From: Chris Barker <ftog@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> I remember your coverage of the conversion of the outside of the
> vehicle Jan. It looks great and I am impressed with your efforts to
> keep the cost to the environment down. The technical stuff is
> interesting as well.
Thanks! We are now about as fossil-fuel free as one can be in an
industrial country. Two vehicles run on biodiesel, Veggie Van Gogh runs
on waste vegoil, and our electricity comes from wind and geothermal. I
filled a 2.5 gallon container with gas in spring 2003 for my
super-efficient inverter Honda generator -- it's still half-full. We
use about 20 pounds of propane a summer for our refrigerator and flash
water heater.
Regarding engine lifetimes: I brought Veggie Van Gogh in to Cummins
when I first got it for a "once over." The shop super came over,
holding a piece of paper, shaking his head, saying, "Man, this is going
to be 300 or 400..."
"Dollars?" I thought to myself, a bit anxiously.
"... thousand miles before this needs anything done to it." he
finished, and charged me about $170 for changing oil and all filters
and adjusting the valves. The tech let me watch, so the next valve
adjustment will only cost my time.
I use synthetic oil and a cleanable (Racor) filter, and change oil
every 20,000 miles, cleaning the filter every 5,000. Diesels do gather
more soot in their oil, but that does not reduce lubricity of synthetic
oil, although it does make it thicker over time. I'm going to add a
centrifugal bypass filter that will remove the soot.
But of course, being diesel doesn't automatically make a poor engine
last a long time, as those unfortunate enough to have the GM 5.7 liter
engine know very well. Perhaps that was what Windsor was referring to.
These rarely went beyond 100,000 miles!
Requisite Olympus content: I recently put up images of the bunk in
Veggie Van Gogh, taken with an E-20n digital, link below.
:::: Given an infinite source of energy, population growth still
produces an inescapable problem. The problem of the acquisition of
energy is replaced by the problem of its dissipation. -- Garrett Hardin
:::: Jan Steinman <http://www.Bytesmiths.com/Van/Bunk.php>
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