to piss on dh's bonfire and say absolutely no way are we running our car off homemade biodiesel

[Woooozle100]

he thinks its a grand idea and will save a couple of grand and the planet. I think its an insane idea. He's a shitty midas at best, always half does things, has no chemistry knowledge / experience, is erratic and disorganised, barely has time to scratch his arse as is.. I've reasoned that it would be unsafe to attempt to make this in our garden, carry it around in our car so we could top up on long journeys,as well as the mess, the smell.. the legalities.. all things considered I am just not interested.

He's now in almighty sulk as had already sourced the chip fat and seen people carrier he wanted to buy. What dyou reckon?

I think only you know him. If he was the kind of guy to see something through I would say go for it. It would save you loads of money but if he was going to make a mess, spend money and then never complete it I would tell him to go jump.

Ummm, I reckon he is an early adopter of what could be a v good thing!

I don't think it is dangerous or illegal, is it?

our neighbour does this

it is legal - but tbh i dont think he really saves that much in money

very good idea actually. Tell your dh to go for it

It's not illegal but I think there are tax issues.

Sounds like a nightmare to me too, but perhaps if I had lots of spare outside space and free time I might feel different!

blu - he makes home brewing dangerous Our back garden already looks like steptoe's yard with his various other 'projects'

In principle I am not opposed to it - say if we had a farm somewhere and we could try it out on the tractors first and then expand.

Really don't know about the legalities. Could we have big stores of methynol, would it invalidate our insurance in any way.. really haven't a clue. I floated these ideas around to him as I was trying not to be too personal in my opposition to it

It is legal but you do have to inform the authorities and pay like a fee thing to allow you to do it

But my dh is a deisel mechanic and says you really have to get the mix perfect or you will wreck your engine

Our car runs on biodiesel, we don't make it ourselves but we're part of a coop which buys it in. it's made from recycled chip fat.

If my dp wanted to make his own I'd be OK but he is a scientist and does tend to get these things right.

You don't have to carry it around all the time, you can always fill up with normal diesel if you're away from home.

so by the time you've replaced several knackered engines and paid a fee to produce the savings would be negligible (cost of course - would still be good thing environmentally. But as would using the car less full stop)

fennel I like that idea of buyong in as co-op much better. How did you get into that?

We've been involved in two, the first was a semi-commercial effort, a group raised money, used an old garage staffed with volunteers. But I think that ran out of money, we moved away from that area.

The current one was set up informally by dp and some local friends, one of them knew a supplier and they buy in tankfuls of biodiesel, store it on a local farm, it's only open to a few people and based on trust, people note down what they've used. It works so far. You need to find a supplier and get a few people together who are interested in using it.

We used to use just a small percentage of biodiesel mixed with the normal diesel, but gradually increased it, now we use 100% biodiesel and it hasn't really affected the car's performance.

thank you. That is interesting