Bull****.


to anyone considering WVO, three points.

1/ The Bosch in-line injection pump used in the merc is one of the highest quality, most over engineered diesel injection pumps available in a motor car.

There are better pumps out there, but not in motor cars.

Here in Europe we have diesel cars coming out of our ass, literally everyone makes them, if WVO was so good, all of these old diesels would be running it, but no, every WVO'er in Europe wants to get their hands on a merc diesel, because the IP is so good... compared to all other cars, in which the IPs die a quick death.

That fact alone tells you WVO is crap and in fact you are trading on the remaining life in an over engineered IP.

2/ Run the numbers and do the math.

Trying to do a WVO conversion PROPERLY costs from £1,000 UK Pounds on up.

Trying to make WVO also costs money, I know people living on state benefits who claim their time as being free, and it still costs them about 15 pence per litre to make the WVO suitable for the engine.

Frankly I think this is unrealistically low and fantasy land stuff, I figure it is nearer 50 pence per litre even just counting my time at minimum wage, street sweeper stuff. But what the hell, we'll go with the fantasy 15p/litre.

Here in the UK pump diesel is UK£ 1.15 a litre. If you're in the states and your fuel is FAR cheaper, the numbers come out FAR worse.

I get about 7.5 to 8.5 miles per litre, depending on the type of driving I do. Call it 8.

The UK£1,000 conversion is a capital cost, 1000 / 1.15 = 870 litres of pump diesel, which = 6,960 miles of driving.

But WVO ain't free, those 870 litres @ 15 p litre WVO costs another £130, in fact as mpg on WVO is lower, it costs nearer £150.

So basically, you have to do 10,000 miles, 100% trouble free, to break even.

Then you get into the maintenance issues associated costs, you start getting through glowplugs, you get IP issues, you eat filters for a passtime, you have to up your regimen of lube oil and filter changes, and sooner or later even on the bulletproof mercedes heads start being removed, and of course all this costs money too (quite apart from the simple loss of having a 100% reliable, turn the key and go anywhere diesel car) and even at insane UK fuel prices, all these extra repairs and maintenance start to add up, and they all buy a LOT of pump diesel.

It isn't hard to spend £1,000 under the bonnet of a merc diesel, just a top end gasket set and some minor shop remedial work, even if you do your own spannering.

But that's another 870 litres of insanely expensive UK pump diesel you could have bought, and another 10,000 miles of trouble free motoring you could have had with it, and your car is off the road again.

And we aren't even starting to look at the capital cost of the car, which you just destroyed the instant you put WVO in it (nobody else will touch the car afterwards) and of course the ongoing depreciation of the once massively over engineered IP equipment.

Basically you have to do 30,000 miles to break even, and that's at UK pump prices, and that's assuming you don't mind eating the cost of the car and killing it, which you should be taken out and shot for IMHO.

This is before you factor in your own time work, this all assumed you work for 0 cents an hour..... I know one guy who uses 15% of his product to drive around getting more WVO, and another 10% of his product in an old stationary engine to run a genny to power his WVO setup, so in fact that is 25% of his product gone before any goes in the tank, which makes the sums even worse.

3/ The very people who consider WVO are in fact the least competent to do it successfully, they are skimpers, corner cutters, people who will work 6 hours to save 5 bucks... someone else made a comment that you have to be a half decent mechanic to make WVO work properly, I'll turn that on it's head, yeah, you have to be half decent, because if you were a damn good mechanic you wouldn't go near the stuff.

And please, spare me the crap about otto diesel and peanut oil, these engines were specified to run on #2 diesel, if you want to see an engine specified to run on bunker oil, which is in fact the dino-hydrocarbon closest to WVO/VO/SVO, then go to a ship bowels, or go to an old stationary engine place.

I am a time served engineer, I could design and build my own WVO kit, I live in a country where diesel is JUST SHY OF US$2.00 per litre, I have an old W124 that I paid about a thousand bucks for, I am not rich (just going through the divorce / child courts) and I am ****ing mean, I fix everything instead of throwing it away, I make stuff rather than buy it, but even I will not even dream of running WVO in a vehicle.

