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One person’s trash is another’s... well, fuel for a Ford F250 pick-up truck.
For Louie Krausz, a consultant in Systems Integration & Technology with Accenture, that fuel would be vegetable oil—the type a restaurant disposes of and has someone haul away. Louie has made arrangements with a local Chinese restaurant and a tavern near his Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina home to collect the used cooking oil he needs to fuel his truck.
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It’s a winning situation all around. Louie has found a free and eco-friendly fuel source and the two businesses dispose of the oil at no charge. In the long run, it’s the environment that benefits, as there is no need to deposit the substance in a landfill nor are there any pollutants caused by burning fossil fuels.
“The satisfaction for me is that I am doing what I can to make the environment a better place for the next generation,” Louie says.
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$500 investment
Like most Americans, Louie is also impacted by the spiraling gas prices, with diesel prices well over $4 a gallon by mid-May. Although his vehicle gets only about 17 miles per gallon, he is fortunate in that it has a diesel engine that, unlike an internal combustion engine that runs on gasoline, can be converted to run on eco-friendly alternative fuels such as vegetable oil or bio-diesel.
Louie researched various types of diesel engine conversion kits, settling on one from Lovecraft Bio-Fuels at a cost of $500. With a friend’s help, he installed the conversion kit in about three hours.
Converting a vehicle’s fuel system may nullify the dealer warranty, Louie cautions. But since diesel engines run for several hundred thousand miles, high mileage (out of warranty) trucks/cars are a great candidate for this type of conversion.
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Smells like French fries
Louie’s first fill-up wasn’t exactly inexpensive, breaking in the new system by purchasing pure vegetable oil from a retailer at $6 a gallon. However, he later started “grease dumpster diving,” taking care to properly filter the used cooking oil of any impurities before pumping it into his vehicle.
Louie makes a collection once each week, pumping the oil from the business’ outdoor storage receptacle into a 55-gallon drum that includes a filtering attachment. He hopes that other motorists who convert their vehicles won’t start competing for the same greasy pot of gold.
“The exhaust kind of smells like French fries,” Louie says. “But I only notice it when I’m stopped at a light with the windows down. It’s not an unpleasant smell.”
The beauty of the process, he says, is that any combination of diesel, bio-diesel or vegetable oil can be mixed in a single tank, although some conversion kits require installation of a second tank for the non-fossil fuels.
“Diesel engines are different from those that run on gasoline in that the fuel is not ignited by spark plugs, but rather by pure compression that is used to crank the pistons,” Louie explained.
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Going green at home
Louie likes the fact that he is reducing his carbon footprint, explaining that since vegetable oil comes from plants that use CO2 (one of the greenhouse gases) while they are growing, burning vegetable oil as fuel is not adding to the net increase of CO2 in the atmosphere.
His green practices don’t begin and end inside the fuel tank, as he is remodeling his home using the most eco-friendly methods, materials and appliances he can find.
“I would advise anyone thinking about converting their vehicle to run on vegetable oil to do as much research as they can, as there are different types of kits and some conflicting information out there,” Louie says. “I think people need to be reasonable in their green practices, though. You don’t have to go extreme to go green.”
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