Unlike other alternative energies such as electricity or hydrogen, switching to biodiesel does not need you to buy a new car. Your existing diesel engine is perfectly compatible with biodiesel. At the most, you will probably need to make some very minor changes to your car. Some important things to remember while switching to biodiesel is that it degrades natural rubber and it turn to gel in freezing temperature. Biodiesel will also clean all the dirty residues of a diesel engine from the fuel line for which you need to change your fuel filter soon after you start using biodiesel. With new diesel cars, you usually do not need to make any modifications to make them biodiesel compatible.

Switching To Biodiesel

Before you make any modification to your car, make sure that you have a good supply of biodiesel. If you are living in a place where a local gas station provides biodiesel, then you are lucky. However, if such gas station is not available or is located far from your place, you can always make your own fuel at home. You simply need to set up or buy a biodiesel processor and contact a local fast food joint for abundant supply of used oil. They will probably give it to you for free. Now you are ready to switch to biodiesel and make a major difference to the quality of the air you breathe in.

You can use biodiesel mixed with conventional diesel or 100% pure biodiesel in your car. Again, remember that it has to be a diesel run car. Many diesel cars and trucks use B20 biodiesel that has 20% biodiesel mixed with petrodiesel. This also increases the fuel efficiency of your engine considerably and causes much less pollution than a pure petrodiesel run vehicle. You can simply pour in some biodiesel in the tank after filling it with regular petrodiesel. Keep a tab on the ratio of the two, as a lot of biodiesel will make your rubber gaskets degrade quickly.

You can also modify your diesel engine car in order to make it run on vegetable oil. You can buy a do-it-yourself conversion kit, which includes an auxiliary fuel tank and an accompanying fuel line. You can directly use SVO (straight vegetable oil) or WVO (waste vegetable oil), which is super-heated for making the oil combustible. First, you need to start your car using bio/petrodiesel and then when the vegetable oil is heated enough, you can switch over to it.