woodrat

I am planning on buying a 1st gen dodge diesel truck in the next couple of months. I am wondering how well this engine accomodates the use of biodiesel, either straight or mixed with petroleum diesel. Does anyone have any experience or technical information about this?

TurboAZ

From what I have read about biodiesel it is made by combinig lye and other stuff with cooking oil to produce the stuff. It is more expensive and untill Cummins says its OK to use I won't put in my truck. <br><br>Jim

Butch

From what I have read about the stuff, yea they do use ly and a couple other chemicals to break down the tri glicoride molecules. But the main factor is that it's good for the environment, and according to what the people that use the stuff say it burns very clean. Little or no lose in power. There are some guy's I've read about that have used it in there VW Diesel's for many miles. The one article I read the guy had a lot of miles on the vehicle and thought it would be a good thing to change the head gasket. When he did there where no carbon deposits in the combustion chambers. Clean as a whistel. There are a lot of guy's that make it themselves but then again they are making it for a VW Diesel so they don't use all that much. For your Cummins you may have to have a good production line going. If your buying it yes it will be more expensive but again your better for the environment. You'll have to watch that you don't put any weight on yourself, cause the exhaust smells like french fries.

Ruralmedic

Check out http://www.greasel.com<br>That's a system using used fryer grease, which would be B100.<br><br>Of course, it must be filtered, and the key is heating the stuff up prior to injection. This is done with a heat exchanger using engine coolant. A seperate fuel tank is used. You start your diesel up using the petro diesel fuel, then once up to operating temperature, switch to the greasel. Prior to arriving at your destination, you switch back to petro to clean the fueling system of the bio product.<br><br>I haven't tried it, but hey, looks promising. Anything to help reduce our dependance on foriegn mineral oil.

woodrat

ruralmedic, are you talking about using straight fryer grease, or manufactured biodiesel? I can buy 20% bio at the pump in portland, oregon for 1.75, which isn't THAT expensive, and I've run it in my diesel VW a few times with no problems. I can get b100 for quite a bit more $, i just want to know what people know about whether the seals in the cummins engine are OK with straight bio. I've heard all kinds of conflicting information about what years of engines are OK with it. I've even been told not to run it in the VW but I know of so many people who have that I don't believe it. What does cummins say? It has less soot, less CO and NO sulfur dioxides and it isn't that complicated to make either. And no middle east war to get it either...

Ruralmedic

The stuff is used fryer grease, what the restuarants get rid of, which is 100% vegetable oil. Based on what I've read on their site, I'll bet the degradation of seals,etc. occurs if it sits in the fuel system, when the engine is not in operation. That's why you switch between the two, and probably why you have to run only a mix of bio/petro in a regular, single tank. <br><br>They say Diesel's intention when developing the compression ignition engine was to use a vegetable based fuel. However, it was less expensive to use a petroleum derived fuel. I can remember when diesel fuel at the pumps was always markedly cheaper than gasoline. That's not the case today, so the future of biodiesel fuels will more than likely expand. The more made, the cheaper it will get. <br><br>And now, that fryer grease can probably be had for nothing! Just your time. At least we have engines that will operate on a range of fuels.

PumpDaddy

Hey Guys,<br> I saw this and got interested. I found this link http://www.afdc.doe.gov/altfuel/bio_general.html for ya'll to check out. But from what I've seen of our vacuum pumps coming in for repairs, and you DON'T want to know what they are pulling a vacuum on, TRUST ME, or you wouldn't eat food anymore, but would this gunk gell when it cools at the end of the tail pipe, or is it CLEAN burn?<br>Hey, I'm not a rocket scientist, just a brain surgeon

woodrat

supposed to be a nice clean burn, at least the manufactured bio. I don't know anyone personally who has set up to burn straight filtered fry oil, but like someone said above, the diesel engine was originally intended to burn vegetable oil.

Stevie G

these folks run their camper cross country to promote biodiesel.
http://www.veggievan.org/
I bought the book &quot;From the frier to the fuel tank&quot;.
I am putting together a system. It takes the same amount of time to make five gallons or 500 gallons so I'm going with the big tanks figuring to save on chemicals by buying bulk.

BTW, You can burn it in an oil furnace AND it makes a darn good parts cleaner.