If I had the capital to make a biodiesel plant, I'd never get my money back, I'd have to run a fleet of diesel vehicles to even get close.

IF I ran a light truck, which a direct injection 7 or 8 litre straight six, something like an old MAN or Petter etc, yes, then I would consider WVO, because;

a/ the engine never exceeds 2,500 RPM which is within WVO flame front speeds

b/ the engine is direct injection.

c/ the engine is minimum 1 lire per cylinder

d/ the engine drinks enough juice anyway that it is worth it.

The MB diesel FAILS on every single aspect of a WVO/VO/WVO conversion except for one very small item, the Injection Pump is extremely high quality.

The rest of the engine is TOTALLY UNSUITABLE.

75S,
There is too much made of this change to fuel. The difference between the old diesel & now is nothing compared with the difference between the old diesel & WVO. it is not a justification for running WVO.

__________________
Grumpy Old Diesel Owners Club group

I no longer question authority, I annoy authority. More effect, less effort....

1967 230-6 auto parts car. rust bucket.
1980 300D now parts car 800k miles
1984 300D 500k miles
1987 250td 160k miles English import
2001 jeep turbo diesel 130k miles
1998 jeep tdi ~ followed me home. Needs a turbo.
1968 Ford F750 truck. 6-354 diesel conversion.
Other toys ~J.D.,Cat & GM ~ mainly earth moving

I didn't say the new fuel ULSD doesn't work. I will say our engines were not designed for them. Nor did I say, that nor imply that WVO was better, or without problems. Some studies show that a 2-5% biodiesel added to the ULSD helps our engines. There are some who would find descrepencies with those studies. I think if you search the net for Shur deisel, you might find a study on a mixture of WVO and gasoline. Supposivly the guy ran 100,000 on it and did a teardown of the engine.
Tom

OK, you can, but its died red for off road use. The fine is heffty. I do know/ have meet a few people who run WVO succesfully. Or at least haven't heard of them having any problems. I do see many points in your post that need to be heeded. What is the actual cost? What is your time worth? And yes, more than a few engines and fuel pumps have bit the dust due to WVO.
I don't run WVO myself. I was looking at it when diesel was over $4/gal. I also though about making biodiesel. Something scared me about the chemicals used. I also looked in the CNG conversion for another vehicle. Ran the math and decided it wasn't worth it.
I did buy this car to convert to WVO. Gas was $4/gal or such. Height of the Iraqi war. I was getting about 21-25 mpg out of my gas car. I am getting 28 mpg with the 240D. I drive about 15 miles one way to work. That really isn't far enough to go the WVO route. Yes, you also have to figure out what your time is worth. I do mow my own lawn. Would it be worth paying someone else to do that? I haven't done the math, really.
Tom

W124, that was a good explanation. Its true that it cost to do WVO, not only time spend, but you buy the filters to filter it and the filters in the car do not last too long, then do the blending, adding costly RUG,Dino or acetone. All this add up at the end.
20 pence is about right I reckon with a mix with Dino. WVO is also 10% less effecient, then you loose there too. But, there is always a but, it suit me fine as I did save a lot of money doing it and I like to tinker around, like you I do fix as much as I can, this is why I was able to keep on going with the WVO.
Apart from the fuel starvation I have now, all is OK ish, I had a lot of maintenance done on the car but this is due to rust and age and the previous owner who was a moron and run it until it died without ant care... Not many of the maintenance was WVO related at all.
Olivier

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E300TD year 2000. RUSTY SOLD
cost a fortune to maintain on the road
but run well on WVO
Second Merc died due to corrosion ( NOT rust) How can mercedes get away with that for so long?
Third lasted a month then went away...
Fourth now... Corroded too...

Tom,
You know there is always a success story about WVO being touted about. Trouble is that no one can actually find the details. Its always a case of some one said some thing in a forum on the internet.
On the other hand you may like to read the following, these guys are in the biz of promoting its use.

http://www.ncat.org/special/oilseeds_innovations4.php

There are not too many properly conducted tests out there.

Nothing on google for "Shur deisel" or even "Shur diesel" all you get is sour diesel; hippie stuff about dope, kind of relates back to my original post.

__________________
Grumpy Old Diesel Owners Club group

I no longer question authority, I annoy authority. More effect, less effort....

