Veg oil in Discos

[thebiglad]

I started to type this thread and suddenly realised that I know NOTHING about this subject, so a helping hand would be great.

I live in France and diesel has gone up to 1.25€ ltr. When I first came here it was 0.70€ltr, so I'm well tiddled off !!!

My vehicles are Discos, Tdi 200 & Tdi 300 auto.

I'm looking for ways to reduce my running costs and one of them would be to start using veg oil, so I have a series of stupid-sounding questions:

1. Is it actually veg oil, the sort of stuff you cook your chips in?

2. Is there any particular type - sunflower, Colza etc. I'm not looking for brand-names as things will be different over here, so it's just the type I'm after.

3. I believe that I can use a mixture of this oil with diesel, without modifying the cars?

4. Anything else I should know about? Think of the most stupid, obvious thing and then tell me, cos I won't know.

We live in the country so have to travel a long way to do anything, so fuel costs are important to us.

Any and all comments will be welcomed.

Cheers

Dave

Edited March 24, 2008 by BogMonster
Bad language

[sotal]

That's still cheaper than it is over here, ours is about £1.15/litre which is about 1.50€

As for your questions I don't know a lot but seeing as no-one else has answered I'll try:

1 - Yes bog standard oil, through filtering you can even use used oil from the chip shop.

2 - I believe any type can be used and some people prefer one to another

3 - A mix with diesel can be done, but I've heard bad things with discos, in winter the amount of diesel goes up in the ratio, in summer you can use more veg oil, if you are in France I suppose it depends if your North or South France, I guess in South France it's a fair bit warmer and you could get away with more veg oil for longer

Bio diesel is the other option

[Orgasmic Farmer]

You can certainly use straight veggie oil (SVO) in a mix with your diesel but to be honest any mixture of more than about 5 litres of veg to a full tank of diesel is likely to be detrimental to the long term health of your engine (if you believe what you read. But then 5 litres on each fill is a free pint in my book so got to be worth it. Buy the cheapest oil from the supermarche and empty it into the tank in the car park (then throw the empties in their bin and save on waste!). If you really want to go down the veg oil route than seriously consider a proper twin tank set up and do it right. That way you should have all the benefits of cheap SVO motoring without the risk. The sums say it pays for itself pretty quickly, especially if you can buy oil in bulk.

[sotal]

Have a read of this:

http://www.vegetableoildiesel.co.uk/forum/...;page=1#pid3731

It basically says not to use it directly but to use a second tank and a change-over switch once warm. Ignore the tax bits as that probably doesn't apply to you and they've made it tax free in the UK too.

[TheRecklessEngineer]

^^^ Yes, have a read of that. I wrote it a while ago, so the prices and tax info quotes are a little inaccurate!

[NeilF]

This site: http://www.journeytoforever.org/biodiesel.html has a lot of information on biodiesel.

Specifically, on straight vegetable oil (SVO) as fuel: http://www.journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_svo.html

[RRX]

Been running on WVO for a while with no issues

[freeagent]

I've been running several 300Tdi engines (my old Defender, started almost 5 years ago, until i sold it two years ago, and for the past 2 years, my current disco) on a mix of straight vege oil and diesel with NO detrimental effects.

In the winter you'll get away with about a 20% mix, in the summer you can probably get away with upto 50% vege oil...

use the cheapest stuff you can find (because its thinner, currently the best option is Pura oil, from Tesco or Sainsburys at 56p per litre)

If it gets to below freezing outside i usually dont bother, as it goes a bit thick..

The others are right; the best way is a proper twin tank system is the best way, but the problems are mostly about injecting oil into a cold engine, once the engine is up to temp the heating doesn't matter quite so much.

I've been thinking about the twin tank option for a while, but vege oil has realy jumped in price over the last year, and I cant make up my mind if its worth it...

I'd say go for it, just use 10-15% this time of year, if you notice any problems starting it, or any lumpy running, then just reign it in a bit...

make sure you change your fuel filter after 500 miles, and ALWAYS carry a spare, Veg oil can pull all the carp out of your fuel system up to the filter...