Another 2nd car on biodiesel

[3DB Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close 3DB]

Evening all,

I bought a new old car today: 2000 Peugeot 306 2.0 HDi for the bargain price of $400 with 2 full weeks of rego remaining. Link to photo below.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/p42zjkff0r..._Frog.jpg?dl=0

This is a big & early call, but it may well be the best value-for-money car I've bought out of the 13 or so I've owned. The AC doesn't work and it has 385,000 km on the clock, but it still goes like a scalded cat, doesn't rattle and generally feels tight as a drum. It also had a new timing belt, water pump & harmonic balancer fitted less than 12 months ago, so I couldn't resist. All the log books and owners manuals are there and it seems like it was serviced reasonably regularly. I just couldn't pass up such a cheap experiment. I figure if it goes bang, I can probably part it out and potentially recover my costs.

So before I give the 'Coal Frog', as I think I might call it, it's first drink of biodiesel, what should I do to prepare?

I was thinking that I will buy 2 or 3 new fuel filters and put the first one on before I start, so there is plenty of capacity to catch all the gunk that will be cleaned out of the tank. Or should I just leave the old one in under the assumption that a dirty filter has a higher filtration efficiency than a new one? I am playing with common rail here, so really don't want anything getting past that filter.

Any other thoughts or tips?

[Johnnojack Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Johnnojack]

Re: Another 2nd car on biodiesel

Bargain! I would take out the fuel tank and clean it, based on switching a toyo truck to bio. Whole system had badass algae attack. Truck is 2000 model but mechanical injection.

[3DB Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close 3DB]

Re: Another 2nd car on biodiesel

Good idea, JJ. I will take tank removal & cleaning under consideration. What did you use to clean yours out? Any solvents, or just elbow grease?

What factors do you think influence algae build-up? Reason I ask is with my Rodeo, I bought it when it was almost 20 years old, but only had 205,000 km on it and it didn't occur to me to clean the tank at the time. I clogged my first filter within a week or two of adding bio, but it has been fine since. In fact, I think I let the second one go for 20,000 km before I called time on it and it seemed very clean when I cut it open. So that vehicle had half the km, but an extra 5 years of age on it.

Now I change the fuel filter ever 10,000 km irrespective, as I read on this forum where someone had one that failed and was bypassing.

My understanding (could be wrong) is that with fuel and air filters, the filtration efficiency increases with dirt build-up, to the point where they are so efficient at stopping things getting through that they no longer allow the minimum required volume of fuel / air through, unless there is a mechanical failure such as the glue breaking or a tear in the media.

With oil filters, I thought they had a built-in bypass valve that allowed the oil to bypass the filter when the pressure drop through the media becomes too high, to avoid oil starvation.

Does anyone know if that is correct?

Back to tank cleaning - I guess I could run the Pug's fuel tank quite low, then open the inspection hatch and take a look inside, gauge the level of filth and decide from there whether it is worth doing the big clean?

[Tony From West Oz Vice Chairperson of WARFA Find all posts View Profile Close Tony From West Oz]

Re: Another 2nd car on biodiesel

Does it have a metal ofr plastic fuel tank?
If plastic there is generally no need to clean the tank as the diesel bug dies not stick to the walls of the tank and are collected by the fuel filter in normal usage.

Tony

[Johnnojack Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Johnnojack]

Re: Another 2nd car on biodiesel

You are right about oil filters DB. Not sure about other theory, but I do know that cloth bag filters for dust filtration ie vacuum cleaners cement silo filters work better with some dust adhering. So if you have a vac with cloth bag don't beat the hell out of it as it will pass more dust thru than when it is dirty. I used NAOH to clean my truck tank. It had about 3 litres of brown ' treackle' muck in it.

[Johnnojack Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Johnnojack]

Re: Another 2nd car on biodiesel

Inspection hatch! Way to go, yeah take look. I've had to make my own inspection hatches to get tanks clean.

[3DB Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close 3DB]

Re: Another 2nd car on biodiesel

Yeah just the port in the top where the submersible in-tank fuel pump lives. Has an opening about 100 - 150 mm from memory. I assume it does anyway - like a petrol EFI car? I think I need to pull the back seat out to get to it.

Tony - thanks for the tip on plastic tanks - will check on that too.

[Matt Senior Member Find all posts View Profile Close Matt]

Re: Another 2nd car on biodiesel

Bug will stick to plastic, don't ask how I know, it forms a nice resin type cake that does not stick really well but it does cause issues. Use a biocide seen a few cases of it lately.