i am running a ram 3500 5.9 cummins and i was wondering if there was anything wrong with running heating oil i have herd that there isnt the same lubricants in it and that it might not be good for the motor ???

 

It is the same as diesel fuel EXCEPT it is dyed to identify it as home heating oil and there is no road tax on it, hence it is illegal to use it in a vehicle used on the road. There MAY be an anti-gel additive in clear diesel fuel to prevent gelling in cold weather that the home heating oil may not have. Sometimes that additive is nothing more than #1 fuel or kerosene. I run #2 home heating oil in all my off road stuff and just add Power Service to it to prevent gelling.

Now that I think of it, my receipts for the home heating oil say, "Dyed Diesel Fuel" instead of #2 home heating oil. And when I was hauling the stuff out of the rack in Boston, the diesel and home heating oil came from the same rack/tanks, they just gave us a 5 gallon bucket of dye to dump into the trailer before we loaded.

 

BEWARE!!! Some heating oil is Kerosene. If it's Kerosene, the lubricity is not adequate and it probably WILL destroy your injection pump.

The red dyed stuff is (I'm pretty sure) like chaikwa said is just "offroad diesel" which feeds my heavy equipment, and is often delivered as "heating oil". But one other thing to know is that to my knowledge the red diesel is still low sulfur diesel, not ultra low sulphur. This means it should NOT be run in a DPF equipped truck.

Also another diesel (not sure if it's still sold) is farm diesel, which is also dyed red. This has even more sulfur than the normal red diesel. Enough that changing the oil a little more frequently may be a good idea due to ph changes in the oil. Especially with the new engine oils being "low ash" oils for the new ulsd fuel.

"Low ash" means what it sounds like. Less industrial ash to offset the acidity of the high sulphur fuel blowby making the engine oil acidic (bad) by the high ph of the ash. I *think* the ash is waste coal ash.

Kerosene from what I understand can be burnt, but requires addatives for lubricity. I would use at least 5 or 10% biodiesel or vegetable oil. Not motor oil because it will "coke up" the combustion chamber. I've dealt with this before-had to pull the injectors and scrape out the coking.