compliments come in all forums *forms*

"<snip>...Some suggested items that people have used with great success are old blue jeans, there are "sock" type filters of cloth that are readily available and inexpensive too.
The best bet would be to slide over the the SVO side of the forum to see what the "greasers" are doing. From what I understand is they are a cheap bunch, so inexpensive filtration techniques should abound."

quoted from the bio-d boyz...

ROTFLMAO hahahahhahahaaaaa

Well... a certain frugality does permeate the boards over here. Who says that's such a bad thing?

They are cheap, because all their money went into modifying their fuel systems.

Of course I'm cheap too. I spent a total of $400 on my processor/wash tank setup. Since last August, I have paid off that investment twice or three times over now that I save over $2.25 per gallon on fuel.

For me it was an ease of use AND a frugality issue. I didn't want to have to play chemist for a few hours every week to make my fuel for $1 a gallon. I filter and let it sit for a while, and pay 25 cents a gallon (for filters and collecting fuel costs). Now if I pay $1000 to convert a vehicle, and i drive 10K a year (conservative) at 20mpg, I will save $375 the first year, and $1375 every year after that and save all the time I would be making biodiesel. If I make biodiesel, for a $400 setup fee I will save $600 first year and $1000 every consecutive year, PLUS I have to make it which takes easily 10 times the hours I spend filtering my oil to go in the car.

If I had a nice new vehicle and I HAD to make biodiesel for it (if it wasn't a good WVO candidate or under warranty), I would, but why would I want to unless I had to? BD costs more and is much more time consuming to make.

THe other consideration is the size of yoru fleet. If you're only talking about biofueling one car, then I think VO is the more economical way. If you are talking about running two cars or more on biofuels then it is a tougher call on the economic side.

My car for example cost ~2.5k to convert, doing a good deal of it myself. If I were to spend that amount converting my wife's car, now you're at 5k. In that case 1k for a processor and a buck a gallon leaves you 4000 gallons before they come even. In our house 4000 gallons is a few years worth of fuel.

I may have been more inclined to go the b100 route despite the extra effort it takes if I could have found a diesel car the wife likes. When I couldn't sell her on a '98 300D, I figured I better pack it in on that one and just convert my own car.
Charlie

quote:

THe other consideration is the size of yoru fleet. If you're only talking about biofueling one car, then I think VO is the more economical way. If you are talking about running two cars or more on biofuels then it is a tougher call on the economic side.

Actually the economics seem to be the other way around if you are talking real "fleets". If you run th enumbers for fleets of low MPG large trucks converting them to VO is significantly more economical than trying to make B100 for them. Even very high quality conversions and precessing equipment pays itself back very quickly if the project is well organized.

yeah... well I just thought it was funny after the recent round of newbie calling, that we are collectively referred to as greaser's and on top of that we are also cheap.

$2500 for a conversion of an Excursion? And you did a lot of it yourself? That thing better drive itself, too...

quote:

Originally posted by B.K. Hosken:
$2500 for a conversion of an Excursion? And you did a lot of it yourself? That thing better drive itself, too...

Well... I didn't quite do all of it myself. The tank was fabbed at greasel and it came to nearly $1k by the time I had it shipped to the west coast. Nice tank though. Also I had the tank installed at plantdrive which came to $700 for the install. That actually was most of the cost. The rest was just components. If the excursion came with a second tank from the factory it would be a pretty cheap car to convert I think. But alas...

Also Dana I udnerstand what you're saying about the big rigs but I think the point you are making is more a function of the MPG and overall consumption. In a nutshell, the cost of conversion scales with the number of vehicles you have to convert. How quickly you make back the conversion cost scales with 1/MPG (e.g., consumption). So with a big fleet of trucks at 5 MPG running lots of miles, the amount of time it takes you to make back the conversion cost PER TRUCK is very quick. Also, once you pass breakeven, the amount of money you "make" by converting to VO scales with 1/MPG also. So... I agree that the economics for big rigs is in a whole different league compared with personal/family vehicles, but I think the bigger factor there is MPG. Either way... substantially higher than average consumption would push you towards VO economically of course. In the case of a "family fleet" of 2-3 cars which between them rack up 20k miles per year tops, b100 homebrew is cost competitive with VO unless you assume fairly long vehicle lifetimes and neglect risk to the vehicle in the analysis (as a guy running VO in a 12k engine, I certainly agree that the risk is low... but it is always possible to make a mistake...). OK now I have begun to ramble.....

Charlie

quote:

Originally posted by B.K. Hosken:
$2500 for a conversion of an Excursion? And you did a lot of it yourself? That thing better drive itself, too...

really, man
I spent $41 for my 17 gal aluminum tank on eBay, $28 for my Fleetguard filter, scattered $10s and $20s here and there (which thank god I didn't document), but I'd be very surprised if I spent more than $500 on the entire system over the 18 months I've been up and running, and that's rebuilding, reworking, reconfiguring it numerous times...

also, my filters are free, my two 150 gal dewatering tanks were free, the sunlight that does my heating is free...
I doubt I spend more than 2¢/gal to drive around when I'm on veggie

those BD guys may call us cheap, but economy is the hallmark of good design
I'm much more proud of how well my rig runs than of how cheap it runs

peace

Wow... that is cheap. Makes me wonder what people in general are paying to convert their cars.

