I'm not here to claim that I've invented something new, or trying to sell snake oil to the masses. In this hub I'm just here to pass along my experience with converting a 1981 Mercedes 300TD to run on waste vegetable oil.

I enjoy watching informative programming on television and reading "how to" articles in magazines and from hubbers here on hubpages.com. My wife accuses me of clogging my brain with a lot of useless information. I admit I may never need to use some of it, but occasionally it does come in handy.

A couple of years back gas prices started to climb and were approaching the $3.00 level. This was more than my information clogged brain could comprehend or accept. What were the "good reasons" the prices were rising. Try as I might I couldn't figure anything other than greed by the oil companies driving the prices to these levels.

I own a sign business in Raleigh, North Carolina and do a lot of driving in my business. I also like to travel on weekends and travel from state to state tending to other business interests. Even before the current recession caused havoc to the national economy, the rising fuel prices were cutting into my personal economy. How dare they?

I happened to drive by a new business opening in my neighborhood one day, and with the curiosity of the salesman in me, I stopped in to investigate. This was going to be a new Automotive Repair shop, and the owner didn't have a sign yet. It was there that I met Brian Walker http://www.linkedin.com/in/brianchristopherwalker

Brian Walker is an ace mechanic who specializes in Mercedes repair and maintenance. I've been told by others that Brian is the best in this area. I ended up getting an order that day for Brian's new sign and then we talked about another sign he wanted. I gave Brian a quote of $2200.00 for the non essential sign and he told me he'd have to wait until he was up and making money to order the sign.

I had read and heard stories about diesel cars running on waste vegetable oil, and had gone so far as to do some research on the internet. The site I was most interested in was www.Greasecar.com. It made total sense to me and I bought in to the possibility that this technology was workable both for and by me. It only worked on diesel engines, and I knew that Mercedes made a lot of diesel cars and the German engineering should hold up to my experiment. I had been looking for an "experimental project" car and asked Brian if he knew where I might find one. Brian informed me that he had a 1981 Mercedes 300TD wagon. When I asked the price, he told me he was asking $1,500.00 for the car.

Now I've been known to barter for services and other things through the years, and this seemed to be a match made in heaven. Brian got the sign he was wanting and in return I got the project car and also the labor to install the conversion kit. I'm only semi mechanically inclined so it was Brian's mechanical services that sealed the deal.

The good folks at Greasecar.com sell a conversion kit for about $800.00 that allows you to run your diesel car on recycled waste vegetable oil. You can read the history of this business on their website.  As I said, I'm not here to take credit for this genius engineering, only to tell you my experience.

The short version is that Rudolph Diesel invented the diesel engine about 1902 and there was no "diesel" fuel to run it on. He ran his new engine on peanut oil. It runs as well on peanut and other vegetable oils today as it did the day Rudolph invented the engine. Oil companies found that the diesel engine ran well on less refined crude oil and "diesel" fuel became a cheap alternative to the vegetable oils.

Flash forward to today and Americans are addicted to the fast foods and drive through conveniences provided by McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's and so on. Those crispy fries that you ate last week or this afternoon were cooked in vegetable oil. When the vegetable oil gets a lot of food particles and starts to turn brown, it's time to change it for a new batch of oil. After all you don't want burned tasting fries do you? Many of the large fast food chains have companies that deliver fresh vegetable oil and pick up the used vegetable oil for processing into pet food, soap, cosmetics, glues and other products. These places are probably not the place you want to approach for your used veggie oil.

Many smaller restaurants have to pay someone to dispose of their used vegetable oil, and these are the places you can find free fuel. Many places are willing to give you their waste oil, but make sure you get permission before helping yourself.

As with most things in life, free things are hardly ever free. You can get the waste vegetable oil for free, but it still requires a bit of filtering before you can put it in your cars tank and use it. And don't discount the cost of your labor for collecting and processing the oil. In the end, Free Fuel isn't for everyone.

