make your own desiel

Ingredients
2L of unleaded petrol approx £1.20 L

8L of light veg oil sunflower or rapeseed approx £1 per liter

100ml of acetone 500ml approx £1.20

mix together in jerry can and add to fuel tank

apparently a side effect of this fuel is that the engine runs more smoothly..... source

total cost for 10L £10.52

diesel at £1.30 L £13

Are you going to try this out BBB?

I've read that the acetone will clean your system but on the same note an excessive amount can destroy your seals and gaskets. So be careful...

I don't think I have the balls... But I will defo if I'm gona change my van

Depending on you car, this may knacker your fuel pump, and/or worsen starting problems in cold weather (it may also damage the fuel injectors, particularly on newer vehicles). The problem is, that diesel is quite thin, whereas veg oil is more viscous (more viscous still in cold weather)... which is why you need to "water" it down with thinning agents such as petrol and acetone... getting the mix right for the temperature and the model of car is the tricky part.

Having said that... most diesel engines can run on pure vegetable oil with only slight modifications (some with none at all or just an inexpensive heat exchanger). A full professional kit can set you back five or six hundred quid (about a grand fitted - if you're not technically minded) like this one from DieslVeg which allows you to run your car on nothing but pure vegetable oil... it basically has a small diesel tank which you use to run your car until it's warm enough (the first couple of minutes/miles) then you switch over to the vegetable oil which is thinned by the heat of the engine.

With diesel costing between £1.20 and £1.30 a litre (and veg oil costing around £0.50p) your payback time can be well under a year... after which you are running up to £0.80 a litre cheaper (around £3.63 a gallon cheaper - that's a saving of over £54 on every fill-up of your 15 gallon tank).

Not economic in Tenerife, with diesel @0.91euro/litre and veg oil more expensive.

Then your money saving alternative is to fry your chips in diesel

I have an old van so the fuel pump is more receptive to veg oil than newer models... Still don't know if I have the balls to actually do it...The van only cost 600 so a grand for conversion is a bit excessive.... Where do you get your veg oil for 50p The cheapest I've found in the cash and carry was 19.99 for 20l.... Which was another reason I haven't tried it yet as desil is 120 so not much saving for the hassle....

A simple heat exchanger will probably suit your old van better... have a look on ebay, kits go for a song... most old vans can probably get away with a simple 50/50 mix, though (1 part veg oil to 1 part standard diesel)... but check with a mechanic or do some research first.

50p a liter is a average based on the following:

• Reasonable cost per litre of bulk cheap food quality veg oil in cash and carries about 80 to 100ppl
• Cost per litre of used veg oil 0 to 20ppl
• min cost 0ppl, max cost 100ppl - average cost 50ppl

In reality, bulk buying (1000+ litres) of reclaimed Waste Vegetable Oil from suppliers like Arrow et al is going to cost about 60 or 70 pence a litre to your door via a tanker. Old veg oil can be had direct from retail outlets for far less or even free (although many retailers are waking up to the fact that old oil has value)... if you're going to pay for it from chippies/kebab shops/restaurants etc, you'd be looking at giving them no more than 20ppl and picking it up yourself.

Of course, if you're going to go down this route (worth it for free/dirt-cheap fuel if you can get a reliable source like chippies etc to give it away or sell it for pennies) then you're going to need to learn how to clean it ready for use.

type "biodiesel" into the search bar on ebay for all manner of goodies

yeah as posted in another post a mechanic recommended a 70/30 (diesel/veg oil) mix to start and increase gradually to 50/50

indeed... you can probably go as high as 75% Veg oil during the warmer summer months (provided you don't have a Lucas fuel pump) without too much worry.

The only real concern with lashing out on any expensive full conversion kit to run 100% SVO (straight veg oil) is the possibility that vegetable oil may go up in price and diesel could go down... Just 12 months ago for example 1 litre of SVO could be had for about 35p in shops like Lidle etc, while diesel was pushing 90p a litre. Now, however, diesel is about £1.25 and the same litre of SVO is a quid... the gap appears to be closing.

One could argue that as it stands, SVO is still a whole quid a gallon cheaper than diesel... and diesel is expected to hit the £1.50 - £2 a litre mark in the foreseeable future once/if oil hits the long predicted $200 a barrel mark