by Michael Daecher
With gas prices hovering around $3 per gallon, many people are wondering how they can save money at the pump. Dan Fisherman, computer programmer and teacher of math and science at the Randolph School, has found an interesting way to get around that. He converted his car engine to run o
n vegetable oil instead traditional gasoline. That’s right, the next time you eat at the Sukhothai Restaurant, the waste oil used to cook your food will soon be used to power Dan’s 1982 Mercedes-Benz.
Using vegetable oil to power diesel engines is not a new idea. In fact, at the 1900 World’s Fair, Rudolph Diesel used peanut oil when demonstrating his new engine, and encouraged farmers to grow their own energy source. Now “grease cars”, vehicles that have been converted to run on straight vegetable oil, are becoming more common.
Dan, his wife Jenn Clapp, 9-year-old son Noam, and 5-year-old daughter Eva moved to the Mid Hudson Valley in 2002. After a year living in Wappingers, they moved to Beacon, where they currently reside. Originally from New York City, Dan is not a gear head. In fact, he knew very little about car engines before he decided to embark on this adventure. I recently sat down with him to talk about how it all works.
Why are you running your car on vegetable oil?
It’s free. And the emissions are far less than conventional gas or diesel.
What does a vegetable oil-powered engine actually emit?
Well, there are no carcinogens, which is different than petro diesel or petro gas. And for all emissions other than nitrous oxide, the emissions are significantly less. With nitrous oxide, some studies show it’s greater with vegetable oil, and some studies say it’s less than regular oil. Others say it depends on the kind of engine you have, like the new TDI engines.
What’s a TDI?
It stands for Turbo Direct Injection. It’s the new kind of diesel engine you find on a new Volkswagen, like the Jetta or the Golf. You’ll get lower emissions for nitrous oxide, which is a component of smog. With the old Mercedes you get higher emissions of nitrous oxide, but everything else is significantly lower.
How long have you been doing this?
I got the car in June of last year and started running on vegetable oil in September.
What kind of car are you using?
It’s a 1982 Mercedes-Benz 300CD Turbo Diesel. You can go on eBay or Craig’s List and find one. The only people that want them are the bio-dieselers or the vegetable oil people.
Why did you decide to use that model?
First of all you can only use vegetable oil on diesel cars. And the Mercedes is the classic conversion car. It has what’s called an indirect injection system. There are two kinds of fuel injection systems on diesels, the direct injection and the indirect injection. The indirect injectors are the ones that are less problematic with vegetable oil. I don’t know what the problem is with the TDI’s, but they end up having more problems with vegetable oil.
If you’re looking to convert to vegetable oil, the diesel Mercedes is perfect. I’m not much of car guy, but I love this car.
So you made the decision to change the fuel system on your main mode of transportation without knowing much about cars?
Right. I had no experience with cars. I’m a New York City kid. (laughs) We’ve always wanted to be a one car family, and when we lived in San Francisco we could do it, because of public transportation. Here it was almost impossible. One of us would be homebound if the other took the kids on a school trip. But the only way I was going to feel decent about getting a second car was if I was going to do something like this. I knew right away – it wasn’t a choice.
You could have gotten a hybrid car. Why vegetable oil?
Well, I didn’t want to get a new car, so that kind of nixed the hybrid idea. Though I think hybrid cars are great. I wanted to get something relatively cheap – this car cost $4000, plus another $1500 in work. I’m the third owner of the car and the second owner didn’t take great care of it. So I had to put in the $1500 to take care of some rust and other problems.
But it’s an incredibly well made car. You just get in and shut the door, and ‘kchunk’, it just feels solid.
How much did it cost to convert the car to vegetable oil?
It cost $1700 for the conversion. My mechanic across the river did the job. It was the first time he’d done something like this, and he said it was a bitch. (laughs)
He’d never done this before?
No. There are guys who are certified. There’s a guy – Wally’s Super Service in Mayopac – he’s certified by the company I bought the kit from, Greasecar. But the company says that anyone can do it, and they include the instructions. They say it should take 10-12 hours, but I don’t have that kind of time. And for me it would probably take more…
Double that, right?
Right. So I brought it to my mechanic and he agreed to do it.
He’s a Mercedes mechanic?
He’s an import guy, very knowledgeable. Import Auto in Marlboro. It took him more than 12 hours to do, and he has all the tools he needs. (laughs)
Did you buy the Greasecar stuff yourself and give it to your mechanic to install?
Yeah, it comes as a kit with instructions. There’s also a company called Greasel and another called Frybrid that do the kits.
How did you know you’d always have a supply of vegetable oil before you did this?
I didn’t know. But I knew that, in a worst case scenario, the U.S. government is mandating diesel fuel be ultra-low emissions by the end of the year. Traditional diesel fuel is much dirtier than regular gas, so it was important to me know the standards were getting tougher. I knew I wasn’t going to be that far off from regular gas even if the vegetable oil didn’t work out.
Around here no one was running their car on vegetable oil. So I knew I’d be able to find an Asian restaurant that would be able to offer me some kind of oil. They have to pay to have it removed anyway.
How did you find a good source?
I just went to the different restaurants. I read online that there’s a certain procedure to test if the oil is good for your use. There’s some oil that’s not a good idea to use, like the stuff from McDonald’s or Wendy’s. Stuff that is used to cook meat or isn’t changed very often. But the Asian restaurants are very good about that.