In my case I looked at the costs and my driving and decided I'd come even and start to gain ground in 17-18 months and that was fine with me. I did go with the most expensive tank option out there, and getting it installed certainly did come out on the high side of the estimate.

Bear in mind my $2500 number includes a very expensive custom tank, shipping that sucker to the west coat, a hotfox heated fuel pickup (overkill with my climate and oil quality for sure), vormax, pump, regulator, a LOT of plumbing and a vegtherm which I later took out and if anyone want it they can have a helluva deal on it.

I dunno... I figure I had ~$1k-$1.2k in my merc and those are very easy to convert, so 2.5k for the ex didn't seem so bad. But geez man $41 tanks and free filters?

Now I'm curious... mabe I'll post a poll or something on this subject.

Charlie

quote:

Originally posted by B.K. Hosken:
Now if I pay $1000 to convert a vehicle, and i drive 10K a year (conservative) at 20mpg, I will save...

And since I drive 1000 miles a week and get 25mpg, I save $100 every week. I drive that about 45 weeks a year. That's $4500 per year.

(It takes me as long to fly to where I work as it does to drive. If I fly I also need to rent a car. The company pays me about $450 per week for my milage. That saves them about $350 per week in tickets and rental. It is a good deal for both of us. And my travel is much more flexable. Some of the $450 goes to pay for routine maintenance, fuel , and tires. With the rest I am paying for the car (8 weeks worth of driving), not so routine maintenance (just got the parking brakes fixed and AC recharged, next are those pesky stuck windows on the passanger side...), and setting aside money for the eventual cracked head (yes, I have a #14 in my 87 300D) and engine rebuild. I have 230,000 miles on the car now. I wonder when the rebuild will need to happen... )

Yes, I am cheap. But for good reason. The car is going to pay to rebuild itself. All it has to do is what it was designed to do, run down the highways for hours on end.

-Jim

Most see me as that wierd old guy that carries a big green tank in his pickup truck all the time. They also don't understand why they smell B-B-Q every time I drive by. A few have figured it out, from those I get big waves and smiles.

Actually - Most of the money stayed right in my pocket -- Once I get the home-built heated system finished (at a cost of about $150.00) I will be running on 8-9 cent/gallon fuel.

I think I have spent about $50.00 on small conversions to my Dodge that is running cold blends. Probably have about $300.00 in verious heated settling barrels, pumps, vac collection tank. filtering barrel setup, flash evaporator for dewatering, etc. (salvage yards and fabrication skills can be very helpfull with frugality)

Figuring the cost of blended fuel used during oil collection, the electricity needed for heating, pumping etc, House water filter elements, Etc it costs me about 15 cents/gallon for my finished oil.

At the current cost of pump fuel used in blending (just under $3.00/G) and depending on the blend ratios, the final fuel blend runs between 65 cents - $1.00 per gallon. No nasty methanol to buy and store, no 20% byproduct to worry about getting rid of - and the exhaust smells --OOHH - SO GOOD.

I was called cheap and stupid until fuel prices went up. Now I am 'smart'.

I spend about $500-$600 to convert. $250 of that is a coolant heated filter I designed and had built. The rest is various hoses aluminum, clamps, fittings and all that good stuff.

People used to scoff and laugh... nowadays they seem to ask a lot more questions.

People used to just see me as "cheap". Now they think I'm onto something. I drive A LOT, so I save A LOT of money. Nothing like driving to Montreal & back for free.


As for the biodiesel vs SVO "debate":
-It costs roughly the same to set up a biodiesel processor as it does to convert a car to SVO.
-Once your done, an SVO conversion just requires filtered & dewatered oil. For biodiesel, you need that PLUS you have to play home chemist with sometimes expensive potentially dangerous chemicals.
-B100 is pretty much out of the question in cold climates. SVO isn't.

quote:

Originally posted by jake palmer:
People used to scoff and laugh... nowadays they seem to ask a lot more questions.

I never had anyone scoff or laugh...but one friend did express genuine puzzlement and asked, simply and genuinely, "why??".

I began to gave a longish explaination about the environment and money savings and etc... but then I finally stopped all that stuff and just said "but you know... all that stuff is true but the thing is that it realy helps if you are kind of an oddball to begin with". I think that's actually true. All the stuff about the global warming and the economic savings, etc... I'm not so sure how much of that is truly motivation and how much of it is more in the category of rationalization for doing kind of an oddball thing and getting a charge out of being able to fuel your car in a very nonconvetional way. It is very liberating to have a choice. That's a significant part of it for me anyway.


Charlie

quote:

Originally posted by Charlie_M:
... I'm not so sure how much of that is truly motivation and how much of it is more in the category of rationalization for doing kind of an oddball thing and getting a charge out of being able to fuel your car in a very nonconvetional way. It is very liberating to have a choice. That's a significant part of it for me anyway.


Charlie

Wow, you just nailed it.

quote:

Wow, you just nailed it.

Yep, that is pretty much it. For me, after I read about it I said "Oh, I have GOT to try that!"

I can't sit still. This is what I do to relax.

-Jim

I quit giving a crap about what other folks think a long time ago... I've always walked the less traveled path... sometimes it's not as easy as the more popular paths.. but it amost always more interesting and rewarding...