My Car Runs on Veg Oil
require that small producers (home users are just very small producers)
register and submit monthly returns. Now, if you use less than 2500
litres of oil a year, you don't have to register or pay duty! Here's the
press release from the Revenue; the rules themselves are being rewritten
and I'll update when they have settled.
Result. Now I just need to find some wholesale oil. Still 80ish p a
litre yay
Info: http://www.ravenfamily.org/andyg/vegoil.htm
,#car,#green,#veg oil,#vegetable
Euphro says:
That looks amazing. I thought that you had to add something to the oil and run it through some filters before sticking it in your car, but obviously not :D
Euphro says:
The link above, which I've just made live, suggests that a ratio two parts diesel to one part vegetable oil is optimum for the UK winter. That still adds up to about twenty litres for the average tank, though :D
kyoob says:
hotdog: yes, yes i did get strange looks and it was ace :) i'd love someone to come over and ask - spread the word. Imagine if every diesel owner in the country used 25% veg oil instead.
Euphro: thanks for making link live, i'm running at 10% for one tank, see how it goes, but saving 20p a litre just buying from tesco is great. the cheaper i can get oil and the braver i get with the percentages the more i save - yay!
silar31 says:
That is so friggin cool! Alas, I live in a state where you can't have a diesel car :(.
billion says:
that's pretty wicked you know.
hey, for an even better use of resources why don't you throw some frozen chips in the tank as well and have them done nice and crispy by the time you get back from work?
James says:
Have you tried used veg oil? I'm sure I read somewhere that you can use 2nd hand oil that's been used to cook food? Or maybe that's where the filtering Euphro mentioned comes in?
Imagine going to the local chippy for your fish and chips and refuelling your car with used oil at the same time!
I know more and more bands are using bio-fuel to power their gas-guzzling tour buses, it all helps!
kyoob says:
James: Yes you can use used oil, though for engines it needs to be filtered to .25 micron, and be dry (no water in it from the food cooked) I may move onto that soon, this was just another first step to greener living.
Salome says:
Silar, I didn't know there were places where you can't have a diesel car. Do you know what the reason is? I'd love to know.
Sir Findo Gask says:
Salome. I would guess at temperature, if it gets too cold the diesel goes thick and won't move..
I could be wrong..
*goes of to check the manual for the Merc and the Nissan
kyoob says:
SFG: You should be fine with the Nissan, providing it's diesel. That's what ours is.
kyoob says:
i think owning and refuelling a car is fine in all states, but some are banned from selling them for environmental reasons. Especially the 3 litre merc for some reasons.
silar31 says:
I live in Massachusetts, and MA adopted CA's EV (emission value) standards in 2004. You haven't been able to register a diesel car here since.
anonymous says:
Impressed
Joe says:
ok so if it's 80p a litre, how much cheaper than diesel is that? (I never look at diesel prices, I have to use super unleaded in mine...can't even use regular unleaded)
kyoob says:
well i actually found the single litre bottles are about 56p confusingly, 3 litre bottles were 2 quid. pump prices for diesel are about £1.07 here.
mat says:
The important thing isn't the cost though, it's the carbon-neutralness of the vegetable oil.
If you can get used oil off chippies and restaurants and the like for free, you can filter, then process it into biodiesel at a cost of around 25p/litre. If you produce less than 2500 litres a year (or something like that), you don't even have to pay duty any more. Carbon neutral fuel at less than a quarter of the price of the fossil sunlight version.
Joe says:
I don't get how it's carbon neutral though, surely it still emits carbon di/mon-oxide/ozone when it burns? or is it really a zero emission fuel? (i'm not a chemist, I only studied it to A-level)
I can understand how it is better for the environment, it isn't a fossil fuel, and it is renewable....which can only be a good thing.
mat says:
It's carbon neutral 'cos it's carbon comes from a temporally local source. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that this oil is made from rapeseed. Rapeseed is grown, as it grows it "captures" atmospheric C02 and locks it up in the plant itself, then it's harvested same year and turned into oil, which Kyoob then burns. The CO2* in the oil is then released back into the atmosphere - where it came from only a few months ago. The net atmospheric carbon change is therefore zero.
It's a bit easier to understand if you think of the other case - that of fossil fuel. Fossil oil is from plants, just like non-fossil oil, but the difference is that the ancient plants locked carbon out of the atmosphere X million years ago, and when we burn it now, we are adding "new" carbon to the atmosphere which had previously been locked underground.
At least that's how I understand it. I'm no chemist either.
* well, the C used in the plant combines with some nearby O to form CO2, as it burns. In the plant, the carbon is used in other compounds.
beth says:
yeah i thought that was a` good splanation to my vague understandings from um. sitting in mud and listening to lectures at glastonbury.
