This is Bernard when we first bought him, parked in jesse and nino's back yard.

This is a picture of the oil tanks we installed underneath and the fuel door we cut.

These are our water separating fuel filters, once 30 micron and one 10 or 2 micron.

This is an inline oil heater and an elctric fuel tank switch which we installed.

This is a shot of our bunks.

This is a view from the front of the left side of the interior.

This is a view from the front of the right side of the interior.

This is the drivers side of our kitchen in the back of the bus shot from the front of the bus.

This is our kitchen shot from the floor looking through the back door.

ABOUT BERNARD:
how we did it.
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Bernard is a 65 passenger, big yellow school bus. He is a 1992 Thomas Built Bus with a Ford chassis and a Cummins 5.9L diesel engine. We describe him as a school bus RV conversion powered by waste vegetable oil. Bernard is legally registered as a Recreational Vehicle, or Motor Home. He was purchased from the Sarasota county public auction in February 2007 for $2,550.00 after taxes with 150,000 miles. We spent another $2,500.00 building the vegetable oil fuel system and approximately $5,000.00 more on the RV conversion. We did the work ourselves with help and advice from a few friends during the months of March thru July, 2007.

Running a diesel engine on vegetable oil is theoretically simple. Rudolf Diesel, the inventor of the diesel engine, originally used canola oil as one of his many test fuels. Vegetable oil burns with the same energy characteristics as diesel, so no major engine modifications are necessary. All that needs to be done to our modern diesel engines to turn them into veggie oil engines is installing a secondary fuel system. This fuel system has to do two things. First, since we are running on waste vegetable oil, we have to have a good filtering system. Second, since vegetable oil is thicker than diesel and our modern diesel fuel pumps are made for diesel, the vegetable oil must be heated in order to thin it out. A vegetable oil collection system is also necessary.

Bernard's veggie fuel system starts with four 50 gallon fuel tanks. We use our engine coolant to heat our vegetable oil. This means that we splice into the radiator loop and add a another one. The new loop runs along the veggie fuel lines, into the veggie fuel tanks where we have installed block heaters, and back to the original radiator loop. Where ever this new coolant loop runs along the veggie fuel line we have wrapped the two lines together with insulation. This utilizes the warmth of the coolant to heat the oil on its way to the engine. Coolant also runs through the block heaters we have installed in our tanks. Block heaters are basically small radiators that help dissipate the heat from the coolant into the oil heating our oil while it sits in the tank. Once the oil is heated so the fuel pump can do its job it needs to be filtered. Bernard has a vormax water separating fuel filter also heated with our coolant and a Racor 900FH marine diesel water separating filter. We run the vormax with a 30 micron filter and the Racor 900FH with a 2 micron. 2 micron filters supposedly stop water allowing only the vegetable oil ( or diesel ) particles to pass. We installed an electric switch to switch between our diesel tank and our vegetable oil tanks. One last detail about vegetable oil being thicker than diesel is that we start the bus on diesel and then shut the bus down on diesel. If the the engine cools with vegetable oil still in the fuel injectors the veggie oil can solidify or gel and not want to pass through the injectors causing the engine to not start due to fuel blockage.

Bernard's veggie oil collection system consists of an electric pump and a centrifuge oil filter. We use our GPS unit to locate restaurants in our area or along our route which we then drive to and check for used oil bins behind the restaurants. We mostly collect oil from chinese, thai, vietnamese, japanese, sports bars, and pizza shops. Corporate chains do not work well because it is hard to get permission from the chain of command and they mostly use cheap hydrogenated oils which are solid at room temperature creating collection issues. If the bin has oil in it we go inside and ask the owners if we can have it. The majority happily agree and we go out back, get out the pump and centrifuge, insert one end into the dirty oil bin and the other end into our fuel tank and we start pumping. The centrifuge spins all of the crud and water out of the oil filtering down to .2 microns. The water and crud remain in the cylinder while the clean oil continues through the pump and into the fuel tank. The cylinder is removed and cleaned every 20 to 50 gallons depending on the condition of the oil. Our first collection system was a hand pump and a 70 micron wire mesh filter on the end of our collection hose. It was hard work and did not filter adequately enough. We have heard of people using bag filters and gravity filtering systems when they are in a fixed location. For example they set up two 55 gallon drums in their garage, one above the other, and used gravity to pull the oil down through some bag filters. Time is also used to let the oil settle. Water and crud settle to the bottom and the clean oil is pumped from the top. Neither of these methods were suitable to our permanently mobile situation.

"When biodiesel displaces petroleum diesel, there is an estimated 78% average reduction of greenhouse gas emission per litre, compared with petroleum diesel, over the life cycle of the fuel " (National Biodiesel Board of the USA). In general, emissions from vegetable oil fuels are similar to diesel fuel except somewhat lower. Nitrogen Oxide emissions seem to be higher but Carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide as well as particulate matter emissions are reduced. Vegetable oil fuels degrade quickly in the environment and are nontoxic. Burning vegetable oil does emit greenhouse gas but is consider carbon neutral because any carbon dioxide emitted from vegetable oil was absorbed by the plant during its growing process in this life time. Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide absorbed by plants millions of years ago.