Well I'm running through the last tank of the second 205L drum of biodiesel, so nearly 400L of backyard B100 Biodiesel has flowed through the surf's engine so far, havn't been to the servo in over 2 months! ;-)
So far:
Cons:
My fuel consumption went pretty much to the crappa, was using quite a bit more
after the inital change over.
Near the end of the first drum my "fuel drain" light came on a couple of times, had to drain the fuel filter to get the water out of the trap. I spoke to the guy and he said that sometimes you can get a little bit of water that settles in the bottom of the drum every now and then, he said the best thing to do at the bottom of the drum is to poor the last bit into a bucket and or jerry or somthing, let it sit overnight then poor it in and ditch the last litre. Oddly enough I havn't had the problem on the second drum, so maybe just a bad batch. It is also possible I contaminated one of my jerrys when I was cleaning them (I'm think it could be my fault). Not that it really matterd, there was no difference in the way the surf ran, just a slight inconveince having to drain the tap a couple of times.
I also was starting to get a rattle for half a second or so on a cold startup. I wasn't sure if it was the fact that I had just changed back from penrite semi-synthetic to
shell diesel super oil when I started using the biodiesel or not. I flushed the oil and refilled thinking that maybe the semi-synthetic and
shell oil had mixed badly. The noise has now gone, so I guess it was not the biodiesel afterall.
The surf can now take upto twice as many turns of the engine on startup on a cold morning than previous, so from maybe 3-4 turns to 7-8 at it's worst, but sometimes it starts straight away. There seems to be a little variation in the cold startup. Once the morning start, she starts instantly for the rest of the day, even after sitting in the uni
carpark all day. In fact I'd almost go as far to say that it starts easier after the first start.
PROS:
After about the 3rd week on biodiesel I started to feel as though the surf had more power. Thinking that maybe it was a "plasebo" effect I just ignored it. That was until I was cruising down the freeway one night shortly after and pulled out to pass a slower car, I was doing 120km/hr with barley any throttle. That was deffinatally different, the old automatic non-intercooled turbo diesel doesn't normally act in such a responsive way, so there was deffinatally somthing going on.
Over the next couple of weeks I felt the old girl launching off the line at the lights with much more enthusiasm and this was deffinatally not a plasebo effect, it was real, and very noticable. The car has almost completly stopped blowing smoke now, apart from a little tiny puff of greyish smoke on startup. My fuel economy has gone from terrible to absolutally fantastic, the best I have ever had out of it since I owned it. It's very difficult to give a realy accurate figure as I fill up from jerry's now, but I can tell you that it was about 90-110km's out of 1/4 of a tank on diesel, and that was a given, no matter what we were doing. On the changeover I went down as bad as 65-70km's for the same mark (1/4 of a tank) with EXACTLY the same driving. The last tank I have 135km's for the same mark and I've been driving it a little harder (enjoying the power). These are around town trips, almost idential.
Home, school, uni, school, mother in laws,
home almost every day.
So the only thing that I can put that down to is a cleaner engine, thanks to the biodiesel, and the supposedly higher cetane level in biodiesel vs petro diesel.
My
shell diesel super oil is STILL CLEAN! OMFG! Normally after I change the oil, you can start the engine, run it for 30 seconds, stop it and the new oil is completly BLACK. I've down nearly 1000k's since I change the oil the second time and it's still CLEAN!
Anyway, all good so far, in fact I'll be ordering my 3rd drum very shortly.