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

If you make it from utilized cooking oil it's not just low-cost but you'll be recycling a bothersome waste product. Best of all is the GREAT feeling of flexibility, independence and it will provide you. Here's how to do it-- whatever you need to understand.

Straight grease fuel (SVO) systems can be a clean, 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 example you can use petro-diesel, biodiesel or SVO, in any combination. Just begin up and go, stop and change off, like any other car. Journey to Forever's Toyota TownAce van uses an Elsbett single-tank system. More

There are also two-tank SVO systems which pre-heat the oil to make it thinner. You need to begin the engine on ordinary 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 switch back to petro- or biodiesel before you stop the engine, or you'll coke up the injectors.

More information on straight grease systems in my blog.

3. Biodiesel or SVO?

Biodiesel has some clear benefits over SVO: it operates in any diesel, with no conversion or modifications to the engine or the fuel system-- just put it in and go. It likewise has better cold-weather homes than SVO (but not as good as petro-diesel-- see Using biodiesel in winter). Unlike SVO,

it's backed by numerous long-lasting tests in many nations, consisting of millions of miles on the road.

Biodiesel is a clean, safe, ready-to-use, alternative fuel, whereas it's reasonable to say that many SVO systems are still experimental and need more development.

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

But the large and rapidly growing worldwide band of homebrewers do not mind-- they make a supply weekly or as soon as a month and quickly get utilized to it. Many have been doing it for several years.

Anyway you need to process SVO too, specifically WVO (waste grease, used, cooked), which lots of people with SVO systems utilize due to the fact that it's low-cost or totally free for the taking. With WVO food particles and pollutants and water should be eliminated, and it probably needs to be deacidified too. Biodieselers state, If I'm going to have to do all that I may also make biodiesel rather. But SVO types discount that-- it's much less processing than making biodiesel, they state. To each his own.