Very Serious Problem With WVO

[Swamp Donkey]

Let me start by saying that I fully support the use of any all alternative fuels, whether its WVO, soy-diesel or bio-diesel, and regardless of whether its store-bought or home-mabe and I do not believe that their use poses any risk whatsoever to the injectors or engine. The problem here is not the WVO, its what was in the WVO.

We got a set of injectors in yesterday for repair. The customer has been running a 50/50 mix of WVO and pump diesel for some time now and said that one injector went out about 3 weeks ago, and then two more last week, so he parked the truck and called us. The engine has around 250,000 miles, so the injectors show the normal wear from that, but what we found when we disassembled them was beyond belief.
All the parts of the injector that are in contact with the fuel: the nozzle body, piston & spring, plunger and barrel, fuel metering plates and the nozzle assembly look like they have been sand blasted, there is so much metal eaten away.

There was some sort of extremely caustic or acidic agent in some of the WVO that has eaten several thousandths of an inch off all of the parts that contact the fuel in just a few days, or a week at the most.
Understand that most of these parts are made to tolerances of one ten-thausandth or even just a few hundred-thousandths of an inch, so losing several thousandth of an inch means that most of the injector is completely destroyed. Also, they are made out of very high grade, hardened tool steel, so we're not talking about some cheap pot metal getting eaten up by some Spic and Span or some Fantastic or Lysol. I'm guessing that the restaurant cleaned out the fryalators with a major dose of caustic soda or equivalent--but this damage is after mixing with 10-20 gallons of oil and then diluting it further with 50% diesel!
I've seen many injectors with water damage, 2 sets with gasoline damage, and several sets out of burned engines, but this set is 10 times worse than any of these--they may not be rebuildable--and even then it may be cheaper for the customer to purchase 8 brand new alliant power injectors at $225 + tax apiece.
I was able to get a small sample of fuel from one of the injectors and hope to get some Ph test strips Wednesday to find out at least whether it was alkaline or acidic, but in light of what its going to cost to repair these injectors I highly recommend that everyone who is running WVO get a Ph test kit and test every batch they use.
Finally, the customer was triple-filtering the fuel before it ever got to the injectors, so this is not something that you can filter out.

Be careful guys!

[ToddT]

Wow... thanks for the heads up. Please let us know what the pH turns out to be.

I've found pH paper difficult to use on oil-based products. There is no water to react with the paper and there really isn't any pH or so a chemist told me. However, if they have some traces of water and that water contains a caustic cleaner, the pH should show.

Most kitchen cleaners are very high pH. The same caustic that we use to react with the vegetable oil works for cleaning the kitchen fryers as well.

What about balancing the pH as part of a water wash prior to filtering? Some have said they do a low pressure water mist wash and it helps drop out the solids better. We could adjust the pH at the same time and produce a neutral pH cleaner oil.

What were the symptoms of the engine? Have you inspected any other injectors from folks running heated veggie? Any running biodiesel?

Thanks again for your post.

Todd

[HDM]

WHAT YEAR MAKE AND MODEL

[01stroker]

Good thing to know Jonathan. There will be a lot of folks following this thread, and rightly so. Thanks for the info.

I'm like Todd, have you looked at any that has been running bio?

[SLO_TAO]

I wonder if it relates to the amount of free fatty acids in the WVO. In www.journeytoforever.org they talk about buffering WVO with lots of FFA's with NaOH/lye and using a pH meter. I hope this is just a case of bad oil! I'm getting worried and I haven't even started!

[HDM]

I've heard that some food joints use some type of powder to clean the used oil to prolong changing it. I wonder if its abrasive

[JOAT]

Yikes. Must have been something unusual to cause that much damage so quickly.

I wonder if some kind of contaminant could have caused an electrolitic type of material loss, due to a static charge?

How about the rest of the fuel system and the collection and prefilter equipment? Should have attacked those materials much faster than the injector alloys if present from the source.

[turbtug]

I wonder what it did to the belly of the guys who eat at that joint? [img]/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/bleh.gif[/img]

[RickHredf250]

Thanks for the info Swamp....
Now he was using WVO wonder if he was cooking it or anything, just straight?
I can see the need to ph test the wash water, if it is nutural, then the fuel ought to be?
Rick H...

[jdkline]

I'm believing that the problem is free fatty acids. That the oil was well used and very acidic. It wouldn't surprise me if this is responsible for most of teh wear and tear seen on WVO systems. On the link that other guy posted to JTF, I hjave read stories about oil titrating to as hig as 15. I've gotten some nasty stuff from my supplier but all theirs alwasy titrates around .5- 2.0. Titration is really the appropriate way to test for basicness or acidity in cooking oil, diesel or biodiesel. Some will say you can do it with a pH meter, and maybe you can, but I've heard pH strips don't work well at all.

[fordnut74]

Wow, that is certainly a bad thing [img]/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/vomit.gif[/img] Thanks for sharing that with us. I am having to lean towards(hope?) this being a relatively isolated incident. People have been running WVO for years now, just never been as popular. And this is the first conclusive report I have seen of accelerated engine wear due to WVO. Hope this is not an inevitable occurance. And even if I have to replace my injectors every 50,000 miles, I am still money far ahead. I had been planning on upgrading my injectors [img]/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif[/img] and having these analyzed for just such problems, maybe I should do that sooner than later.....

[Spencnaz]

I've tried using pH strips and a meter. None work as well as doing a titration.

Probably would be a good idea for the WVO users to have a titration kit handy when they pick up their oil to burn.

[blitzlaw]

Thank you so much for bringing this up to the board!!! This is just the kind of "real world" data that people need to push this technology forward!!

This is also the first I've heard of a fuel system problem with WVO.

Sounds shocking, and I'm not sure that the damage could be prevented easily given the already robust composition of the hardware involved, but a few questions are in order:

What's the history of the vehicle prior to WVO mix use?

Did he get all of the WVO from the same source?

How many miles on the blend?

What is the normal lifespan of a set of injectors?

How fast did performance degrade?

Is it possible that a defect in the fuel filtration system or engine oil system allowed abrasives into the fuel system or fuel rail (I've seen some abrasive looking particles lurking at the bottom of the filter bowl after fuel filter changes myself)?

I've been running almost exclusively WVO for over 1 year and 15k miles. If your shop isn't that far away, would you have any interest in just pulling my injectors and/or some other's injectors and doing a comparison?

**

As far as I'm concerned, a set of injectors every few years is a small price to pay for the other benefits of WVO, but it is important to find out if the damage is preventable or a one-off event.

[rdixiemiller]

I have seen a SS pan with some meat and grease in a refrigerator get eaten up. Especially if there is aluminum foil on the pan. I had a SS bowl get eaten through in every place it touched the refrigerator grates. I assume it is a galvanic reaction.

[JOAT]

Interesting, rdixiemiller, tho in that case there was likely water and salt present among other things. Makes you wonder if there was salt or other compounds in the suspect WVO.

Just speculation, but, if an alkali cleaner was present, I'd expect a soap forming reaction. An acid that was oil soluble, or FFA reaction (which it's been said rarely reacts with metals), should have affected other components of the collection and handling equipment.

If the internal parts of the injectors were all that were affected, perhaps it was a severe cavitation erosion issue due to high water content, perhaps aggravated by other contaminants such as salt or sugar [img]/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/shrug.gif[/img]

Other thots;
-chlorine or ammonia based cleaners?
-somebody illegally dumping something in the collection container
-sabotage