Farmer Converts Diesel Truck to Run on Waste Vegetable Oil

hey everyone matt here from exploring alternatives we recently did a video about jade a farmer who converted a school bus into a beautiful motorhome what we didn't really talk about in that video is that he also converted that school bus and his small truck to run on vegetable oil vegetable oil that he gets for free from restaurants all over he did the conversion himself and what's really interesting is that any vehicle that runs on diesel fuel can be converted to run on vegetable oil which is really awesome so keep watching this video to find out how it all works sometimes you know I have people pull up beside me or behind me if I go to a restaurant and I'm on the road and they run up think'll what are you burning you smell like french fries so this is the vegetable oil tank so it's basically just another fuel tank they're separate so you still have your full diesel system your car your truck comes from and then you have this and in a nutshell the system is this simple it's this tank and the line from this tank joins the line from the diesel tank and you put a valve there you have a switch so you can go back yeah and I'll show you the switch so you start on diesel you hit the button you turn to this tank and then before you park you hit the button and it goes back to the diesel tank once the system is installed this right now this setting is on diesel fuel this is the tank this is the gauge for the vegetable oil so once you're started you just click the button and automatically you're on vegetable oil when you come to a stop you just hit go back to here you're on diesel fuel and when you want to purge run diesel fuel through the whole lines back to the vegetable oil tank which is what you would do in winter you just hit this button so super easy operation so the diesel fuel comes in to this filter this is what was on the truck to start the vegetable oil comes into this filter here from here both both of these sources diesel and grease run into this valve right here so when you hit that button it either takes from diesel or takes from vegetable oil source from here it goes straight into the injector system burns in your motor and then the other diesel motors don't use all of the fuel that the injectors supply so a little bit is always returned back to your tank right so when I'm running on diesel the extra diesel goes back to the diesel tank when I'm running on vegetable oil the extra fuel goes back to the vegetable oil tank this is a real simple system I like simple systems easier to fix you can get more complicated you can get sensors you can have temperature sensors on your vegetable oil you can get sensors that tell you how close to clogged up your your filters are you can get more complicated but if you wanted a simple system this is as simple as it gets super easy when I was doing this as a farmer and delivering vegetables it was cutting my fuel bill down by 300 bucks you know so as a small-scale farmer that's big difference to me right so use cooking oil use it straight the big deal is not to use it from pubs and places I deep-fry animal you know chicken wings and stuff like that because animal fat doesn't burn okay it clogs up the filters it doesn't have the same power so you want to always use canola or sunflower oil from places that the best is like a and W high-end restaurants so that's the main thing with finding your vegetable oil and the other is just building it properly so I do it just through a hand pump diesel filters it's just basically a regular diesel fuel filter it's only this big with a little bit of metal attachment and then some hoses right and then a little hand pump so I have taken right from Ag resource through the hand pump right into this tank here and that's kind of the manual way to do it they now have a filter built power filter built specifically for vegetable oil and you can literally take one end and stick it in your source so you go behind the restaurant stick it in the barrel and then the power filter runs off your car battery and you can stick the other end right in your diesel your your grease tank and it fills it up Wow so there's no intermediate so right now I'm packing barrels around so I filtered into the barrel and then from there I put it into the truck or the van or the bus right no need to do that anymore yes you can you know it cost 600 bucks but but it's well worth it I've only had a couple people turned me down and one person looked at me like I was going to do something really weird with the oil and the other person just didn't really and was being really cautious but otherwise I've usually had managers come out and get excited and say I've heard of this I've never seen it done can I help right and so as I've traveled around BC number two actually have certain towns that I pretty much know the people and in different towns and I just stopped with the same sources and oh you're back oh yeah let's go man and we go back and we have fun pumping the oil into my tanks and have you ever travelled around and had to store oil in your vehicle while you were travelling just as kind of a backup yeah in my bus I extended the back bumper so I could carry 245 gallon barrels and then on this truck here I have a 45 gallon barrel that I sit in the back so potential and I welded to 45 gallon barrels together as my fuel tank so potentially if I was fully loaded I'd have like five full barrels of oil which is a lot of weight right yeah I was thinking you know what if I'm Way back in the boonies for a few months and I can't get our I'm way out in the you know northern BC and I'm not close to any sources but in the last three years I've realized it is so easy to get there's a there's a deep fire anywhere all the time right yeah so I know I know I don't have to pack that much oil around so especially now I'm gonna buy that new power pump and I'll just have my two barrels underneath my regular tank and that'll be it yeah I've never even come close to running out the first truck I did was a Dodge 4x4 truck my farm truck so I bought a kit from grease car it took me six hours to install a complete from start to finish never had a problem with it so if you're stationary it's super easy if you're on the road then you then you know I've been traveling with extra vegetable oil but if you're like situated one spa like when you're in just one it's so easy to do yeah yeah you can stockpile the stuff you can get a little co-op going a few people doing it share the expense of that power pump and an agree station you know and have fun doing it yeah it burns a bit cleaner than diesel but there's still a carbon footprint there yeah but the big deal for me is its recycled yeah it's free and it feels better member