1967 230-6 auto parts car. rust bucket.
1980 300D now parts car 800k miles
1984 300D 500k miles
1987 250td 160k miles English import
2001 jeep turbo diesel 130k miles
1998 jeep tdi ~ followed me home. Needs a turbo.
1968 Ford F750 truck. 6-354 diesel conversion.
Other toys ~J.D.,Cat & GM ~ mainly earth moving

I thought about this, but the cost of rebuilding a Mercedes engine is too high relative to the benefits.

If one were to do this, a VW 1.6 IDI would make more sense. They are cheap to rebuild ( when your rings eventually stick) and IPs can be rebuilt by the DIYer. Still a very messy and miserable way to save a buck, IMO. But who knows, it may be in the cards when oil goes sky-high again.

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80 300SD (129k mi) 82 240D stick (193k mi)77 240D auto - stick to be (153k mi) 85 380SL (145k mi) 89 BMW 535i 82 Diesel Rabbit Pickup (374k mi) 91 Jetta IDI Diesel (155k mi) 81 VW Rabbit Convertible Diesel 70 Triumph Spitfire Mk III (63kmi)66 Triumph TR4a IRS (90k mi)67 Ford F-100 (??)

Well said, I will be bookmarking this and using it for every "should I convert" post.

I agree on most points.

I believe that a WVO conversion can be done well, and that many WVO conversions are not. Example being poster Oliver above, who is currently having un-resolved problems with his ( http://www.peachparts.com/shopforum/showthread.php?t=287679 ), yet to find out what the problem is or how it occurred. His conversion is a fairly simple one, not to say that is wrong, but that it cuts initial costs and the complexity of making fuel at a likely down the road penalty, and initially he was basically pouring the stuff into a car without any "conversion" on the car. Either, both, or neither could have led to his current symptoms on another thread.

I have a couple of neighbors "successfully" running WVO converted 617/603/606 cars and one Tdi. Smell cool, get the stickers for the back windows, a great hobby.

However, it is a hobby, the time and money spent collecting and distilling the fuels as well as the mess and hazardous chemicals, space in the garage, extra tank in the vehicle (on some conversions), I'm not sure that you could ever justify it from a $$ standpoint even with $3/gallon diesel.

I don't run WVO for this reason, plus the un-known eventual maintenance (search stuck rings etc.), and the last point being I won't touch a WVO burning car unless it is so underpriced that I can't go wrong. There are several every month on CL and ebay, mostly don't sell for much and often have problems as the reason for the sale.

I have nothing against running it, if you can I'm happy for you as you're doing the world a favor, albeit a small one, for not buying "blood oil". I'm just not that motivated, have enough things in my life costing time and money. If you want to run it and know the time/money involved, do lots of research to be sure you're doing the best conversion and fuel-production possible.

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Gone to the dark side

- Jeff

Firsthand knowledge only:

I make biodiesel...50 gal each week religiously. Power my home furnace and 3 Mercedes with it. Building up for winter. My furnace alone will take 12gal per day on cold days.

83 MB purchased 2006. I put 40k miles on it, 10k on homemade BD, 30k on WVO/RUG blend...yes, that's 30k miles of COLD VO hitting the injectors, even on 5-degree-F Massachusetts winter days. Still have it, still runs great. No fuel-related issues.

97 Black E300. Purchased 2007. Put 72k miles on it. About 60k were WVO/RUG blend, the other 12k homemade BD. It never got pump diesel while I owned it. Yes, that 60k miles of COLD VO hitting the injectors, even on 5-degree-F days. Running great when I sold it in 2010 due to excessive rust.

97 Gold E300. Purchased 2008. Put 9k miles on it, all homemade BD. Wife's car. Straight BD gelled on cold winter mornings last year. Still have it. Runs great.

2005 E320CDI. Purchased 7/2010. 11k miles on homemade BD. I'm apprehensive about putting creative blends in the common rail system, so I won't. I will say, however, that my experience is that WVO/RUG stays liquid at much lower temps than BD, so I'll have to introduce additives this winter to keep the BD from gelling. 200hp. Awesome.

