SmartVeg report.

[pope]

Well, after spending endless hours reading this and other bio diesel forums I finally bit the bullet and ordered a Smart Veg system to fit myself to a '93 200 Tdi Disco. Thought i'd post a quick view of the experience for any interested parties.
First off, I must say that the kit is probably a bit overpriced.(£513 for the basic kit with VAT and post). Especially when you consider what you get when you pay for a £500 diy LPG kit. You could no doubt gather most of the parts together for half the price though not the control module. Having said that the comprehensive instructions and ease that comes with an absolutely complete kit, right down to all the jubilee clips counts for a lot in my book, I don't really have the time for all the head work that must come with sorting it all yourself. And i'm hoping that the fitting of a recognised automatic dual fuel kit must add a fair bit of value to the car when I come to sell it.
Fitting was no real problem though you do need to be a pretty confident home mechanic. The strap and bracket that is supplied is not really up to the job of securing a twenty litre diesel tank in my opinion, probably fine tucked away in the boot of a car but not in the rear cabin as it is in a Disco, so I made my own angle iron frame that fits into the place left by the removal of one rear dickie seat, my bracket bolts to the seat mounts on the rear wing and through the floor, two tonne ratchet strap holds the tank down to it. Sorry no pics, was in too much of a rush when getting it all fitted to stop for photos, may take a few if there's much interest in this thread.


It's a hose in hose heat exchanger set up using solenoids to switch fuels and a small computer to control and automatic switch-over regulated by a heat sensor sampling actual fuel temperature rather than relying on the water temp guage. Everything seems to be working very well and I really can't notice any difference in performance when running on Veg oil. I've spent most of today dragging a 12"x6" trailer up and down a serious hill off road with upwards of sixty Xmas trees on it so I would have noticed any lack of power for sure.( this disco's gotta earn its keep, and does!)
I bought my first SVO last weekend, 105 litres in one litre bottles from Lidl. Getting some very funny looks in the car park as my son Owen and I crammed sixty odd bottles down it's greedy neck. If anyone knows where I can get 20l drums from in the mid/south wales area I would be grateful.
Rapseed oil in Lidl/Aldi's was 68p/litre last weekend(though it may have gone up since(i'm sure we used to have some kind of economic stability in this country once!).
I worked the mileage out from brimful to brimful, and these figures are for careful driving but over two fairly serious mountain roads so lots of gearbox work and it returns 100 miles for £12. Pretty bloody good for a coupla tonnes of Landrover. Looking even better with the ludicrous price of diesel, a car doing fifty to the gallon will still cost nearly £11 for those 100 miles.
It's worth remembering though that you do use a surprising amount of diesel for warming up and purging the veg, especially if you're doing a lot of short trips with the car cooling down in between.

[Nathaniel]

Glad to see somebody doing it properly.

The Smart Veg kits are lots of money but The control module on its own is quite a lot of dosh...

The problem is SVO is getting ver expensive now... You don't get your money back quick enough...

Have you considered collecting and filtering WVO?

[pope]

Yes, definitely looking to start filtering WVO, i've been promised a regular supply just haven't got it together yet. One issue has been bothering me though, the SmartVeg booklet mentions that there is a high acidity content with WVO which can be harmful to pumps, i'd be interested to know more about this, there must be some kind of acidity regulator available for home brewing or something, maybe some of this could be used? I was going to get around to posting a thread to see if anyone knows about it or can point me to a thread.

[gavin.]

Thanks for taking the time to report on the kit - I have been looking at them in the past, but I am put off by the relatively small tank capacity. At £1.089 a litre for Dino-diesel here, however, it is getting more attractive.

[Ray_Jnr]

what most people do is use the reliotavely small tank to keep diesel in for starting and purging and the large tank is filled with veg

[gavin.]

