Greaseball Challenge - Greasin’ for Charity!

Another great development in bio-fuels I heard about from Green Options is called “Greaseball Challenge.” It seriously doesn’t get much cooler than this: the Greaseball Challenge is a race from the USA to Costa Rica in vehicles running strictly on renewable fuels. And it’s a charity benefit. Their site describes the challenge:

The Greaseball Challenge is a charity biofuel car rally
from the USA to Central America. Inspired by the tradition
of the classic car race, Greaseball is a cross-continental
adventure promoting sustainability on a shoestring using
renewable fuels.
The inaugural Greaseball Challenge departs on April 1, 2007.
Armed with nothing but a sense of adventure and some
cheesecloth, five teams will drive 4,500 miles on grease power
from the USA to Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua
and Costa Rica.

I am so tempted to sign up for this thing! It’s fun to watch the racers’ progress on the Greaseball Challenge blog and live on the road vicariously. I’ve always wanted to drive down to Peru, I might just have to copy these Greaseballs and follow their route…

 

Green Options

I recently joined a new web site, Green Options as a weekly blogger. The site is a great resource for all kinds of green living information, including a section of their Green Life Guide devoted to green transportation. The Green Options Blog has regular posts on bio-diesel and WVO transportation as well. I will be writing about green art, design, and culture, but there’s a fellow greaser who blogs on Green Options, so more information will be out there on bio-fuels. Yay!

 

Fellow Greasers

I was looking around online and ran across some fellow greasers. Some folks are so dedicated, they’ve made entire sites sharing their knowledge. They sound pretty darn smart to me, but then again I am not good with the mechanical/technical side of this stuff! Check out some fellow “greasers” and bio-fuel bio-neers!

Vegd VW: Learn how Dave converted his cars to run on Waste Vegetable Oil.

The Fry Guys show you how they converted their cars and have plenty of useful tips.

Dreamer Propulsion: learn how one greaser converted a Mercedes300D.

Veggie Caravan is a non-profit group who tours in veggie-fueled buses promoting alternative energy and sustainability.

David Henri tells the story of converting his 1981 VW Rabbit in this article.

I could go on listing quite a few groups and individuals who have converted their vehicles, and the internet is a main source of information for the bio-fuel community. Since WVO conversions are still rather “underground” and definitely a DIY-project, the free-speech zone of the Internet is a great place for individual greasers to share their stories and find information. Feel free to comment with other conversion stories or the sites of fellow greasers!

 

First Veg-fueled Trip!

We made our first veggie-oil fueled trip this weekend to the Santa Barter Fair. It’s about 60 miles North, not a very long trip but a perfect one for trying out the grease system. It ran great on the way there on veg oil, but on the way back we lost power as we were going up a hill. We had to switch to diesel and it ran fine the rest of the way home as long as we stayed on the diesel. When we got home we discovered the veggie oil fuel tank was almost empty and that’s why we lost power. It’s pretty crazy cuz Sen filled it up with about 10 gallons before we left!

We have discovered the culprit though. At the shop last week the mechanic said that our injector pump is leaking and needs rebuilt. Ugh. So that’s what’s leaking, apparently it leaks more on veggie oil than diesel. We haven’t replaced our hoses & gaskets with non-rubber ones yet and we’re pretty sure that’s the problem. We did use some bio-diesel blends like B20 and it’s best to replace all the rubber if you’re using any bio-diesel because it will erode. So we kinda figured we’d have to do it sometime. Now Seneca is trying to decide whether we should fix the injector pump, replace it and all the rubber hoses/gaskets, or just get a new turbo engine. All options are going to be a bit spendy. I was warned that VW ownership meant one project/problem after another… I guess we should’ve expected it.

Here’s Seneca driving on the way to Santa. We had a great time at the barter fair. We’ve been going to it for about 4 years now, it’s a small fair but a lot of Moscow people go since it’s so close and so we always know a lot of people. I actually sold and/or traded quite a bit of soap and massage oil, and a couple pieces of jewelry as well! I handed out lots of PETA stickers, too. There was a potluck on Saturday night and a drum circle as always. I have some pictures up on My Flickr Page of the trip. Our next big adventure is planned for the second weekend in October, the Okanogan Family Faire near Tonasket, WA. It’ll be a 5 hour drive, so we may actually be packing extra grease, and we’ll be staying a bit longer. It’s a huge faire, and we’ll have a booth, so I gotta get busy with my crafting! Hopefully we can promote sustainable transportation and maybe even get some grease from the food booths at the faire!