My real costs to make BD are about $0.80 per finished gallon for raw materials, and about 1.5 hours of my time each week, spread over 24 hours. My processor takes up about 50 sq ft total, in my 3 car garage that has 3 cars parked in it.

WVO/RUG costs are about $0.30 per finished gallon, mostly in RUG and filter costs.

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Mark in MA
05 MB E320CDI 402k Granite Grey Metallic
05 MB E320CDI 267k Black
05 MB E320CDI 232k White
05 MB E320CDI 209k Tectite Grey
99 Dodge 2500 Cummins 5sp 148k
62 Jeep CJ-6 120k

I actually agree with most points of the naysayers. I do not go around promoting the use of wvo, there's lot's that can go wrong and I do not want to be responsible. It is not for everyone. For me it started as an experiment 6 - 7 years ago and I have been very successful at it. I drive 20-25K a year and it does save me quite a bit. A much bigger savings is home heating 100% wvo. I have not bought any home heating oil for 4 years now. The first year was tough, many cold nights but I didn't give up and continued to refine my design and it is very easy now. The only maintenance is clean the nozzle every 100 to 150 hours which takes about 15 minutes. The prime oil on top of the cubies gets filtered and go in the car, the rest gets coarsely filtered and heats the house.

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85 300D turbo pristine w 157k when purchased 161K now
83 300 D turbo 297K runs great. SOLD!
83 240D 4 spd manual- parted out then junked

I also have run a lot of VO through my various cars with no ill effects and a pretty decent cost savings, and also agree with Funola, and a lot of the points of the naysayers.

Its not for everyone, it takes a specific type of person to do it successfully, well, and save money. You CAN save a lot of money depending on your driving requirements, choice of vehicle platform, and how you take care of your car. Lots of people are unsuited to even change a tire by themselves, this is not the type of person who should be running VO, but what was said earlier is correct, there are lot of short sighted cheap minded people who skimp on maintenance and also try to run VO for the same reasons, resulting in catastrophic problems that ultimately get posted on forums like this.

There is a LOT of truth to the the bad things that can happen. I have said this many times, but I will repeat it here again, the running of VO is too easy.
No matter the car, most decently designed engines will actually burn VO with no modification for a while. That means that everyone who can get their hands on a cheap old diesel not in decent condition mechanically, 'proves' to themselves that its possible since it actually works initially.

For me, the question was, how do I make it work permanently and well with no long lasting issues, so yes, its a very interesting hobby for me, and I see no reason why I should not experiment with alternative fuels.

On my previously owned 83 300D with a triple tank on board filtering system I put in, I was constantly pulling injectors, doing compression tests, pulling glow plugs and examining for carbon deposits. I even stuck one of those little cameras down in the injector seat near the heat shield to peek in the prechamber from real close. After 40,000 miles of VO, all those components and tests were no different than any other diesel only vehicles of similar mileage. I filter my oil well, NEVER cold start, or even warm start, and use the VO mainly for the highway and distance driving.

One thing that its important to remember is that there are really not that many cold hard facts with VO. Reading the above posts, its important to remember that some types of plant oil are less powerful than diesel, some the same, and some more. Oil choice, local quality, and filtration are all huge factors on what you will see for power, filter life, ect.

You can't say a filter lasts such and such miles. With VO, a filter lasts until its clogged, there is no mileage. Thats why well conceived systems have provisions for direct feedback to fuel line restriciton, and temp information, ect. I have seen filters go for 500 miles, and over 20,000 miles based on oil quality. My car was rusting out, and I sold it to a guy who double prefilters his oil. I was seeing an average of 5 thousand miles per filter, HE has not changed the filter since I sold the car to him 1.5 years ago. He has put more than 25,000 miles on one VO filter so far, and his restriction gauge has not moved yet.

You have tons of factors to consider with VO, "facts" are few and far between, as there is no fuel standardization, and no system standardization, at least in the US. You should decide whether you consider yourself the type of person who can make it work well, then look further into what people have done, and whats commercially available. Above all, keep your own coucil and keep an open mind. For me, im not going to see my car actually run off a bottle of canola oil and NOT look further into it. It proved to me that the concept is at least almost completely possible on a stock engine. I was absolutely obsessed with eliminating the almost from that sentence.

