running on veggie oil / legal situation ?

peasant

Hi folks

Had the bright idea to get myself a stone-age pre-chamber diesel (an old Merc or somesuch) and running it mainly on veggie-oil (not "Bio-Diesel" but rapeseed oil, cooking oil, etc)

Does anyone know what the legal situation is re tax / customs etc for a) having it in the tank, b) possibly buying in bulk and c) having a big drum of it at home?

Any "vegetarians" already out there ?

maidhc

You should be paying duty:

s94 of the Finance Act 1999 defines "mineral oil" as;

hydrocarbon oil, liquefied petroleum gas, substitute fuel and additives;

and

"substitute fuel" means any product, including biofuel, in liquid form, manufactured, produced or intended for use or used as fuel for a motor or as heating fuel but does not include an additive, hydrocarbon oil or liquefied petroleum gas;

There is an exemption scheme but it is restrictive, and of no concern to people putting crisp'n'dry into w123 estates!

There is no VAT on vegetable oil;
http://www.revenue.ie/services/tax_info/vatrate/P01249.htm

(Mind you I would be very surprised if the customs are concerned with people running their cars on veggie oil. There was a prosecution in the UK for it in the past year, and it got very very bad press.)

overdriver

If you go to www.ecocar.ie, you can read about the exemption. The big drums are less value than tesco's veg oil in 3 litre bottles. It's a loss leader.

Paul (MN)

you have to pay VAT if using it as a fuel.
there is not duty (currently).

I think you have to buy it from a registered producer (eilishoils.com) to be legal but I guess you could use lots of Tesco 3l bottles and kepe your receipts to pay the VAT on "at the end of the fiscal year), if you are stopped.

junii

Jez, would you be saving much money doing that? What kind of power and economy are you looking at as opposed to diesel? Wheres the catch?

Whats pre-chamber?

peasant

savings depend very much on your mileage and the price difference between veg oil and diesel (currently about 28 cent/litre)

also if you want to do it properly, i.e. run 100% veg oil you should consider upgrading a few engine components (hoses, seals, injectors) and install a heat exchanger. Kits cost around 700 euro. So you'd need to do a good bit of driving to recover that.

Veg oil gives you at least the same efficiency from your engine, sometimes even better, if properly converted.

pre-chamber is the old diesel technologie, i.e non direct injection and definetly non common-rail. On these engines you can risk running on veg oil without conversions ...sort of ... depending on the state and condition of your injection pump and general engine condition(read up on it)


biggest advantage is you're absolutely GREEN, no greenhouse gas emission (well ..the co2 you emit will be absorbed by the next batch of oilseed that somebody grows...that sort of thing)

Boggle

There's a guy who used to work with my father a few years ago who ran his car off waste oil from chippers. He got on fine till he was featured in the farmers journal and now the govt are after him for excise duty - he is fighting it apparently.

junii

Boggle wrote:

There's a guy who used to work with my father a few years ago who ran his car off waste oil from chippers. He got on fine till he was featured in the farmers journal and now the govt are after him for excise duty - he is fighting it apparently.

Surely the bits of chips and fish were all through it though or did he have some way of filtering it. What kind of car was it?


Peasant: Could you convert any auld diesel into running veg oil? Its a wonder more ppl aren't doing this if it works.

Boggle

He filtered it in his shed I believe and he was driving a golf... (pretty new from what remember)

junii

Boggle wrote:

He filtered it in his shed I believe and he was driving a golf... (pretty new from what remember)

Did he have modify it much to make it run on this?

peasant

junii wrote:

Peasant: Could you convert any auld diesel into running veg oil? Its a wonder more ppl aren't doing this if it works.

It's been done in Germany (for example) for years.

The necessary grade of conversion is food for heated deabates. Some people run old Mercs on veg oil with zero modification ...others spend thousands to convert their state of the art Pumpe-Duese VW.

And on some diesels it just doesn't work at all. It's usually those whose injection pump doesn't have a separate lubrication but is lubricated by the diesel it pumps ...veg oil is just not "liquid" enough to do this properly.

Even if you get a car that runs with zero modification, you should be prepared to replace the odd filter by the side of the road and/or tighten the odd hose of a cold morning

running on veg oil poses a few problems:

- it is thicker than diesel, so you need a strong injection pump and maybe some larger hoses/fuel lines. Some injectors also need to be adjusted to start injecting a tick sooner

- it congeals faster than diesel, especially at cold temperatures. So it is advised to pre-heat your veg oil or mix in some diesel ...especially in winter

- it is slightly more corrosive than diesel. Especially on old engines this could be a problem, as the veg oil "cleans" away all the old crud that has built up over the years, leading to fuel leaks everywhere. Worst case scenario is it runs into your engine lubrication, congeals your motor oil and kills your engine fairly quickly.

so ..to sum it up ...there is a lot of trial and error involved ...some tinkering and three million different opinions on what is really necessary and what works best. Always depending on the type of engine, of course.

