Finding veggie oil on long trips
QUESTION:
Hi Larry,
Thanks for detailing your experience driving across the country. Very exciting (and also somewhat comforting!)
I'd like to hear about how you obtained fuel on your trip cross country. Did you plan ahead? How much time does finding the fuel take?
I'm guessing at home you go to the same restaurant. Where I live, I've heard restaurants are starting to charge for their waste oil....
Thanks,
Vicki
POSTED BY VICKI :: CALIFORNIA USA :: 08/11/2008 4:50 PM
LARRY'S ANSWER:
Hi Vicki,
In answer to your questions about our veggie car trip across the country.
Although our trip was planned, it was from the viewpoint of; we have to be in Denver on these days for a conference (where Debra was speaking) and in Los Angeles and Vegas and Chattanooga and Atlanta for media appearances about the veggiecar on these other days.
We actually did NOT plan our trip around where we could get veggie oil.
We have a GPS navigation system, that helps us to locate restaurants that might be willing to give us some waste vegetable oil.
I simply go in the restaurant and ask if I can have some of their waste vegetable oil for my car. After some explaining, often enough, they say 'Sure'.
Then, we often ate a meal at the restaurant, just to help keep things even. (After all, they are giving me free fuel.)
I estimate we spent about 2 hours a day collecting and filtering the veggie oil for every full day of driving we did on this trip.
This was with a manual hand pump and gravity based filtering (no pump).There are faster methods available.
I have also heard the rumor that restaurants are beginning to charge for their waste oil but I didn't run into even one on my entire trip across the country and back. So, its not something I am going to stay awake worrying about.
I also really like the fact that my car exhaust doesn't reek of some toxic petroleum product, but instead, it smells like food cooking.
Larry