Veggie Car

in today's world of rising gas prices everyone seems to be looking for alternatives well one of these alternatives is much simpler than you think you can run your car on vegetable oil hi I'm chase Evans I have a 2005 Volkswagen Golf that's been converted to run on vegetable oil the reason I Drive a veggie car is because vegetable is free I get better mileage on diesel anyway that's a great hobby you heard chase correctly not only does a car get more mileage on vegetable oil than it would with gasoline but the oil is free collected from restaurants that normally would have to pay someone to dispose of it the only requirement is that your car must have a diesel engine and diesel on its own gets about 30% better mileage than gasoline so why are more people driving diesel one of the reasons is sort of cultural in that over the years I'm sure most people think of diesel as like smelly trucks and buses and stinky stuff like that and for a long time that was kind of true but inherently diesel engine gets a lot better mileage in the gasoline engine and also the modern diesels have gotten rid of the whole smoky smelly pollution aspect of it so they're just as clean as gasoline in Europe because gasoline and diesel prices have always been much higher than they have been here in the US they've always been much more pro diesel than we have been here in the state so most of the cool cars you see here you can get there and just the diesel versions diesel has been incredibly common in Europe for years right now you could even go on the European section of most car manufacturers websites such as outtie and place an order for a diesel car today this car has gone from London to Edinburgh and back with a v8 engine on one tank of fuel you might be asking yourself how can a modern diesel car run off vegetable oh well as long as you heat it up so that it gets as viscous it's very good ezal fuel it'll run on vegetable oil just fine Rudolf diesel actually invented the diesel engine in 1902 or so to run on peanut oil and things haven't changed much since in the past hundred years now there are a couple of different things there's biodiesel and there's regular fossil diesel and there's waste vegetable oil waste vegetable oil is basically waste vegetable you take it out of the frialator and you filter it so that there aren't chunks of meat in it chunks of you know whatever you filter all that stuff out of it and pour it in the car you heat it up you feed it to the engine you drive away biodiesel is sort of a hybrid of that and that you take the vegetable oil and you do a bunch of chemical reactions to it so that you end up with something that is a straight replacement for diesel you don't have to heat it up when you feed it to diesel engine you can just port in your tank and drive away and of course regular old diesel pump is just regular old diesel pump so what we have here is the vegetable that I collect from a restaurant which they would otherwise have to pay to have hauled off basically they put it back in the containers that they get it in so this container once had brand-new vegetable oil in it then they put in the used vegetable from the fryer that's what's in here what we have to do is filter that so that it's usable in the car and we have to filter out all the gunk what we have here is the nastiness that you find at the bottom of one of these before you run it through a filter all right so what's it take to turn this is the usable fuel for the car first I take these when I get back from the restaurant net poor mass of these metal drums here when I need them or I need to start the process I filter from these metal drums through this device when we get aerial filters it to one micron which means the filters are real good through this device into one of these white tanks here so once I actually need fuel for the car end up filtering from one of these white tanks through this device one more time into this final drum here which has a hand-cranked fuel pump which I use to actually fill the veggie tank in the car so what we have here is the heated vegetable oil tank it takes the place of the spare tire installed nicely in the spare tire well it basically holds all the vegetable oil and has a heating coil in it to come from the engine so I have the engine warms up it actually warms up vegetable oil as well once it hits 190 degrees I hit the switch and I'm running on vegetable okay so when I start driving for the day I'm in regular diesel and the car is cold and I'll drive until the car hits thermal operating temperature which is about 190 degrees and I know that by looking at just the stock temperature gauge on the dashboard once I hit 190 I know that by default the veggie oil which is heated by the engine is also at 190 so I can switch to vegetable oil and just keep driving I just have to make sure that when I'm going to shut the car down and I know it's going to cool off that I'd purge and purging means that I switch so that it's feeding normal diesel fuel to the engine and pushing the excess fuel and edging back to the veggie tank if you happen to shut down in veggie and the car falls off you run the risk of the veggie actually solidifying and making Fred either a rough start or you won't be able to start the car at all so you just need to be cognizant of the fact that if you're going to shut down for more than like 20 minutes half an hour and the cars been cool off you have to Kirks before you do it if it's a hot day you know the car pretty well you know it's going to stay hot you're going to run in the store for a few minutes you can leave it in veggie and up off your perch until you're done doing your errands for the day so how do you actually convert a diesel powered car to run on vegetable oil hi my name is Darryl Beck evergreen motors Greenfield Massachusetts alright so if you want to convert a vehicle to run on vegetable oil needs to be a diesel engine and it's really simple basically you have a separate fuel tank and a couple switching valves and you tie into the factory fuel system and the switching valves operate which fuel you're going to brown either diesel or vegetable oil Darrell converts a wide variety of cars ranging from old Mercedes to brand-new Volkswagens he showed us this car which has been outfitted with a grease car copilot a computer that automatically switches the fuel source of the correct temperature so our veggie cars a solution to rising gas prices future of veggie cars it's never really going to catch on because people aren't into dumpster diving and spending a lot of time dealing with this filtering vegetable oil and all the nastiness that that entails so as far as a general practice it'll always remain sort of Fringe a lot of people doing it as hobbies but that's about it in the next coming years there are going to be a lot of new diesels on the US market a lot of cool new cars but most of them aren't going to be able to have veggie kits installed because of their new emission systems for me personally I'm going to keep doing this I love doing it I love the fact that veggie oil is free that I'm paid by the mile for work I love the fact that I'm not burning fossil fuels and sort of all the issues that are attached to that and keeps me out of trouble in the weekends give me something to do in my free time Oh

Channel: shapiro127

Views: 39,612

Rating: 4.8461537 out of 5

Keywords: veggie, car, diesel, VW, gavin, shapiro, environmental, green, planet, earth, save, electricity, mileage, hybrid, prius, clarity

Id: P2Pk38Yofwo

Length: 7min 30sec (450 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 08 2009