my life

We be greasin'!

We finally have a greasecar! After a lot of work (mostly on Seneca's part), we got our greasecar.com kit installed so the bus can run on Waste Vegetable Oil. We took her for the first veggie-fueled run on Friday. We had to be sure to smell the exhaust, which didn't smell like much of anything since we were running on virgin oil for the first trip, not used oil. We're very excited to have a more sustainable & less polluting form of transportation, and of course, now we're planning some trips in the bus! We've done a lot of upgrades on the bus since we got back from vacation: new headlights that are MUCH brighter and safer, a hemp/organic cotton pop-top canvas with 3 windows, fixed the sink with a hand-powered water pump so now all the camping equipment works, and we just got our new tires in today. So all that's left is to put the new tires & wheels on (we have an appointment scheduled tomorrow) and possibly get the engine checked out by a mechanic and the timing belt replaced. Then it's ready for road-tripping!

Seneca has been very dedicated to this project, making it his full-time job for the summer. His brother, Andy, also has a greasecar, an old Mercedes Benz. So now the "Bio-Brothers" are hoping to start up a business converting people's cars to run on veggie oil and installing conversion kits, using their own cars as models and as advertising. We have been trying to find sources of used fryer oil from various restaurants. We have one regular source, The Breakfast Club, who graciously provides us with about 5 gallons every week, which we then process (put baking soda in it so the animal fats & hydrogenation settles out), filter, and put in the veggie oil tank. We're on the lookout for more sources, and have a couple in the works (it sure helps knowing lots of people in this town, especially those that work at restaurants we want to get grease from). We just got a big storage barrel for the filtered grease, which we heat up a bit before putting into the tank. We're hoping once we move to Eugene (sometime later this fall) that we can get grease from the many vegetarian restaurants in town, to avoid having to separate the animal fats from the usable oil.

So the process works a bit like this: the car has 2 tanks now, one for diesel (or bio-diesel when we can get it) for starting the car & warming up the lines. The second tank is the veggie oil tank, which is heated up so it flows well. After the car is warmed up & running, we flip a switch on the dash and it begins running off of the veggie oil tank. Seneca says the engine sounds quieter on veggie oil, since it's a natural engine lubricant. Once it's running on veggie oil, the exhaust smells like french fries (a big improvement over diesel exhaust), and we cruise at about the same miles per gallon as we get with diesel (for our car it's about 30MPG, not bad for such a heavy bus). About a minute before we stop, we have to purge the veggie oil from all the fuel lines since it can solidify when cool, and switch back to diesel. If we forget to purge it, we have a buzzer that alerts us when we turn off the car in veggie-oil mode, so then we can turn it back on & purge it. Pretty simple, and according to Seneca (well, he's an engineer, this stuff is way over my head), it was easy to install. The only problem we ran into was that our wire for the switch & gages wasn't long enough, so Seneca had to improvise and we'll re-wire it when we get the correct wire from greasecar.com. After that's done the wiring will be hidden and it won't look ghetto-rigged. :)

We're planning on going to several barter fairs this fall in the bus, and spreading the good word about a more sustainable method of travel. And of course now that we get free fuel (assuming we get some good sources soon), we'll be much more likely to take a lot of weekend road trips & camping trips!

I have been writing about our conversion process and bio-fuels in general on my new blog, Our Volksvegan Adventure. We'll also post pictures and stories of our hopefully many future veggie-fueled travels, information on collecting and filtering grease, and anything interesting about sustainable vehicle developments. Please check out the new blog and say hi to our new greasecar!

Labels: activism, green living, volksvegan grease bus

posted by Megan @ 5:18 PM