Bio Diesel
With petrol prices starting to rise again many people are beginning to look into alternative ways to fuel their vehicles, such as running a car using biodiesels. However, before you get excited and head to the market to purchase some vegetable oil, you need to be aware of the fact that not all vehicles can be converted to biodiesels.
In fact, some vehicles simply cannot be converted to run on biodiesels even with the best guide, and if you try, the results may be very expensive to repair.
The best way to figure out if your car can be run on biodiesels is to take a look at what type of fuel the car currently consumes. Any car that runs on petrol cannot be converted into a biodiesel car, due to the fact that biodiesel cannot be used on spark ignition engines, it simply will not work. For these types of vehicles ethanol is a better green alternative to try out.
On the other hand, most diesel engines can be converted to run on biodiesel without too much modification, unless you plan to run your car using straight vegetable oil. Also, if you want to use waste vegetable oil such as oil left over from the local chippy, you will also need to make a few modifications to your vehicle, as well as process the fuel before it is used your vehicle.
Biodiesel is a much stronger solvent than regular mineral diesel, so most of the time when you start to use biodiesel the gunk that builds up in your petrol tank and pipes will be dissolved by the new fuel. This means that the particles will get transferred to the fuel filter where they get caught and start to clog the filter.
Thus, once you start to use biodiesel fuels you should be prepared to have to change your fuel filter. Once everything gets filtered out, the return is that you will not need to change your fuel filter at regular intervals again, because your engine will run much cleaner than on diesel.
Another thing that you need to consider before using biodiesels is the age of your car and the type of piping inside your vehicle. Most new cars have nylon piping in their engines, but older cars use rubber, which will need to be replaced with nylon, otherwise the biodiesels may melt the rubber piping. During the winter you will also need to add some mineral diesel to your fuel, as the biodiesel fuel has a much stronger tendency towards freezing, so be aware that you cannot escape the petrol station altogether.
You cannot simply make these adjustments and head to Tesco, buy some oil, and pop into your fuel tank. Anything that is used to run an engine must be taxed in accordance with the law, so you will need to sort out the tax on bio-fuels and pay it, otherwise you may be faced with rather large penalties down the biodiesel road.