Anybody can make biodiesel. It's simple, you can make it in your cooking area-- and it's BETTER than the petro-diesel fuel the big oil business sell you. Your diesel motor will run much better and last longer on your home-made fuel, and it's much cleaner-- much better for the environment and much better for health.

If you make it from used cooking oil it's not just inexpensive however you'll be recycling a frustrating waste item. Best of all is the GREAT feeling of flexibility, self-reliance and empowerment it will give you. Here's how to do it-- whatever you require to understand.

Straight grease fuel (SVO) systems can be a clean, effective and cost-effective option. Unlike biodiesel, with SVO you have to customize the engine. The best way is to fit an SVO system with replacement injectors and glowplugs optimised for veg-oil, along with fuel heating.

With the German Elsbett single-tank SVO system for circumstances you can use petro-diesel, biodiesel or SVO, in any combination. Just start up and go, stop and switch off, like any other automobile. Journey to Forever's Toyota TownAce van uses an Elsbett single-tank system. More

There are also two-tank SVO systems which pre-heat the oil to make it thinner. You need to begin the engine on regular petroleum diesel or biodiesel in one tank and after that change to SVO in the other tank when the veg-oil is hot enough, and change back to petro- or biodiesel before you stop the engine, or you'll coke up the injectors.

More info on straight grease systems in my blog site.

3. Biodiesel or SVO?

Biodiesel has some clear advantages over SVO: it works in any diesel, with no conversion or adjustments to the engine or the fuel system-- just put it in and go. It also has much better cold-weather properties than SVO (however not as great as petro-diesel-- see Using biodiesel in winter). Unlike SVO,

it's backed by many long-term tests in many countries, consisting of millions of miles on the roadway.

Biodiesel is a clean, safe, ready-to-use, alternative fuel, whereas it's reasonable to state that lots of SVO systems are still experimental and require additional advancement.

On the other hand, biodiesel can be more expensive, depending how much you make, what you make it from and whether you're comparing it with new oil or used oil (and depending upon where you live). And unlike SVO, it needs to be processed first.

But the big and rapidly growing around the world band of homebrewers don't mind-- they make a supply weekly or once a month and quickly get utilized to it. Many have been doing it for several years.

Anyway you need to process SVO too, especially WVO (waste vegetable oil, utilized, cooked), which lots of people with SVO systems utilize because it's cheap or free for the taking. With WVO food particles and pollutants and water need to be gotten rid of, and it probably needs to be deacidified too. Biodieselers say, "If I'm going to have to do all that I might as well make biodiesel rather." But SVO types scoff at that-- it's much less processing than making biodiesel, they say. To each his own.