Td5 On Bio Diesel?

[eyore]

Knowing the Td5s tight tolerances to everything I wonder if anyone knows will it run on bio diesel/oil additive mixture?

Apparantly common rail diesels don't/cant run on bio mix.

Any info appreciated.

[western]

Found this in RAVE, use only diesel fuel not exceeding 1% sulphur content, haven't seen anything about bio-diesel.

[eyore]

With the price of diesel going mad it is becoming an option,I know of a few people running older Land Rovers using a 50/50 mix of oilseed rape and diesel.The rape oil costs about €0.70/litre or roughly .47p Stg here in Ireland with diesel here at €1.06 or £Stg 0.72p.

I'm just back from a week in Wales where diesel costs about 98p a litre

[BogMonster]

I don't think LR approve bio fuels in any of the engines. I was talking to an engineering guy who worked for LDV the other day and he said the big problem with dodgy fuels is that the tolerances inside the high-pressure pumps on common rail engines are so tight (to get the high pressure) that any sort of crud in there just wrecks the guts of the pump. He wasn't that impressed when I showed him some of our "diesel samples" from a couple of years back - it was the sort of stuff that a Russian snowplough would turn its nose up at, never mind an EU3 common rail diesel

Fuel prices are going silly .... petrol is 64p a litre here now (it was 35p a litre not long ago) and diesel is a scandalous 36p a litre ... mutter mutter I remember when it was 25p a litre

Why do I get the feeling I won't get much sympathy

[western]

But LR do say the 200/300Tdi's can be run on a 90% normal diesel + 10% bio mix

[jeremy996]

The bio-diesel you can usually buy is 95% diesel and 5% bio stock. There is a European standard for it, (in France you will be hard put to find anything else, they use it as a lubricity enhancer). 100% bio-diesel is possible and there is a standard for it, but the only place I've found selling it is in Norfolk and it's in drums!

Bio-diesel is normally very low in sulphur, the only common issue is that if it's home brew, it may not have been reacted properly or it may be contaminated. Some of you may find this web page interesting:-

http://www.biofuels.fsnet.co.uk/basics.htm

Here is one area where a 2.5TD, (like mine), raises fewer issues. It really annoys the anti 4x4 Greenies when I tell them my Land Rover runs on bio-fuel! Older engines will also run on straight vegetable oil without too much work - although Excise get exercised about it!

[Niall_CSK]

I read quite a lot about this a couple of years back just as common rails were starting to come onto the market.

There is no sulphur to speak of in true biodeisel or even the recycled cooking oils, even McD's would have a hard job getting sulphur in chips, sorry french fries.

I understood that probably the biggest issue with home brew was ensuring that the acids were all properly washed out as they attack certain types of seals with higher silicon content, don't ask me about all the chemistry of that I have long since forgotten.

I believe you are correct about the addition of biodeisel as a lubricity enhancer as that was largely performed in the cylinder by the sulphur compounds, another factor we have experienced with marine engines running on low sulphur fuel is reduced detergent effect on the liners and hence a build up of laquer which completely knackers the liner ring seal surface and bang goes you LO consumption. This is particularly noticable with older design of engines so beware if you run a Perky on ultra low sulphur diesel, it might be good for the environment in the short term but in the end you will be pumping large amounts of partially burnt LO into the air. Then you go sit outside of a Greenpeace office and rev the engine

So in short properly made biodiesel in a modern engine should not be a bad thing IMHO.