We Be Greasin’!

For Memorial Day Weekend, we embarked on a journey to the Gorge Ampitheater for the Sasquatch Music Festival. Seneca recently installed a Mega-Therm heater for our veggie oil fuel line that ensures that the temperature of the oil is high enough, as well as an auxillery pump to help out the injection pump with processing veggie oil. So the 175-mile trip was a test of the newly upgraded greasecar system. And thanks to Seneca’s troubleshooting and work on the bus all day Saturday before we left, we made it to the Gorge and partway back on grease with no problems! WOOHOO!

Switching to grease went very smoothly, and the Mega-Therm heater really kicked in, heating the oil up to the ideal 175 degrees very quickly. We noticed that it has a tiny bit less power going up hills on grease compared to diesel, but that can be expected. Other than that, there was no noticeable difference in engine performance on grease. The bus enjoyed being vegan for the trip! Now all that needs to be finished for the grease system is mounting the switches and gauges to the dash.

The only problem we had was a bit of difficulty getting the bus to start. It takes several tries of cranking to get her going. Seneca thinks there may be some air getting into the lines, and plans to replace a connecter in the grease lines that seems a little cheapy. Also, we ordered some new glow plugs because those need to be replaced periodically and often problems starting indicate faulty glow plugs. So hopefully once those things are replaced she will start up more reliably. Diesels always have a little trouble starting in the cold, but we want her to be as reliable as possible.

We’re now just mostly working on small things to get the bus ready for our trip: fixing the curtains, replacing the interior upholstery, deep cleaning the inside, and working out the last kinks in the grease system and new engine. We’ve got a few more weeks before we hit the road, and were very happy that this test run of the grease system did so well. Yay for the volksvegan! May there be many more greasy miles ahead…

 

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…

 

New Site for GreaseMonkeys

Thanks to Green Options, I found out about a great new site for people running on veggie fuel that need help finding friendly restaurants with grease to spare. It is called 100th Grease Monkey, and the aim of the site is to create a database of restaurants offering grease for fuel to traveling “Grease Monkeys” like us! The database is just getting started, but I’m excited to see this project grow. It certainly would come in handy for a WVO-fueled road trip!

Here’s some info on the idea behind the 100th Grease Monkey site:

The story of the “Hundredth Monkey Effect” originated with Lyall Watson in his 1979 book Lifetide, in which he claimed to describe the observations of scientists studying macaques on the Japanese island of Koshima in 1952. Some of these monkeys learned to wash sweet potatoes, and gradually this new behavior spread through the younger generation of monkeys—in the usual fashion, through observation and repetition. However, according to Watson the researchers noted that once a critical number of monkeys was reached—the so-called hundredth monkey—this previously learned behaviour instantly spread across the water to monkeys on nearby islands.

What does all this have to do with veggie vehicles? Well, the hope of this website is to launch the “Hundredth Monkey Effect” in regards to veggie fuel. If enough people visit this website and enough restaurants choose to be included in our database, we hope to reach a level of awareness that changes society on a fundamental level. All we need is a few more grease monkeys to reach that critical point. So please, spread the word and help us reach that ever so important 100th Grease Monkey!

Go Grease Monkeys, go!

And as for an update on the bus, she’s running, but not too reliably. I drove her around town this weekend and she had trouble starting at first, but after one run she did just fine and started up each time I tried after that. We are planning to put in a new Turbo Diesel engine (or TDI) before we do any major trips. This ol’ engine just isn’t working well and we know we’ll need to upgrade eventually, so we might as well get a reliable engine in her sooner rather than later. It will be nice when we have an engine that is powerful enough for the size of the bus (the 1.6 L diesels just aren’t enough to move a big bus up hills), and we have a friend who will help with the installation, so now we just need to find a new engine that will last us a while. Drop me a line if you know of any good resources for finding newer TDs or TDIs!

 

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!

 

Grease Collecting Pictures

So as promised, here are some grease collection photos of our quickest collection ever. We collect grease at the Breakfast Club every Friday, and they are nice enough to leave out the hot fryer oil in a big bucket so we can come get it before it solidifies. Seneca has to prime the pump (by sucking on the end of the hose, ewwww!) to get the grease flowing. Sometimes we hook up the pump to 3 filters so the grease can go right into the tank, but this time we opted to filter it at home so we just pumped it straight from the bucket into a container.

With a little cooperation, we got the grease in record time. Our friend Crystal works at the Breakfast Club, so she unlocks it and we plug in the pump, then pump it from the bucket into a container. It usually takes 2 people (one at each end of the hose) to collect grease, but on this trip we had 4 just for good measure. I held the hose in the “cubie” container and took the picture at the same time, Crystal unlocked the door and plugged in the pump, Seneca primed the pump and held the hose into the bucket, and Andy helped hook up the electrical cord and generally supervised the edeavor. That’s what I call teamwork.

Seneca filled up the tank for our maiden grease voyage to the Santa Barter Fair (about 60 miles away). But that’s a story for another post…

 

OK, so the maiden voyage was postponed

Well, we didn’t get to take our maiden voyage this weekend. The bus is still in the shop, due to a couple other parts that needed replaced. It should be done tomorrow, so we’ll be taking our maiden voyage this coming weekend to the Santa barter fair (it’s only about an hour away). So sadly my parents didn’t get to check out the grease bus, but Sen & I will get to take our first grease-fueled trip in it together, and we’ll be able to camp in it all weekend. Joy!

I did take some grease-collecting pictures and will try to get those up soon. We’re getting pretty quick at it due to a fancy-pants filtration system that Sen & Andy set up to pump the grease out and through three filters so it’s ready to go in the tank. Now that we have 5 sources of grease, our exhaust will smell like a mix of Mexican food, Chinese food, greasy bar food, and hashbrowns!

 

Maiden Voyage!

I will be making the maiden voyage in the newly-converted greasecar this weekend! I’m going down to McCall to show off the bus to my parents, who used to own a very similar one. It’s going to be about 400 miles round trip, and Seneca anticipates that I should be able to make the whole trip on one full grease tank, about 15 gallons. This will be a test to see if the miles per gallon on grease are better or worse than regular diesel, on which we get about 30 MPG. Most “greasers” say they get similar or slightly better mileage on grease, so we’ll see. I will be hitting some mean hills though, with the itty bitty 1.6L engine I’m sure it will be slow. But it’s a great way to test out the grease system. The only thing I’m nervous about is that Sen isn’t coming with me, so I just hope we have no car troubles. Send me & the Volksvegan some good vibes for a safe trip!

We have now secured 3 regular sources for waste oil. We also found out who our competition was, there are a number of locals who make bio-diesel out of wvo, and they have set up agreements with the biggest restaurants with the best grease. So that sucks, but maybe they can learn to share. Until then, we get about 5 gallons a week from each of our three sources, although the timing on 2 are a little irregular. That should more than cover our in-town driving, since we rarely drive and do most errands by bike. We really want to get a stockpile saved up for road trips though. We’re taking the bus to a barter fair September 9-10 and another much farther one the second weekend in October. I’m excited to finally be taking some veggie-fueled trips, and the bus is perfect for barter fairs since we can camp out in it and set up a canopy on one side of it to use as a booth. I sell and barter with handmade gemstone jewelry and herbal soap & massage oil at the fairs.

Tomorrow we collect more grease (I’ll try to get pictures this time) and take the bus into the shop to have the belts replaced and hopefully get our temperature gage fixed. The temperature gage stopped working, and it’s pretty important, so if they can’t fix it we might have to take our maiden voyage a week later.

 

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…

 

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!