It’s official! The green Land Rover is finally truly green. My ingenious husband has been working for months to get to this point. We’ve been collecting waste vegetable oil from our local restaurants. Michael has been researching formulas with which to obtain the optimum viscosity, and the day has finally arrived! How did he settle on this particular day to become THE auspicious day that the rover runs on yucky stinky rancid used cooking oil?

Let me tell you….Michael came home from work the other day. I came home a bit later to tell him that he would need to use the rover to get to a massage appointment IMMEDIATELY after work the following day. Unfortunately, he did not have enough fuel in the tank, and would not have time during the day to get any. I mentioned that we could just go get more that evening. Here was the glitch: The gas station with a diesel pump was ALL the way on the other side of town. So I said, “When were you going to try using the veggie oil formulas that you’ve been working on, since you know they have the proper viscosity?” And that was it! That provided the impetous for the BIG day!

Michael went out to the carport and started pumping filtered vegetable oil. He mixed it in the prescribed proportions with a small amount of unleaded gasoline and kerosene (okay, so it’s not TOTALLY green, but it’s a lot better than it was. Biodiesel uses methanol which is really difficult for us to get here, and not “green” either).
He mixed the concoction in a 15 gallon barrel, and he filled the rover’s fuel tank….Then…..he started the engine!

It worked!! Now the rover exhaust smells like it comes from a fryer rather than a stinky old diesel-guzzling engine! Mmmm mmmm, good! Yay, Michael!!

Tags: St. Croix

This entry was posted on Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 7:23 pm and is filed under St. Croix, Terry Talk, Veggie-Rovers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.