The Trailing Spouse Plans to Fuel Car on Cooking Oil

When people in Tallahassee usally talk about “going green” they mean to make an effort to conserve fuel or reduce emissions to “save the planet.” When the Trailing Spouse talks about “going green” – he is usually referring to ways to save “green money.”

My latest adventure is that I bought an old Mercedes Benz diesel sedan. It is 17 years old and has 215,000 miles on it. Although it is so old – it has beautiful gray leather seats and a giant sunroof. The EPA says it gets 26 to 31 miles per gallon. Now before the politically correct police jump all over me and tell me that diesels are so bad that California has banned them – let me explain my plan.

There is a rather large movement in America of folks that have bought Mercedes – Volkwagens – and other diesel vehicles – and they are burning cooking oil in them – like the frying oil from Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald’s. Yes – restaurants are more than happy to have people take their used cooking oil – they usually must pay to have it disposed.

If you google Waste Vegetable Oil – called WVO – you will find tons of articles on people that are running their diesel cars on cooking oil. Here is an example – Lyle Pearl and his WVO car - http://tinyurl.com/2fsn77

When Rudolph Diesel designed the engine with his name – he was running it on vegetable oil. That was over 100 years ago.

Besides saving money – my main goal – cooking oil is a much cleaner burning fuel than regular diesel fuel. It also saves landfill space by using an item that generally has to be carted off to the dump.

There are a few problems with using cooking oil as fuel. First – you must filter the food particles out of the waste cooking oil. Filtering can be done by first letting the particles settle to the bottom and then pouring the oil through a filter. Second – the cooking oil must be warmed up so that it can pass through the fuel lines and fuel injectors in the car. In warmer climates – the latter is not much of a problem. In colder climates – many folks choose to set up a two tank system – one for regular diesel and the other for the cooking oil. They use engine heat to warm up the cooking oil while running on regular diesel fuel – then they switch over to the cooking oil tank. Some folks say the exhaust smells like fried chicken.

The “cooking oil diesel car” will not be my only regular driver. I have a scooter – pickup – and another car. I will probably put less than 4000 miles a year on it. Heck – being a retired trailing spouse with an attention span of 5 minutes – I may not even get the project done. But it is fun to try new and exciting things – it won’t be the first time I failed at anything. Also – starting with a car with 200,000 miles on it – may have “other problems” that will end the project. Besides – Lulu likes the gray leather seats and the big sunroof.