It's great to have a large beast of a truck when you're building a homestead, but the cost to the environment and to our pockets can be defeating. That's why our plan includes converting this baby to veggie oil. This means installing a system that allows the engiine to use cooking oil from restaurants instead of gas. Here Joe explains the basics of the system in detail for those of us who know how to talk cars.

Our truck is a 1997 Dodge Ram 3500. It has the 12 valve Cummins 5.9L in-line 6 cylinder diesel engine. It's regarded by many as one of the best light-duty truck engines ever made. Despite its late nineties production it is one of the last diesel engines to feature an entirely mechanical fuel injection system. This reduces some of the difficulty and reliability issues that can be found when converting new vehicles to waste oil. The addition of computers that track fuel/oxygen mixtures and other functions of the fuel system can make bio-fuel conversions more complicated.

The system we will be installing in our truck is designed to be very robust and suitable in any climate. It features 4 in-line heated filters to clean the waste oil on its way to the engine. A brief summary of the system is as follows:

• Unfiltered waste oil will be dumped into a large heated tank located in the bed of the truck
• Coolant will run through a heat exchanger at the bottom of the tank to heat oil.
• The heated oil will flow "inside" a coolant hose through a smaller diameter aluminum hose heating it to engine temperature before reaching the 4 filters
  The oil will flow into 4 filters that are all in parallel so they will clog evenly together extending filter life
• Filtered oil will flow from the filters into a valve that switches between diesel and bio-fuel systems
• A "looped return" will be installed preventing any cross-contamination to occur between the veggie and diesel fuel tanks.

Our plan is to use a standard 100-150 gallon fuel tank that fits into a truck bed. We will modify the fuel tank to allow us to heat the oil, clean the tank easily (via removable lid) and install some type of fuel-level indicator to allow us to track the level of waste oil. With a 150 gallon tank, at 15 miles per gallon, hauling a heavy load we could feasibly travel over 2,000 miles without stopping to fuel up.

With this vehicle in operation, traveling a long distance to acquire salvaged materials will no longer have a high fuel cost associated with it.

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