How to Use Vegetable Oil to Fuel Your Car

Towards B20

The previous tank of petrol was half B20 so that’s effectively 10% biodiesel (assuming it’s mixed). I’d noticed the car appeared to have (even) more juice, and come refill time I’m now at 6.3L/100km and that’s with most trips just across town and me behaving rather sporty (learning more about the gears).

With the refill the tank is now nearly all B20, and boy can you notice… it has even higher torque in any gear. In 1st it now pretty much races up my steep driveway without me touching the accelerator – previously it’d just hang or crawl gently. The effective range of all gears has thus increased at least on the bottom end, which is actually very handy in some busy traffic situations.

So I’m expecting the milage to rise further just on the basis of running on almost all B20 now. The stuff clearly has more energy (that’s a known fact but it’s fun to see it in action) so I’m basically getting more for the same price – unlike E10 petrol which actually gives people lower milage.

On that note though… with refuelling at the FreedomFuels bowser, I’m not making use of my Coles or Woollies petrol vouchers. So I suppose that’s “costing” me 4c/L, other than that the diesel price is pretty much the same ($1.225/L lately in this area, and for some reason diesel seems to not be subject to the weekly petrol price cycle so it’s pretty stable throughout the week).

PetrolMonkey – track your fuel consumption and compare!

Some time ago friends of mine built the PetrolMonkey site. You can enter a basic profile/name for any car you own, and then input refills. The system then shows nice stats in both numbers and graph, and you can compare with other similar cars. There’s a minimal mobile version also.

By comparing Tiger (it’s the diesel growl ;-) with Otto (“the auto”), I already know that I’m spending about 40% less fuel now per km. Eat that, Kevin Rudd PM, with your pathetic 5% emission reduction over too many years proposal!