August 11, 2008

LARRY'S ANSWER:

Hi Nell,

Thanks for sharing your ideas on how to improve things for our future roadtrips.

1) The picture idea is brilliant. I had not thought of it myself. It does look like an excellent way to clearly communicate what I want without even having to speak a verbal language.

2) The idea of filtering veggie oil while driving had also occurred to me.

It seems like I need to do some further research to see if somebody has already come up with a practical method of doing this. If I don't find something practical, then I guess its time to put on my inventor hat or find an inventor.

It would greatly speed our trips if the filtering coould be done on the road.

Thanks for helping with the excellent suggestions!

Larry

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

LARRY'S ANSWER:

Dear Bob,

There is a website which has people all over the country who are willing to share veggie oil, sometimes free sometimes for a fee.

www.Fillup4free.com

They have a map so you can instantly see in what areas of the country WVO is available.

You can register to add yourself to the map if you want to share your veggie oil or to use it to find people who have waste vegetable oil to give away or sell. Registering is free and gives you instant access to their discussion forums, video and photo libraries, and news feeds.

Larry