How do you know if the oil is good to use?
Ideally, it should be clear. It doesn’t matter what color it is, but if it’s clear you take it. If it’s not clear, you let it sit, and it should settle out. If it stays turgid then you shouldn’t take it. If it’s congealed or if there’s water in it, you should leave it alone. But once you know what you’re looking for, it’a piece of cake.
The test I use is putting it through two filters first. If it gets through those filters, I’ll take it. If it gets clogged and doesn’t make it through on the first try, I won’t take it.
How much vegetable oil do you use in a typical week?
In the winter, not that much, because it takes a while longer to heat up. In the summer, you use more. If you take a 3 hour trip, you’ll empty your tank.
What kind of mileage do you get?
I get about 30 mpg on the highway, same as diesel, and city it’s not so good, about 18 mpg.
So it’s not necessarily the mileage that makes this a good thing –
No, but it’s clean, it’s free, and it’s re-using something that has to get disposed of anyway. There are no production negatives whatsoever. There’s a certain amount of energy that goes into producing vegetable oil in the first place, but this is waste oil, so it requires no energy to produce. Its primary purpose is to use in a restaurant.
How does it work?
The vegetable oil tank sits in the wheel well in the trunk of the car. The tank is plumbed with radiator coils that carry radiator coolant through the length of tube to heat the vegetable oil. The tube runs from the front of the engine to the back of the car.
You start the car on diesel and there’s a 3-way switch: a feed from diesel, a feed from the vegetable oil, and a return setting called purge. When you start the car on diesel it takes anywhere from 2-5 minutes to heat up the vegetable oil, depending on how cold the weather is. Then you flip the switch to vegetable oil. There are two gauges on the dashboard, one for diesel, one for vegetable oil, so you know how much fuel you have left.
As far as the engine goes, the keys are the two solenoids, which are really just switches. These control whether the engine is getting diesel or vegetable oil when you flip the switch in the cabin. When you’re running on vegetable oil, the oil has to run through this filter, which you change every 3500 miles, or any time you feel a power loss when you switch to vegetable oil. At that point you can switch right back to diesel until you can replace the filter. But it’s obvious when the power starts to drain because normally running on vegetable oil gives you the same power as running on diesel.
You can flip the switch from diesel to vegetable oil on the fly?
On the fly. You don’t feel a thing. All you see is that the light is on.
And you don’t sacrifice any power using vegetable oil?
No, the Mercedes before the 300 was the 240, and that didn’t have the turbocharger. Once they put in the turbocharger, to approximate the power of a regular gas engine, they had what is arguably the best engine ever made for passenger vehicles.
Can you show me how you get the oil ready to use?
Of course. [walking down to his basement] Like I said, I get my raw oil from local restaurants, Sukhothai and Ming Moon. I pour the raw oil into a 5-gallon bucket through two filters, the top one is 400 microns and the bottom one is 100 microns. (These are 5-gallon pail filters, which you can get at B100supply.com. They sell all biodiesel equipment.)
Once the oil is pre-filtered to 100 microns, you take the 5 gallon bucket and pour it into the 55-gallon drum through what they call the “bung hole.” It’s supposed to sit in the 55-gallon tank for 2 weeks to let all the particulant gunk settle. But I usually don’t have that kind of time.
I use this hand pump to pump the oil through a 20 micron filter and eventually through a 1 micron filter into the final holding tank. (The engine won’t take anything 5 microns or larger.) Then it’s ready to go. That’s really all there is to it, making sure the oil is filtered well enough so the engine can burn it.
So if a lot of people suddenly started doing this, what would you do for your oil?
Well, I’ll tell you a story about that. In Northampton, Massachusetts, they have a lot of people doing this. Northampton is only 5 minutes away from Florence, which is where the Greasecar company is located. So there are all these greasecar people driving around, and the local Chinese restaurant requires you to do work if you want the contract to pick up their waste oil. People have to go and flyer cars for this Chinese restaurant to get their oil! (laughs)
What’s the furthest you’ve driven on vegetable oil?
We drove to Boston and back and almost made it with 5 extra gallons. If we’d brought 10 extra gallons we would have made it easily.
When you run out of vegetable oil you just switch it back to diesel?
Yup, it’s seamless. So if the ‘big one’ hits, and there’s a disaster where we have to get out of town, we have two tanks. We’ll fill up one with diesel and the other with vegetable oil, and we’ll be able to drive forever.
Amazing.
It is. I love talking about it. I love prosyletizing about it. It’s free, it’s clean, and it’s not hard to do.
On Saturday, July 8, at 10:00 am Dan will be hosting a workshop on how to use alternative energy sources around the home, such as biodiesel, vegetable oil, and solar power. For more details, call Lisa Jessup at 845-831-6070.
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What’s the difference between biodiesel and vegetable oil?
According to Wikipedia, “Biodiesel refers to a diesel-equivalent, processed fuel derived from biological sources. Though derived from biological sources, it is a processed fuel that can be readily used in diesel engined vehicles, which distinguishes biodiesel from the straight vegetable oils (SVO) or waste vegetable oils (WVO) used as fuels in some modified diesel vehicles.”
Want to learn more?
Greasecar
http://www.greasecar.com/
Greasel
http://www.greasel.com
Frybrid
http://www.frybrid.com
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