 

Grease Collecting

We’ve been on a mission to collect as much grease as possible lately. We now have two regular sources, a local breakfast restaurant and a bar & grill. Still not a lot of grease though. We’ve tried talking to several restaurant managers and are finding that many of the larger places have collection companies contracted to take their grease. Many companies have started paying people for it, and are turning it into bio-diesel. The bio-fuel craze is here!

I went on my first collection run this weekend with Andy. The bio-brothers have quite the filtration set up! We use a long tube connected to a pump and 3 filters to suck the grease out of the bin, through the filters, and into a collection container. Then it’s all ready to put in the tank. We got a big bin to collect filtered grease in the garage, so we’re slowly building up a stockpile. I’m hoping to have enough to make it down to McCall to visit my parents this weekend. The bus needs a good bath before then, too…

 

She’s Officially a Greasecar!

Well, we have a greasecar! Seneca finished up the greasecar kit installation on Friday. Here is the converted engine… the main additions are 2 valves and a fuel filter for the grease, and of course the hoses carrying grease from the tank. The wiring is a bit shoddy at this point because the wire that came with the kit was too short, so we gotta call greasecar to get a longer wire and re-do the wiring. I’m sure it’ll look much better since the wire we got is a single insulated wire, and it will be hidden under everything up to the front of the bus.

Before running on grease, we had to warm up the engine and time how long it took to purge veggie oil from the tank. When we stop the car, we’ll have to purge it first, so it’s good to know how long before we turn off the car we need to flip the grease switch off. We have a buzzer that warns us if we shut down without purging the lines, as well, but we still need to install it once we get the longer wire. Our purge time is pretty quick at about 40 seconds. In the picture, Seneca watches the veggie oil tank and waits for diesel fuel to start flowing back in, indicating the purge is complete.

We took our first test drive in the greasecar at last! We ran it on pure veggie oil instead of waste veggie oil for the first run, and just did a quick trip out to the park. She drove perfectly, and Sen says the engine sounds a bit quieter on grease. We even stopped to smell the exhaust to make sure it was truly on grease. The exhaust on grease smelled very mild and almost like nothing, it’s a bit more of a french-fry smell with used oil, but it sure beats diesel exhaust!

We’re quite excited about finally being up and running on grease! It was much easier than we thought to convert the bus, and hopefully we’ll have many veggie-fueled travels from now on. We’re not quite ready for a road trip yet, we need to get the wiring for the kit done properly, mount the gages a bit better, and get new tires and wheels put on the bus. Then, let the grease collection commence!

 

My First Ride in a Greasecar

Yesterday Andy (Seneca’s brother) finished installing his greasecar kit. He has a 1975 Mercedes Benz that now runs on Veggie Oil! We took it out for a country drive yesterday to test it out, and it runs great! Andy made us all smell the exhaust, and yes, it smells like french fries (a vast improvement over diesel exhaust). The engine actually ran a bit quieter than it did before as well. So Andy, Seneca, Juneau, and I piled in to the Grease-Benz and headed for some country roads.

Now that Andy’s running on grease, we’re even more motivated to get the VW converted. Seneca finished up some other upgrades (new hemp/organic cotton pop-top canvas, brighter headlights, a water pump for the sink, and new injectors for the engine), and the grease conversion is up next. Stay tuned!

 

Recommended Reading…

I just ordered From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank, a book on alternative fuels. I’m about halfway through it right now, and it’s a great read. The first few chapters explain why bio-fuels are so important and why we need to get off our petroleum addiction. Not only is petroleum a non-renewable resource, but the pollution it releases is contributing to global warming, the wars we wage to defend our oil supply are expensive, bloody, and unnecessary, and we’re funneling our money for fuel directly out of the country when we could be re-investing it by using bio-fuels. This book has some great points about bio-fuels that I didn’t realize. The first is that bio-fuels are carbon-neutral: because they come from plants (which can be grown domestically, adding jobs and using fallow fields), the CO2 that these plants use in their lifetimes compensates for the CO2 emissions that occur when bio-fuels are burned. It’s a closed cycle. Emissions of other harmful chemicals are much lower than petroleum-based fuels, as well.

I’ve also found out from reading this book that the original diesel engine was designed to run on vegetable oil! It was designed by Dr. Rudolf Diesel, who first demonstrated the engine using peanut oil. There are many other bio-fuel options available as well; besides bio-diesel and Waste Vegetable Oil, gasoline engines can run on ethanol, which is made from corn. It’s unfortunate that our country is far too invested in the petroleum industry to make a serious shift over to these options. I guess it’ll take one greasecar at a time to start this revolution!

We saw the perfect slogan for a bumper sticker to put on our converted VW: This car is run on bio-fuels: NO WAR REQUIRED!