That and the fact that diesel wasn't that expensive up to now is the reason why it hasn't really caught on that much

Plus the hassle of buying your veg oil and storing it ...pumping it into your tank by hand etc

andreas_220D

peasant wrote:

running on veg oil poses a few problems:

- it is thicker than diesel, so you need a strong injection pump and maybe some larger hoses/fuel lines. Some injectors also need to be adjusted to start injecting a tick sooner

the old inline pumps used on the W115/W123 Mercedes are strong enough and they have a separate lubrication. You need to modify the start of delivery at the pump to start injecting sooner. If you want to do that on the injectors, you need to change the injection pressure to a lower value but that is definitely not recommended, neither for veggie oil nor for diesel. At the opposite, you should replace the nozzles against modern ones and increase the injection pressure and thus modify the start of delivery to earlier.

peasant wrote:

Even if you get a car that runs with zero modification, you should be prepared to replace the odd filter by the side of the road and/or tighten the odd hose of a cold morning

that's part of the game BTW, i did not need to change my filter so far (about 20.000 km on veggie oil)

peasant wrote:

Worst case scenario is it runs into your engine lubrication, congeals your motor oil and kills your engine fairly quickly.

But that's mainly a problem of Pumpe-Duese resp. Common-Rail. The old prechamber engines don't suffer from that. That's one of the reasons why you should (need to) run on a 2 tank system on a modern direct injection engine.

peasant wrote:

Plus the hassle of buying your veg oil and storing it ...pumping it into your tank by hand etc

Well, always a good opportunity for nice chats with people at LIDL, ALDI, Tesco or wherever you fill it up.

Green Driver

I have been using rapeseed oil in a 2004 diesel Skoda Octavia since April 2006 and I am pleased with the performance. I bought the Skoda second hand and I spent about €2,000 euro, including VAT, getting it adapted to run on pure vegetable oil.

I got the car in February 2006 and used diesel in it for 2 months. After switching to using rapeseed oil, there was no reduction in performance. The car does about 40 miles to the gallon.

I buy rapeseed oil fuel for my car from Eilish Oils, http://www.eilishoils.com/
They sell the rapeseed oil in 1,000 litre plastic containers which you can put in your garden and get refilled by them as necessary. I call into a place in Dun Laoighaire owned by one of the directors of Eilish Oils and get my car filled there at 84 cent a litre.

The rapeseed oil sold by them is exempt from excise duty, but they pay VAT on it.

It is physically (but it may be illegal if you do not pay VAT) possible to use rapeseed oil of the right quality bought in a shop as fuel in a diesel car which is able to run on rapeseed oil. I do not know if other vegetable oils, such as sunflower, or olive, oil, could be used as fuel.

Apparently, vegetable oil sold as food is zero rated for VAT, so if you use it as fuel, which is subject to VAT, you might be breaking the law. I am going to make enquiries to see if it is possible to arrange to pay the VAT on oil bought as food and then use it as fuel.

Earlier this year someone who knows about these things estimated that you would get back the cost of adaptation after 30,000 miles using rapeseed oil.

colm_mcm

if you're buying at 84c a litre and only getting 40mpg, and had to pay for a conversion, are you actually saving money?

Green Driver

Vegetable oil as fuel in a car

As I said in my posting of 04/11/2006, it was estimated early this year that after 30,000 miles using rapeseed oil I would have covered the €2,000 cost of the adaptation of my car. It is not possible to guarantee that figure, but if you subtract the cost of rapeseed oil at 84 cent a litre from whatever you are now paying for diesel, you will find out how many cents per litre you could save and then if you know how many miles a year you do you will be able to calculate how long, assuming 40 miles to the gallon of rapeseed oil, it would take you to cover the €2,000 cost of adaptation.

If you are a good mechanic, you could buy the kit and install it yourself. There is a German company called Elsbett, http://www.elsbett.com/ which has been adapting diesel engines to run on vegetable oil for years. The kit in my car was supplied by them.

If Bush makes a really big mess of the Middle East and there is a war, which I hope does not happen, the cost of petrol and diesel could go up a lot and it might take less than 30,000 miles to cover the €2,000 cost of the adaptation.

But it is also about the planet and preventing global warming. The CO2 which is emitted when I burn rapeseed oil in my car is CO2 which was taken out of the atmosphere when the oilseed rape crop was being grown, ie. just a year or two before I burn the fuel.

Therefore, when I drive my car, I am not making a net addition to the CO2 in the atmosphere.

By contrast, when you burn fossil fuel in your car, the CO2 which is emitted is a net addition to the CO2 in the atmosphere because the fossil fuels have been under the surface of the earth for 100's of 1,000's of years.

HJL

what happens if you have a few litres of veg oil in your tank and you get dipped by customs? is keeping a few reciepts in your glove box and saying you will pay tax at the end of the year enough to keep them happy?
i would have my doubts, although some using some veg oil in their tank is hardly a public enemy. with all the NI/UK reg cars and the like would a customs officer have a high priority to bust someone with a mix in their car? because technically isnt it the same as using green or red diesel?

in the UK you can use 2500 litres and not have to pay duty, but this is the irish government who wwant to screw you out of every penny you have so i doubt if such a scheme will be introducted here.

unkel

Please read the charter before further posting, HJL

Resurrecting old threads is not done here...