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 THE BASICS:
Diesel engines are designed to run on "diesel fuel". Diesel fuel is much thinner than vegetable oil. Used cooking oil is generally thicker than new vegetable oil.
To use Vegetable Oil in a A Diesel Engine as FUEL, it must be made "thinner", so that it can be moved, by the "lift pump", from tank, to filter, to injection pump, injectors, and into the combustion chamber, and burned successfully.
There are two generally accepted ways to thin the vegetable oil: (A) Add a Straight Vegetable Oil (SVO) System, or (B) make "biodiesel".
Our business is currently mostly focused on:
"(A) Add a Straight Vegetable Oil (SVO) System", although we certainly sell components, and even kits, for biodiesel applications.
DETAILS:
( A) Add a "Straight Vegetable Oil"(SVO) System to the engine/vehicle fuel system. This supplies HEATED and therefore THINNED vegetable oil to the engine. The most commonly accepted, practical temperature for this is 70 degrees Celsius which is 158 degrees Fahrenheit. The SVO is heated, in our kits, by a combination of electric heating device(s), and by heat exchangers reliably and efficiently transfer heat from the hot engine coolant ("antifreeze") to the SVO.
Two of these heating devices are in ALL kits ( the VM2 heated water separator/fuel filter and Vegtherm inline electric heater).
The other two are OPTIONAL or DEPEND ON CLIMATE, OIL TYPE, and HOW MUCH FUEL IS USED (FUEL ECONOMY). These are the Hotfox coolant-operated in-tank heater, and the Hotplate SVO/coolant flat plate type heat exchanger.
In most cases, this is a "two-tank" system. (Get more info on our tanks HERE.) The only exception, for kits from our company, at this time, is that we offer a "SingleTank" system, for older Mercedes engines.
So, you start the engine on diesel fuel, or biodiesel, run it a minute or two (perhaps twice as long in winter as in summer), then you switch a dash-mounted fuel selector switch, and STRAIGHT VEGETABLE OIL (pure 100% vegetable oil, not "biodiesel" or vegetable oil/solvent mixture) is fed to the engine from a second tank. At the end of the trip, diesel fuel (the "start/purge") fuel is selected, and a short "purge" is done, to remove vegetable oil from the injection pump and injectors before the engine is shut down for longer periods (e.g. more than an hour, in warm weather, more than half an hour in cold weather). If the engine is shut off without a purge, a buzzer reminds the driver to do so.
KITS and COMPONENTS:
We sell both kits and components in our on-line store.
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