Specific car forums like this have a lot of skewed data looking at total VO posts simply because they are primarily a information and repair network, most VO posts are people having problems, which is why they posted in the first place. People NOT having problems running VO don't really use their time talking about it on a forum, especially when there is a lot of outrage and anger by enthusiast of the car's themselves from the history of other posts.

Think about it this way, In a tire shop, every car that comes in has a tire problem or tire related maintenance. This does not mean that ALL cars are running around with tire problems, it means that the problem is the reason the car is there. People have an issue, they go to where a congregation of experts exists and try to find answers.

I haven't converted any of my current cars yet, because right now, they are not running completely tip top. I have several thousand to spend in maintenance and repair until the car is in good enough shape to be converted to an alternative fuel. Lots of people buy a car, slam a system on it or just dump oil in the tank, and drive. I don't like that any more than the naysayers, but its a fact of use for this technology.

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This post brought to you by Carl's Jr.

The more reading I do, the more I come to a couple conclusions.

1 You should be fairly tech savvy to even attempt to use waste oil as fuel

2 If you are savvy enough to build a good WVO conversion, you're savvy enough to build and operate a small biodiesel converter.

I feel like the filtering, settling effort necessary to ensure the safety of WVO negates any convenience advantage. You still have to "process" it, its just a simpler process. OTOH biodiesel, if properly manufactured and tested should work as well as dino diesel.

For the record, this is based only on what I've read. I've got no personal experience either way, but I've been doing a lot of reading because I have WVO readily available to me. I wouldn't mind putting it to use - but not to the detriment of a car that I really like.

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'82 300SD - Somewhere over 220k - Becoming reliable...

A lot of guys who run VO started with brewing biodiesel, I did. I moved to this because I did not really want to deal with the caustic materials needed to brew biodiesel anymore. As far as the filtering settling setup, again depends on the system, can be convenient, can be inconvenient.

For example, in the final version of a system on my 83, I had two VO fuel tanks, a 20 gallon and a 10 gallon, with a timed filtration pump between them. I would just pump oil directly out of a bin into the dirty tank, let it heat up in the dirty tank, hit the filter button, pre filter it down to 10 micron while driving into the 10 gallon tank, then the 10 gallon tank had a 2 micron filter between it and the engine.

I also had a 'washing' capability of the fuel. Since the dirty tank was so much larger than the running tank, it had a overflow system where fuel would dump back into the dirty tank. that way If I had especially dirty source oil, I could run it through the 10 micron filter multiple times through the overflow. Either way, the VO was filtered at least twice before even getting up to the engine compartment, and it was all controlled by switches and timers on the dash.

It was a very convenient setup, which allowed me to completely ignore out of the vehicle pre-filtration.

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This post brought to you by Carl's Jr.

I read a study where they evaluated using SVO in tractors. If I recall, they tore down the engines and evaluated them after the tests. They found that for short periods of time (a few tank fulls, IIRC), no permanent damage was done by burning SVO, but that if run for longer it tended to foul up the engine and cause performance decline.

Lots of caveats to the comparison between what they did and running WVO in a 20 year old diesel mercedes, but, since WVO isn't better for the engine, you shouldn't expect even similar results.

If I recall, they found that deposits accumulated until performance declined. They didn't check to see if running normal diesel for a while cleaned out the accumulation. They were trying to determine if farmers could safely run SVO, and for how long, before it started to cost them in extra maintence and they got their answer -- briefly = no problem, long term = problem.

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'83 300DTurbo http://badges.fuelly.com/images/smallsig-us/318559.png

Broadband: more lies faster.

Sounds fairly convenient, but with all the plumbing and such that went into making that an automated system, it seems like you could've built a fairly automated biodiesel reactor. Also, do you still have a trunk?

Either way, I don't have a consistent long commute, so anything involving heat exchangers is really not a winner for me. I suppose that is the core of it - different things work for different people. I'm not nuts about using the toxic chemicals myself, but I feel like its the best way to minimize risk to the engine.

One thing I'm sure of - If you're the type of person who can't change their own oil, you should probably stay clear.

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'82 300SD - Somewhere over 220k - Becoming reliable...