Guess I was wrong. Another example of don't believe everything you hear on tv:
The Discovery Channel's Mythbusters handed out some incredibly bad advice on last night's show.
Long story short: They showed that a Mercedes Diesel could run on veggie grease from a restaurant without any modifications to the car and without any modification to the oil other than filtering. Adam even said something like, "It looks like anyone could just pour [veggie oil] in their tank and it would run just fine!" They made a point of mentioning several times that they made no modifications to the car.
No no no no no. Do not try this at home! The only reason it worked so well was because they had warmed up the engine by driving a few miles on regular diesel. This is what people do when running Straight Veggie Oil (SVO) in their cars: Warm up the engine on diesel (or biodiesel), and then switch to their heated SVO tanks (hey... new tanks and oil heaters! That's a car modification, isn't it?!?). No sane person on the planet pours unrefined veggie oil directly in their tanks. Unless it's a hot summer day, the car likely wouldn't start.
The other option, of course, is to actually modify the oil itself. The result is "biodiesel" which, 1) Is what I do, 2) Can be poured directly into the tank, 3) Was never mentioned by the Mythbusters.
I'm a little disappointed in Adam and Jamie. It would have taken about 3 minutes of research to find out what I wrote above. Instead, they ended up giving out truly awful and possibly dangerous advice that will no doubt result in someone somewhere pouring grease in their diesel tank and ruining a perfectly good engine.
