why diesel was never so popular for everyday conventional vehicles, aside from the fact that diesel engines were initially designed for industrial and 4×4 vehicles and have always had that association together.

Diesel prices have risen just like gas prices have, so they haven’t become especially popular as a means to save on gas. This is compounded by the fact that most diesel vehicles that the ordinary person would use are either pick up trucks 4×4 vehicles, not especially popular for city driving, or imported foreign cars that may be hard to find.

this is Where vehicles using diesel have an advantage is that, unlike your typical everyday vehicles, they can burn a different various number of fuels, all of which fall under the general definition of diesel. Most often The one we hear about, and the one that’s become most common, is biodiesel.

As the name biodiesel might have you thinking, biodiesel is produced from organic sources. It’s has become so commercially popular that it’s become necessary to make the distinction about what kind of diesel you’re refering to.

Unfortunately, biodiesel tends to not be any cheaper than the regular stuff, so while using it might make you feel better about using a sustainable resource, it won’t do much to help out your gas bill.

Did you know that there is another type of biodiesel out there. Suprisingly you can actually put used cooking oil in your diesel car, it will run without any kind of modification to the engine. This may be surprising most of you, this is no accidental discovery as this is exactly what diesel engines were designed to do.

The diesel engine was invented by Rudolf Diesel. His objective was to create an engine that would run on vegetable oil, thus making it more affordable and giving the small farmers the opportunity to compete with those who could afford the more expensive gasoline machines.

Now this is an opportunity to save your hard earned cash. Also doing the right thing for the environment. If you have a diesel vehicle/engine, you can run it entirely on oils that your average local restaurant. this will give them the the opportunity to dispose of the old cooking oils also doing there bit for the enviroment. 99% of the time, they’ll be happy to see you take it of there hands. After all it cost them money to dispose of the used cooking oils.

It’s very much possible to run your car for free. If you’ willing to put in the work and learn more about using vegetable oil to run your car,Which, you have to admit to yourself, it is a pretty big improvement over four dollars a gallon.

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One Comment to “Run Your Car On Cooking Oil?”

  1. on 16 Jul 2008 at 12:47 pmSam

    David,

    One thing that needs some clarity, depending on how tightly you define engine, you do have to modify the fuel system to run vegoil. Pumping cold vegoil will ruin your engine. You need to warm the engine on diesel or biodiesel, then heat the vegoil entering your engine, then purge it all out at shut down so the vegoil doesn’t gell in your filters and end up entering the engine cold at start-up. This sounds worse than it is, it can all be done automatically so you don’t really have to do anything. But you do have to modify your engine in a sense to run vegoil.

    Sam

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