You should try this at home - SVO

[trentc]

Being a bit low on funds and fuel tank at the 1/8th mark it occurred to me I have some old cooking oil sitting around I bought nearly 3 years ago.

I look for it and see it is half full, giving me about 2.5 gallons of oil to try out.

I poured it into the tank while engine running and soon started to smell like a fast food place.


I took it for a spin to get the 2 fuels a good mixing. After running the low energy ULS diesel I quickly noticed a BIG difference in performance. It went from going to a sluggish truck to almost wanting to burn rubber!

Now off to find some used oil to filter.

[Subzilla]

Just make sure it the crusties are filtered out, it is dewatered either by time or by heat/circulating air, and it is not very cold down there! I prefer to convert it to Biodiesel myself as our IP's don't like too high a percentage of the thick stuff for very long. If you keep the percentage low, you might be OK. Check out the Biodiesel Infopop forum for the SVO users. They can give much more advice.

[Robyn]

A local fellow here that has a small shop uses just about anything he can scare up in his shop truck.

Filters the stuff and into the tank it goes
Tranny oil
Engine oil
Used fry oil
Hydraulic oil
A mixture of all the above and if it gets a bit cold adds a touch of gas to thin the mix some.

I am not a fan of such activities as some of the finer contaminates can over time wreak havoc with the IP and the injectors.

Clean fry oil will work well as long as it does not get cold and thicken up.

The best setup is the dual fuel setup where you switch to diesel to shut down and then switch to fry oil once the rig is warmed up. An immersion heater in the fry oil tank is also a good idea too.

But its all been done, many many times over.

Best

Robyn

[Mark Rinker]

I think it would be interesting to have an older, mechanically injected diesel to experiment with - trying different blends of filtered veggie, drain oil, etc. Living in warmer climates certainly helps. I have heard that some of the older Mercedes diesels will burn just about anything you can filter and dump in the tank.

However, up here in the cold northland, the most important days for dependability are the COLDEST days - when you really need your rig to start and run right.

For that reason, I have always been careful about what I dump in the tank.

[Stratosurfer]

There are comprehensive articles written about running SVO in the diesel tank in a diesel tank stemming from fuel shortages in WWII. All the articles I read seemed to agree that if you exceed no more than 20% SVO (or cleaned/dewatered WVO) then the risk for damage becomes very low. I have done this often with good results. The problem is that the studies were all completed long before electronic IP's came along. HOWEVER, the same basic rules should apply: hopefully...