Anybody can make biodiesel. It's simple, you can make it in your cooking area-- and it's BETTER than the petro-diesel fuel the huge oil companies sell you. Your diesel motor will run much better and last longer on your home-made fuel, and it's much cleaner-- much better for the environment and much better for health.

If you make it from used cooking oil it's not just cheap but you'll be recycling a bothersome waste product. Best of all is the GREAT feeling of liberty, independence and empowerment it will give you. Here's how to do it-- whatever you need to know.

Straight veggie oil fuel (SVO) systems can be a tidy, effective and affordable option. Unlike biodiesel, with SVO you have to customize the engine. The finest method is to fit a professional singletank SVO system with replacement injectors and glowplugs optimised for veg-oil, along with fuel heating.

With the German Elsbett single-tank SVO system for instance you can utilize petro-diesel, biodiesel or SVO, in any combination. Just launch and go, stop and turn off, like any other vehicle. Journey to Forever's Toyota TownAce van utilizes an Elsbett single-tank system. More

There are likewise two-tank SVO systems which pre-heat the oil to make it thinner. You need to start the engine on regular petroleum diesel or biodiesel in one tank and after that switch to SVO in the other tank when the veg-oil is hot enough, and change back to petro- or biodiesel before you stop the engine, or you'll coke up the injectors.

More info on straight veggie oil systems in my blog.

3. Biodiesel or SVO?

Biodiesel has some clear advantages over SVO: it works in any diesel, without any conversion or adjustments to the engine or the fuel system-- simply put it in and go. It also has better cold-weather properties than SVO (but not as good as petro-diesel-- see Using biodiesel in winter). Unlike SVO,

it's backed by numerous long-term tests in numerous countries, consisting of of miles on the road.

Biodiesel is a tidy, safe, ready-to-use, alternative fuel, whereas it's reasonable to state that lots of SVO systems are still speculative and require more development.

On the other hand, biodiesel can be more expensive, depending just how much you make, what you make it from and whether you're comparing it with brand-new oil or utilized oil (and depending upon where you live). And unlike SVO, it needs to be processed first.

But the large and quickly growing around the world band of homebrewers do not mind-- they make a supply each week or once a month and quickly get used to it. Many have been doing it for years.

Anyway you have to process SVO too, especially WVO (waste vegetable oil, used, prepared), which lots of people with SVO systems use because it's inexpensive or complimentary for the taking. With WVO food particles and impurities and water need to be gotten rid of, and it probably needs to be deacidified too. Biodieselers state, "If I'm going to need to do all that I may as well make biodiesel rather." But SVO types belittle that-- it's much less processing than making biodiesel, they say. To each his own.