d'oh

[pope]

yeh, small tank for the diesel which is just for start up and purging, this runs through a seperate filter with a bulp type lift pump to prime it when first running the diesel through. This pump is frankly rubbish, though to be fair i've got the diesel running upwards through the filter which probably doesn't help. The filter is just a simple flow through fuel filter as you get in the car spares shop. I'm not very impressed with either of these and they will be replaced with a CAV type filter head and lift pump when I get round to it.
It's with these things in mind that I do feel the kit is overpriced but i'm still fairly sure that the control module, convenience and instructions are worth the extra.
Managed to find rapseed oil at Tescos this evening for 56p/l which was pretty good but they only had 15l and no plans to order any more in which is a wind up. Aldi's still got it at 68p which compared to 111.9 which it is for diesel round here is great. I do somewhere in the region of 600 miles/week in this disco(see above about earning it's keep!) so reckon i'll get the price of the kit back in about 3 months if I have to carry on using SVO but i'm planning to get going with WVO as soon as possible. I was in the good position of buying this truck(off the classifieds of this very forum) for less than £500 in the first place and after about thirty hours of diy welding and a spring lift/tyre upgrade the whole car has still only cost me less than £1300 even with the SmartVeg so my money's pretty safe. I would be very interested to see how much it would fetch on Ebay with the SmartVeg fitted. When i ordered the kit I had to wait a week for them to get the parts in and they were selling kits as fast as they could assemble them so there does seem to be a great deal of interest out there, no surprise with the bloody mental price of fuel at the minute.
I'd certainly recommend the kit but only if you're capable of fitting it yourself, you're looking at nearer a grand if you have it fitted for you and there's no way it'd add that kind of value and it would be a long time making it back on a normal mileage.

[Nathaniel]

RE Acid content in WVO - the General consensus is not to worry about it!
No problems have shown up yet.

If you can already get a supply of unfiltered WVO but haven't got the filters - collect it anyway, the more you have, the better! It needs settling for at least a week before adding to the filter plant, then another week to settle doesn't hurt!

[pope]

Thank you Nathaniel, that's just what I wanted to hear, I've really got to get it together with this filtering thing, how long that will last i don't know, seems more and more bio-diesel companioes are buying up WVO and it's looking more like the price for SVO is going to take off too.Last weekend I bought oil from Aldi's for 68p/l, today the same oil is 78p. What the fxxk is going on in this country. I thought the prime duty of any democratic government was economic stability, no society can operate with any kind of decency, planning and care without a stable economic background to support it,(check out Zimbabwe) Everything's going through the roof, I am genuinely worried man, this country is Fxxked. Why the hell aren't there riots on the street! Maybe i'm overreacting slightly but my industry(forestry)is massively dependent on oil and we are getting well and truly screwed.(Sorry, gone a bit off topic here posting drunk again )

[Nathaniel]

Yep, agree with you on that!

In Germany, a lot of the farms that press rapeseed oil also have a filling station for converted vehicles - Its charged at 45PPL.

Makes you sick doesn't it?

[terence]

Gents , Vegetable oil is an ACID a fatty one. so you cannot alter its PH !


it will only cause mild damage to natural rubber o rings and such but most bosch systems have vitron seal and rings anyway.

Pope welcome to the revolution !

[pope]

Here's a few pictures that may be of help to anyone out there fitting a SmartVeg kit to a Disco. My apologies for the filthy state of my underbonnet area This is a hard working truck.As I said before, the fitting kit for the tank is not very substantial, my solution can be seen above, It's not very easy to see in these pics but I have routed the heat exchanger along the bulkhead above the back of the engine, its about 3 foot long and best not to bend it too much because of the risk of kinking it, the grey piping running along the front of the engine bay over the top of the rad is the fuel from the end of the exchanger to the pump and the grey is the lagging over this, pay particular attention to the lagging, it is critical for warm up times, the longer the warm up time the more overpriced diesel you will end up using. I found there wasn't enough lagging supplied but it is very cheap to buy from a hardware shop. As I said the filter and priming pump for the diesel side of things are very poor, nowhere near good enough given the price of the kit. I had a lot of trouble getting the diesel primed though I have fitted the in line filter in the engine bay with the fuel supply coming up to it from below and this may be a part of the problem. I would recommend ditching this and using a CAV type filter head with the built in primer. Something you really shouldn't have to consider with a £500 kit.Future plans are to replace my standard LR filter with a heated one, hopefully not have to be so religious about getting all the slightly solid stuff out of my WVO as it will be heated and thinned as it goes through the filter and not clog so easily, again these additions should have been included with such an expensive kit.

[van_kerr]

The fitted kit looks good and (fairly) simple ........ How about any wiring additions ? Easy or hard ? How long does the complete job take ?
I'm really interested in this kit but can't justify the £500 to fit it. If you were to do the job again would you fit an uprated filter/primer at the time ?

