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Bill Bill is offline
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First recorded activity by BoatBanter: Mar 2007
Posts: 225
Default Converting Diesel engines to burn Bio-fuel


Joe wrote:
Has anyone here converted your boats engine over to burn bio-fuels?

The smell of french fry, or duncan doughnuts exhaust fumes sure would
be nicer than diesel.

Here in Houston we have a dealer than will deliver and it's cheaper
than Diesel fuel.

Joe


Deisel engines are designed to run on this stuff but it depends on the
level of filtering that has been done to it. If it is used french fry
grease you should filter it and probably mix it with either bio-deisel
or regular deseil. You can also heat it to get some better
performance. There is a ton of info on this on the net. If you want
it to be the same grade as deisel fuel with all the same perfance
qualities you need to do a little refining yourself. It's doable at
home but is a little complicated. It's propably not worth the time
and added expense to you but you can mix well filtered french fry
grease with deisel fuel and at a pretty good ratio (something like
50-75% grease depending on where you live) and get similar performance
characteristics. One thing I have heard repeatedly is to not leave
the grease in the line when the engine is off. If it gets cold it
will thicken and can cause all sorts of problems when trying to start
up. Kill the fuel pump and let it die on its own. This should be
common practice anyways but it's really important if you are using
unrefined grease as your fuel.

A lot of people like the smell of the exhaust but they say it always
makes them hungry.