Question from Julie
I’ve been sharing your veggie car info with my 13-year-old grandson. He wants to know if frequently replacing the filters would be the expensive part of the veggie car.
Debra’s Answer
Currently my 1978 Mercedes Benz 300D veggiecar has three fuel filters on it.
The first or primary filter is a small disposable plastic filter which filters out the bigger pieces of crud. This filter originally came with my Mercedes and costs three or four dollars at most auto parts stores.
My second fuel filter (which is not original to the Mercedes) is a Racor 500FG filter with a 2 micron filter element. I added this filter because vegetable oil often has many particles in it and I wanted to run the oil through an additional filter to filter out the smaller particles down to 2 microns. Since a single strand of hair is 300 microns, 2 microns is pretty small. These filters and elements are available at many marine supply stores. The elements cost eight to twelve dollars. The filter setup itself costs about $150 new, but you can buy them on eBay for about $60.
The third fuel filter is the standard Mercedes fuel filter, called a “secondary filter”. Cost is ten to twelve dollars at most auto parts stores.
All three of these filter elements need to be changed every 1000 miles or so, or when the car slows down when going up hills it used to take easily.
This is the setup recommended to me by fattywagons.com and it works very well.
