Frequently Asked Questions

• How does it work??

Rudolph Diesel originally created the diesel engine to run on vegetable oil. He hoped that farmers would be able to grow their own fuel. Our modern engines now require fuel that is thinner than cold cooking oil - this is how it works...

• Drive your car on diesel until the engine heats up.
• During this process, your veggie kit is heating the fuel tank, lines, & filter. The oil needs to be heated to make it thinner.
• Once your engine is warm, you can switch to heated veggie oil.
• Then, before you turn your car off, you flip back to diesel to clean the grease out of the fuel lines. Otherwise it may cool and get too thick.

Easy!

• Can I convert my gasoline powered car to run on vegetable oil?

Unfortunately no gasoline engine will ever be able to burn straight cooking oil.  When Dr. Diesel designed the diesel engine, he designed it based on compression explosion.  This means that there is so much heat and compression generated in the engine that the fuel molecules literally just explode.  In a gasoline powered engine, there are spark plugs that ignite the fuel, similar to lighting a gas powered stove or grill, using a spark.  Gasoline engines can only burn very flammable substances such as alcohol(ethanol), propane, natural gas, or unleaded fuel.  Diesel fuel is considered a grade of oil and is not very flammable at room temperature and vegetable oil is even less flammable.

• Will vegetable work in all diesel engines?

Vegetable oil will work in about 80% of the diesel engines currently available.  This depends on the engineering used when designing the fuel delivery and injection systems and the emission control systems.  Vegetable oil is thicker than diesel fuel, even when heated to temperatures above 150 degrees F.   Please look at our section “Choosing a system” for more specific information or contact us if you have specific questions about a specific make or model.

• How will vegetable oil affect the life of the diesel engine?

Because vegetable oil is a superior lubricant to low sulfur diesel fuel, it should in theory increase the engine life by lubricating the top of the engine.  We have early prototype systems with nearly 200 thousand miles on vegetable oil with engines that have 300 to 500 thousand miles on them.  The key to success with burning vegetable oil is using a high quality conversion kit that heats the oil properly, cleaning and dewatering the grease properly, and flushing the vegetable oil out of the system properly at the end of every trip.