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Smilin? all the way to the bank

BY BILL BRADLEY [email protected] One Sudbury resident doesn?t care about high gas prices when fuelling up his 1997 Volkswagon Jetta. After he warms up his car, he doesn?t use gas at all.
BY BILL BRADLEY

One Sudbury resident doesn?t care about high gas prices when fuelling up his 1997 Volkswagon Jetta. After he warms up his car, he doesn?t use gas at all.

Unlike most people, Rob Whiteford isn?t worried about high gas prices.
Instead, Rob Whiteford, who lives in Hanmer and is a mechanical engineer apprentice for Bestech Engineering, flips a switch beside his steering wheel to power his diesel car with 100 percent vegetable oil. It is drawn automatically from a separate tank in the trunk. The fuel is provided free from a local restaurant.

To them, it?s a waste product from cooking french fries. To Rob, it?s his fuel of choice.

?Just last weekend I took a trip to London and back - around 1,300 kilometres - without having to spend any money on diesel fuel other than the first two or three kilometres to warm up the engine and the vegetable oil tank. My car is now more environmentally friendly since it doesn?t poison our air or contribute to global warming,? Whiteford says.

In fact, he states if vegetable oil and biodiesel became a more mainstream fuel, it would reduce our dependence on foreign fossil fuel and give Canadian farmers much needed income.

?And most obviously, I am saving a lot of money, up to $50 per week depending on mileage,? he said.

Being handy helped cut the cost of his system to $500 for fuel lines and switching valves that switch the fuel between tanks. He fabricated his own vegetable fuel tank himself.

A separate gas tank in the trunk of Rob Whiteford?s Jetta holds the vegetable oil he uses to power his car.
?The payback is pretty quick, just a couple of months,? he said.

?To run vegetable oil you need a second complete fuel system so I have dual fuel tanks, the original diesel tank plus a second vegetable oil tank in the trunk. You start on diesel. When you are at the proper operating temperature then you flip the switch on the dash. It switches a valve under the hood and you start drawing vegetable oil.

?Vegetable oil is thicker than diesel fuel when it?s cold so it has to be warmed up to make it a similar viscosity as the diesel so it runs through the fuel injection system properly.?

Whiteford says he got his start in green fuels from Joshua Tickell?s book, From the Fryer to The Fuel Tank, back in 1998.

?Tickell writes that you can convert the vegetable oil to biodiesel, a mix of vegetable and diesel, but I went on to learn you could do it my simpler way, running just on the vegetable oil after your auto is warmed up enough. There is a cost to making biodiesel because you have to mix in methanol and sodium hydroxyl.?

Whiteford says his vehicle can run on any type of vegetable oil, and even animal fats, but they require more careful filtering.

As for his car exhaust, Whiteford says it smells a lot like a barbecue, which isn?t a bad thing either.

For more information, Whiteford recommends websites like www.biofuels.ca and www.greasecar.com, which sells ready-made kits.



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