Channel: Exploring Alternatives

Views: 57,145

Rating: 4.9506578 out of 5

Keywords: converting diesel to vegetable oil, vegetable oil powered rv, vegetable oil powered motorhome, veggie oil conversion, veggie oil diesel, biodiesel, van life, green power, fuel efficiency, sustainable fuel, exploring alternatives, alternative fuel, eco friendly living, fuel efficient rv, fuel saving devices, fuel saving tips, fuel saving, veggie oil car, vegetable oil diesel, vegetable oil car

Id: b10aXJU1EcQ

Length: 6min 36sec (396 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 16 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/not_whiney]

Since the original design of the Otto cycle diesel was supposed to run on vegetable oil this is not too far of a stretch.

Lets get real these conversions have gone on since the early 1970s pretty regularly. It is not new and exciting. It actually dates to the invention of the entire concept in the late 1800s. Any diesel can run on vegetable oil, the limiting factor is the injector system fro fuel. The reality is that a modern injector system optimized for the viscosity of diesel is much more efficient and can get more power with more efficiency that an older system that can start and run on pure vegetable oil. Really what would be nice is if made a point of recycling ALL of the used oil around and turned it into bio-diesel instead of the small fraction that gets turned in to bio-diesel.

Cool, yep, but earth shaking? Not really. You can also run just about any non-computer gas engine off of wood, coal, natural gas etc. Also not new tech. But then again you could also design a computer that will handle the different fuels. Here is the thing, can we run all our cars off vegetable oil? Can we convert our petro-based system to vegetable based? Maybe, but it still is burning something to get from place to place. It is less polluting than fossil, but still polluting. It is less carbon in the atmosphere that petro- but then again it still is cycling carbon from bound to not bound in the atmosphere. So at best is carbon neutral.

[u/iamajs]

I wish he would have went into the reasoning behind needing to switch back and forth from diesel when starting/stopping. Anyone know why you have to start the engine on diesel?

[u/bikemandan]

In my area its very difficult to find waste vegetable oil. Most restaurants have contracts with haulers that typically take it to one large refinery where they make biodiesel. I did this in a Mercedes 240D 8 years ago and even then it was tricky to find an oil source

[u/exploringalternative]

Watch this video to learn how B.C. farmer, Jade, converted his diesel school bus motorhome/RV and his pickup truck to run on vegetable oil.

Converting a diesel engine to run on veggie oil is a creative way to use free & recycled fuel from restaurant deep fryers instead of filling up at the gas station pump.

Jade used a kit from Grease Car (www.greasecar.com) for his first conversion.

[u/bigattichouse]

If using biodiesel, you have to be careful to let it sit for a while, or "wash" the diesel, as your catalyst (sodium or potassium hydroxide) is still mixed in with the diesel for quite a while... needless to say can wreck havoc on engine parts.

I've seen some studies using Deep Eutectic Solvents to wash the catalyst out... but haven't tried them.

[u/Moral_Gutpunch]

Got a non-video version?