I've been doing a lot of research into readily available alternative fuels as kinda a personal hobby of mine and the best sounding thing out there that I've come across is biodiesel.
They are saying that to make your own biodiesel only cost about .80 to a dollar per gallon to make. Okay sounds great, saves you roughly 3 bucks a gallon at the pump.
The newer refined waste vegetable oil units say it only takes about 30 minutes of hands on time to make. I think it's a 48hr totally process tho.
I'm just curious if anyone here is making their own. It sounds too good to be true to me.
Any input would be helpful
I have several friends that have been either making biodiesel or running straight WVO in their vehicles (going on 10 years now). It's a great idea, and it's quite doable if you wanna put in a little effort. But one by one, most of them got tired of it and moved onto other hobbies. It just got boring after a while, and they decided that they weren't all that serious about saving the fuel money. For my dad, it took about 1.5 years for him to get interested in other things. He passed his diesel beater-car onto another friend who is probably still running it on free-ish fuel. During our tenure with it (I helped out extensively with this project), it operated well on filtered WVO dumped directly into the tank. And, yes, the exhaust actually did smell faintly like the products cooked in the oil (Chinese food & Chick-fil-a, in our case). The WVO from our particular restaurants would freeze up at around 40*F (lower for the CFA peanut oil). So we would only run it straight on hot summer days, and we would mix in less and less as the temperature fell in the wintertime. Our friends would either run the biodiesel conversion or install heated fuel tanks to run it in the wintertime. Also, different types of oil froze up at different temperatures.
If I was doing it again (and I probably will someday), I would collect waste motor oil from local garages or autozone and filter that with a centrifuge. Much easier to pump, much cleaner than dealing with rotten french fries, and the centrifuge appears to be funner & easier to use than the cartridge-type filters that we used (based on helping our friends out with theirs). It doesn't freeze up under any normal operating conditions, and it will be far nicer to your fuel system at 40*F than congealed chicken wings will be.
Biodiesel will also be kinder than WVO, but it is still of heavier viscosity than petrodiesel, and it doesn't lubricate as well as old injector pumps like mine require (this point is probably moot, as petrodiesel also fails in this regard).
So you can reasonably make biodiesel, or just run WVO or engine oil. The hardest part will just be getting a supply lined up. We chose a supply that froze solid, and that was the point where it ceased being fun. Even had we been doing the biodiesel conversion, we couldn't have easily picked up our oil supply during the cold season.
If you can do that, it's just a matter of making sure the fuel is clean enough and of sufficient viscosity to run through your fuel system without breaking things. Viscosity fears did drive one of our friends away from biodiesel. It was a great idea when he had a 15-year-old TDI. Then he bought a brand new one and didn't have the stomach to put homebrew in it. Warranty issues and fear of messing something up on his expensive rig drove him out of the hobby. We just opted for a $1000 beater car and decided we didn't care if we messed the IP up. I don't think anyone in our group messed anything up, but the potential is there if the fuel gets too solid to pump smoothly. This is mostly a concern for places with cold winters. Not sure how cold your region gets, but places like SoCal and AZ can much more safely ignore this problem.
