Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Overhaul of Waste Vegetable oil system on '02 Jetta TDI


Just some notes about this overhaul, most of which I have probabley mentioned before. The car initially had a stock Plantdrive TDI kit installed . Getting a better understanding of things, or at least my opinions about them led me to change and add some things.

What I don't like:

  • My car has no hose over hose(HOH) or hose in hose(HIH) on the fuel lines. Nor do I have a heated fuel tank. If I were to do it again would added the heated fuel lines. But I am in a realatively mild climate and it was a son of a gun to run those aluminum lines under the car . Most of my oil run under the car is uninsulated aluminum tubing - this I would not do again
  • The Vormax (FPHE) is in the trunk. This to me does not seem like a good idea as there is heat loss on the way up to the engine bay & a section of oil is unheated before the Vegtherm for the initial switchover.
  • The 2 micron Racor filter attached to the back of the Vormax is unheated. Again if I was to do things again I would use something else, perhaps a Frybrid TDI filter or the new Vegmax thast Plandrive sells. I would not go through the hassle of wrapping the Racor. I only did it because I had some leftover tubing around.
It's been about a month now and car is running good. As for the air leak, I found a line with a slit in it near one of the hose clamps.

I have noticed a quick change in temperature when I do the initial switch over but after that the change is not as great as I had hoped. In other word when I switch over the oil will go to 100º rather quickly but after that it take time more time then I would like for it to reach 160º.
I'm thinking that the heater coil around the Racor is more of a passive heater. The quanity of oil it is heating is more then is needed and it can not heat that amount of oil quickly.

To fix this I bought the Frybrid Heated filter. I have yet to receive it but I will replace the racor filter and homemade heater coil with this. My thinking is that the new heater will be using the same amount of heat to heat a smaller quanity of oil because it passes through the heater exchange on it's way to the IP.

I still have to insulate the lines and do a little replumbing. I will install the Frybrid heater at that time. Perhaps by the end of the month

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