My Vegetable Oil Conversion Story

Until 3 weeks ago, I was 4-year owner of a 2000 Honda Insight (the highest mpg *petroleum* car on the freeway in America-- 50MPG). Unfortunately, I leaned that every 100,000-120,000 miles, the IMA (integrated motor assist) battery (which gives the otherwise normal honda its 50MPGs) dies. I bought the car at 70K and at 105,000 (5K over my warranty), the battery died. It's a $4,000 battery. Fortunately, I got a tip that Honda Corporate will sometimes give what's called a "good will warranty" and cover the expense for you. And I wrote Corporate and asked for a good will warranty and they gave it to me! So I lucked out and got a recharged $4000 battery *and* a new $2,000 catalytic converter that they wanted to throw in for *FREE*.

Unfortunately, I didn't want to go through that again at 200,000 miles so while reading about gas alternatives (I'm a big alternative fuels person) in Fast Company magazine, I learned that a lot of Hollywood stars are having their diesel vehicles converted to vegetable oil cars by this famous "green mechanic" in Kansas... he's doing some amazing things...

So after doing about 1 month of research, I learned that there are diesels that actually get 50MPGs-- they're called standard-transmission Jettas and you can burn biodiesel in them all over the USA (even if you don't get them converted to straight vegetable oil, you can still burn "b100" -- which stands for "100% biodiesel" as opposed to "b20" which stands for "80% petroleum diesel & 20% biodiesel").

But after filling up with 1 tank of b20 at $3.80/gallon here in the Arlington, VA area, it didn't make economic sense to me anymore to be buying b20 biodiesel... considering it only costs $.70/gallon to make yourself b100 with *free* vegetable oil from restaurants nationwide.

So I started researching something called the "greasecar" and found out that there are some really great mechanics out there who can convert most diesel engines to burn straight vegetable oil. So I found a *really great* mechanic in Lancaster, PA named Fred Burgess who has been doing greasecar conversions for something like 15 years.

I'm blown away with the results... and so are my coworkers and the people I've shown my car to... in fact 2 of my coworkers saw the clean work he did on my Jetta and they are now shopping for their own diesels and thinking of contacting Fred to convert them to burn vegetable oil.

After the conversion, I still have all the original equipment on my car... it's still a diesel engine... still runs petro-diesel fuel (or biodiesel if I want)... it just has an additional tank in the trunk (taking up about 1/4 of the trunk) that I can switch over to in order to burn my *free* vegetable oil... yes... it's free because I have a restaurant supplier in DC who gives me their excess grease and I have a guy who filters it all for me because I'm building a web site for the filtering product he's selling... and my landlord says it's no problem for me to store the vegetable oil in our shed(it's totally non-flammable).