[bird_2112]

Does the output pipe from the original fuel filter go directly to the fuel selection valve or is it now part of the recirculation loop ? That would leave the fuel line from the original tank going straight to the selection valve.

G.

[pope]

Wiring on the basic kit is very simple, the harnesses between solenoids and module are all self contained and just plug in, other than that it's just one switched live, one constant live and one earth. There is an option of an immobiliser for if you forget to purge back to diesel and let the veg get too cold but this could leave you stranded when the bosch pump on a landy is pretty forgiving and would probably just start without any real damage anyway. Plus an optional low fuel warning sensor for the aux. fuel tank which I would recommend.
As I have said the priming pump and filter supplied for the diesel side are cheap rubbish and need swapping for a CAV type, this will make the first bleeding of your new system much easier, and I would recommend a heated filter for the veg oil as this would make the system much more forgiving of animal fats in poorly settled WVO, something i'm going to track down when I get some spare time. As I have said, for £500 this should all have been included.
Fitting the kit took about 3 or 4 hours but this does not include making the frame for the aux. tank. I do not recommend using the supplied set up in the cabin of a landrover though it would be fine out of the way in the boot of a car. You need to allow for some thought and time for this. Disco's are ideal because you can just lose one of the dickie seats and use a frame as I have done.
Output from the original fuel filter goes direct to the select valve.
I believe you can download the fitting instructions and flow diagrams from the smartveg site, though I haven't actually done this myself as they came with the kit obviously.
You are right about the £500 being way too steep but really it just depends on your mileage and whether you can get hold of WVO, I do over 500 miles per week in my disco and manage to SPAM SVO(av.78ppl) with about 30L of free WVO/per week so with my mileage it's not going to be many weeks before my kit has paid for itself, however, if you're only doing less than 100 miles/week its going to be difficult to justify. You do need to take into account resale value too. I'm fairly confident that a nicely set up kit such as smartveg is going to be quite a draw on ebay(hope so anyway) and will probably add its own value to the car. My disco, including the kit, 2"lift, loadsa welding, new MOT etc.etc. has still cost me less than 1500 quid so I reckon my money's pretty safe. She'll probably go up on Ebay sometime in the summer so we'll see how it goes.
As an interest, it was MOT'd yesterday and flew through the emissions on veg on the first rev. Not sure if this was because veg is clean or because it was actually running on injector cleaner one benefit of two fuel systems, I filled the original(veg) filter with Wynns injector cleaner and then drove to the mot using the diesel system,(i'd also run some through it a couple of days before, then switched to the veg system when I got there, result only 0.96 on the test with 3.0 being the acceptable limit.
Probably just being paranoid as it runs really clean anyway with no smoke once up and running but it's nice to be sure.

[pope]

Ok, so for those who might be interested here's a bit of an update on the smart veg. Well, done more than 20k since fitting the kit and I have had absolutely no problems whatsoever with any of the smart veg stuff. As I said it didn't seem a lot of kit for the money but i've no complaints about quality. Don't know so much about the Landy side of things though, I have just changed the engine!! Before I say anything else, even if running on Veg had anything to do with the engine going down it wouldn't matter to me at all. I did more than 20k on scrounged WVO fuel for no cost, I reckoned it saved me more than £3,500 in fuel and I paid £450 for another complete(inc turbo, pas pump, alt. etc)motor and swapped them easily in a weekend. The engine never really gave up but it did start sounding more and more rattley until I got too paranoid with the racket and chucked a new motor in. I'm in the process of stripping the old motor, just about ready to lift the head, so i'll post a really good assessment of long term 100% waste veg use, trouble is i'm so busy lately that i'm not getting much time to play with motors. It was sounding like wear in the cam, pretty quiet up to about 2k revs then start getting terminally rattly above it so I don't think the veg was the cause anyway, it'd done 175k. I'll finish stripping the motor at some point in the next couple of weeks so i'll let you know what the head, valves bores etc look like.

[crazymac]

I will wait with anticipation for your interpretation of the engine, as I have yet to hear of anyone doing a reasonably long term test!

I know SVO is still silly expensive, but time will tell and I have a possible source of free 1000 litre IBC's of WVO!