Geoff, You wrote:
> Has anyone installed an Espar, Webasto or other diesel fired water > heater in their WVO system to pre-heat the cooling system and thus > the WVO?......My question is if these will work burning WVO..... I've installed a Webasto diesel-fired coolant heater/pump in my Tdi Land Rover, plumbed into the cooling system (obviously) and will use it to preheat the coolant in my radiator, engine, heatercore, Webb HotSTK (now Racor HotSTK, since they bought Webb in December) in my WVO tank, and in my Vormax fuel pre-filter/filter, which has a heat exchange function. (The Webb HotSTK is the only way that we - Neoteric Biofuels www.biofuels.ca recommend as a means to introduce coolant into a fuel tank - we don't feel like taking on the potential liability we'd incur if a customer had a catastrophic loss of coolant into their fuel from a copper loop or transmission oil cooler. Which has happened, BTW - with diesel engines being turned into boat anchors in a few minutes of operation without coolant.) So, fire up the Webasto or Espar, (and they both offer a keychain remote feature) and after some amount of time, which of course varies depending on ambient air temps, you've got hot coolant being circulated (by the 12V pump) through all of the above components, so you've got: a hot engine, hot (or at least warm) fuel in your injection pump and injectors, hot fuel in your tank, hot fuel in your fuel filter, and hot coolant in your heatercore - so everything, including your passenger compartment, is hot prior to starting the car. For campers or RV's, you can plumb a hot water heat exchanger into the loop, and use the Webasto or Espar to provide you with domestic hot water. If your fuel lines are bundled next to your coolant lines (HOH or hose-on-hose, as opposed to HIH or hose-in-hose, which scares us (see above - can you say "catastrophic loss of coolant") with the whole bundle insulated with foam pipe insulation) you've also got a heated fuel path from tank to engine. As far as running an Espar or Webasto on WVO: Alexander Noack, the senior engineer at Elsbett, who's in charge of the SVO kit side of their business, (and Elsbett installs Espar heaters as a cold-weather option on conversions they do at their workshop in Germany) told me that Espar claims you can run *biodiesel* (not SVO or WVO) in their heaters, but that you need to run them on diesel periodically. Whether pre-heated biodiesel would eliminate this need, I don't know. And it's possible that pre-heated WVO would also combust properly. I'd of course suggest our Vegtherm 12V inline fuel heater for this purpose. My Land Rover isn't quite on the road yet, but when it is, I'll be experimenting with the Webasto, to see if it will run on pre-heated biodiesel, and I'm sure I'll try it on pre-heated WVO at some point. With a bit of plumbing one could of course do a two-tank system for the Webasto or Espar and start it on bioD or dinoD, run it on WVO, then shut down on dinoD or bioD. I'll keep the group informed of the outcome of my experiments. Craig Reece Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://archive.nnytech.net/index.php?list=biofuel Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Yahoo! Groups Links To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/biofuel/ To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
