Cooking oil fuels up Golf

A Kiwi couple are running their Volkswagen Golf using cooking oil from their local fish and chip shop. When German inventor Rudolf Diesel invented the diesel engine in 1893, he invented it to run on peanut oil and not fossil fuels, says American-born Heidi Douglass. The consultant clinical psychologist, who lives in Raglan with her husband Mark Dobson, says: “We bought a conversion kit online and my husband installed it in our diesel Golf.” The $2,000 kit, especially designed for the car, was imported from Germany and they installed it themselves with a little help from their friends. They have been running the vehicle on waste since December 2012, using frying oil from Jo’s Fish and Chip Shop in the coastal community. They are charged 20 cents per litre. “That is way cheaper than the $1.45 to $1.50 per litre for diesel, but we still have to pay the diesel road miles on the car,” says Douglass. Her husband drives the converted car to and from Hamilton every day and says it gives the same mileage as diesel. It’s also still capable of running on diesel too. “I read in a story in an American publication called Natural Farmer that after World War II, when Germany had been bombed, they used to power buses with methane from manure. They captured the gas in bunkers and pumped it into enormous canvas bags then pulled behind the bus on a trailer. “Our first vehicle was converted back in 2007 in the US – a Ford F350 pick-up. In New England, where we lived, you had to heat your entire house in winter or pipes would explode from the cold. We also converted our home heating to run on biodiesel made from fish and chip oil.”