Obtaining the waste vegetable oil wasn't initially my biggest concern. It was the filtering of the oil that provided my biggest challenge, and I've gone through several revisions to the process before coming up with the current workable filtering process. Greasecar sells filter bags on their website that do the job of filtering the oil, as well as complete filtering systems. The filter bags are the cheapest option and work quite well. The filters are made of a fabric that filters out 5 micron particles on the inside of the filter and 1 micron particles on the outside of the filter. This is sufficient to filter the used oil to a usable state.

I'll take you through the process I use for gathering and processing waste vegetable oil. After locating a source with fairly clean oil (yes you should be choosy...it takes longer to filter nasty oil and you go through filters quicker), I pull my Mercedes wagon up to the waste oil container close enough to use my electric pump (purchased at Northern Tool & Equipment Co.). I clip the electric cables to the battery terminals of the car, place the pickup hose in the oil container, and pump the used oil into the 5 gallon containers that vegetable oil comes in. I place the 6 to 8 containers in the back of the car and take them back to my shop. I found early on that unheated oil clogged the filters quickly and were extremely slow at filtering the oil. I bought a 110 volt hot water heater element at the hardware store and connected an electric cord to the terminals. I also bought a 3 gallon metal bucket to heat the oil in. I pour the bucket about 7/8 full and hang the water heating element in the bucket, and plug the heating element in for 4 minutes ( I use a kitchen timer). At this point the oil is heated enough that it flows nicely through the filter.

I bought a 55 gallon plastic pickle barrel and cleaned it out well. The top screws off so I was able to install a spigot about 6" off the bottom of the barrel (any water in the oil will settle to the bottom). I cut a 6" circular hole into the top of the barrel (the filter has a 7" wire ring that keeps it from falling into the barrel). I pour the heated oil through the filter into the 55 gallon barrel and fill my empty clean container from the spigot at the bottom of the barrel (just an ordinary water spigot..make sure you use a rubber gasket to seal it good). Pour the filtered oil in the tank and drive.

The Greasecar website has diagrams, photos and all kinds of resources for answering all your questions about the system and all related topics. Really you could spend days there reading in the forums. Have a question...just ask.

Here I'll give you the laymans version of how the system works. The Greasecar system is a separate fuel system that gets tied in to the cars diesel fuel system. It consists of a separate tank for the vegetable oil, separate heated fuel filter for the vegetable oil, and a switching system that switches the fuel source from the diesel tank to the vegetable oil tank. It comes with all the hoses, clamps, instructions for installation and everything you need. If like myself, you're not mechanically inclined, you can get a mechanic to install the system for you.

The reason a separate fuel tank and system are needed for the vegetable oil is that vegetable oil can become sluggish or even congealed in cold weather. There is a hose that runs from your radiator to the vegetable oil tank. The tank has a copper coil in it to heat the vegetable oil. You start your car on diesel fuel in the morning, or anytime the system has cooled off, and after driving several miles, the system has heated the vegetable oil to a viscous state (I check my temperature gauge) and when the water temperature in the radiator reaches 175 degrees I flip the switch and the car is then running on FREE fuel (filtered vegetable oil). The vegetable oil gets the same mileage as the diesel fuel and has the same power as the diesel fuel. The big advantage is that vegetable oil is a renewable fuel source and doesn't have the nasty emissions of the diesel fuel. You can go as far as you want on the free, renewable, environmentally friendly vegetable oil. The last thing you do before shutting down the engine for an extended period is to switch back to diesel fuel and let the vegetable oil clear the engine. You don't want the vegetable oil to harden in the injectors because it could be very difficult to start.

I have put over 30,000 miles on my Mercedes using this free fuel source. In driving from North Carolina to Florida and back I was able to take enough containers of vegetable oil in the back of the wagon to make it both ways without ever stopping to buy fuel. In short ....it works.

While the labor of collecting waste vegetable oil and getting your hands dirty in the process isn't for everyone, it works for me on several levels. First I like the fact that the fuel is free. It keeps a waste product out of the landfills, is a renewable fuel source, burns clean, and takes a buck or two out of the pockets of the greedy oil companies.