Running Your Car On Waste Vegetable Oil or WVO

The Dodge is an excellent candidate for a wvo (waste vegetable oil) conversion. I choose this engine over the Ford because the engine is configured as a straight 6 vs the Ford's V8. My 6 cylinder has about 40% less moving parts due to it's simple design which means there are less parts to worry about breaking as the engine ages. I also went with the Dodge system from PlantDrive.com where many of the parts that are mentioned can be purchased. Ted at VegAuto did the installation in Los Angeles.
The conversion really isn't a conversion at all. My car is more like a Flex Fuel vehicle as it runs on both Veggie and Diesel or even Biodiesel. A second tank was added to the bed that holds 45 gallons of veggie fuel. A heated fuel pick up sucks up oil and starts to warm it up. From there it goes through a Racor/ Vormax filter and all the micro bits of french frys are filtered down to 2 microns. After filtering it hits a FPHE (flat plate heat exchanger) and then gets a blast of electric heat from a Vegtherm. The oil is now being delivered to the injectors at 180 degrees and the engine loves it! How do you switch? A simple switching valve takes care of that. I start the car on diesel coming from the stock tank. When the car warms up and flip a switch on the dash and the valve now directs the flow of fuel to come from the veggie tank. At the end of the night, about two miles from home, I switch back to diesel and purge the oil out of the lines. That way my car can start in the cold morning without thick cold veggie stuck in the lines.
Now it's not so simple as to just get dirty veggie oil from a restaurant and dump it in the the truck. I bring it home in the original 5 gallons totes and filter it down to 1 micron using a system from www.Fryer-To-Fuel.com. It is very important to filter and de-water the oil before you use it. The cleaner the oil is before use, the longer your on board filters will last.

There is always a ton of confusion when it comes to the two terms as many people mistakenly think that cars running on straight vegetable oil are using biodiesel. SVO or WVO is not Biodiesel. They are both Biofuels but very different from one another. Biodiesel, in simple terms, is chemically converted vegetable oil. The oil goes through a process by which glycerine is removed yielding a "thinned" fuel that is easy to spray through fuel injectors in unmodified diesel cars. This can be added directly to the stock tank of the car. WVO, or waste vegetable oil, is pure oil straight from the fryer. The oil is filtered and dewatered and then put in to the vehicle. This fuel is heated to a point that it's viscosity becomes similar to diesel, again, making it easy for the injectors to spray fuel in to the cylinders. Cars using this fuel generally have additional filters and heaters on board. This fuel is added to a secondary tank where are switching valve lets the driver start up on diesel then run on WVO once the car has warmed up.