Marine Diesel Prices are Outrageous

http://www.billharder.com/boating/39-general-boating/67-marine-diesel-prices-are-outrageous

Do some research on crude oil spills to see just how much of a crude oil spill actually evaporates rather then having to be scrapped off the surface of the water and believe me, crude oil has a far higher viscosity then outboard oil and gasoline.

Here in Asia there are kerosine fueled outboards. I wonder whether they are legal in the U.S.

Bruce in Bangkok (brucepaigeatgmaildotcom)

Larry

I'm in agreement that diesel engines are disgusting polluters, but they are all we have in marine life. We can either use them or use nothing, IMO. I won't sail with petrol engines due to the safety issue. I have twice been personal witness to yachts exploding due to petrol fumes - both times with deaths.

Also the least of my problems when sailing is becoming becalmed. I need my axillary to safely maneuver in tight places to assure safety to others in the area. I may need it to claw off a lee shore and in fact have.

Yes, the old timers used sail only and there are wrecks on those lee shores to prove it. I don't want to join them.

Now, instead of railing against we who see things differently from you, if you choose to lobby for pollution controls on all diesels, then we can form common cause. Else, sail away.

But that's all this Wilbur guy does.

Richard

What's so disgusting about diesel? Mine are all BURNING POLLUTANTS....waste frying oil! Frying oil doesn't even make SULPHUR Dioxide!

www.frybrid.com

Larry

After watching a YouTube video from BBC's best car show, I tried what they were doing on my two old Mercedes diesel cars, one a restored 1973 Mercedes 220D and the other a 1983 Mercedes 300TD turbocharged, 5 cyl diesel station wagon. I'm currently running a pint of mineral spirits mixed in 20 gallons of frying oil in those cars, UNMODIFIED, with great success. Skip and Lydia, of Flying Pig fame, were riding around in my 220D on French Fried Oil last night....for free...(c;

The only big difference I see is the oil fires a little slower, making less engine knock. They say it has less power and mileage, but I don't see that for me. When the Frybrid switches over from straight diesel, which it starts on to warm the oil to 160F from the heater water before its computer switches, automatically, to fryer oil, I see an increase in speed at the same throttle setting....more power, not less. I suppose my observation is subjective and very unscientific. What I DO notice is the truck went from $95/week to $5/week, overnight. All I have to do is move the 5 gallon oil containers from the restaurants to George's warehouse, in the truck for free of course. Mike, the guy with the Volkswagen, is in charge of "processing". I'm in "delivery". George is in "warehouse management" because it's his warehouse...(c;

There's about 1400 gallons in the warehouse, tonight, but I got a call, yesterday, asking me to come get more free product from 2 of the 3 restaurants to make room in their kitchens, so that'll go up another hundred or so gallons Monday afternoon during the restaurant's afternoon break (They help me load if they're not real busy...(c;). The restaurants are all provided with a nice primary filter funnel with a fine screen strainer in the bottom of it to get the oil back from their cooling tank into the original plastic jugs it comes in, also solving their oil jug disposal problem. They don't mind, at all, doing this filtering from us as we are saving them about $100-200/month in disposal fees. Fuel in any city with restaurants is abundant if one gets off ones lazy ass and goes to get it. They dump the filter funnels in their garbage and what I take to the warehouse is fairly filtered of the big stuff.

After we slowly pump 3" off the bottom of the jugs through our filtering system, the residue on the bottom is dumped into an empty container. When several jugs has filled that container, we set it aside for another month or so to settle it again. In 500 gallons of oil, we find about 2" of "sludge" in a 5 gallon jug that has settled out. This saves us changing the final filters, which have lasted nearly a year without plugging up. The oil we pump in the vehicles is so clear you can read through it. A gallon clear water bottle of it sits on my porch so I can watch for it to get cloudy in winter, which, in South Carolina, it has only done twice last year. A second clear bottle of the 80% oil/20% gasoline I WAS using last winter in the unmodified cars is also up there and it never clouds, at all. I've gotten away from gas/oil mix as mineral spirits from a commercial paint supplier is much cheaper than gas and I use less of it as a thinning agent. Runs great.

All of this sounds good, but I cannot imagine how anyone is going to run it in a Hatteras 58 guzzling hundreds of gallons. How would you drag it to the boat, 6 gallons at a time? If you had a warehouse on a WHARF, say for fishing or shrimp boats....that would be a different matter!

We have so much "surplus", we've discussed procuring a diesel genset and mounting it behind George's warehouse to turn the excess oil into power we can sell to South Carolina Electric and Gouge in a new program being tested. I found a 250KW, 12 cyl diesel genset I could have gotten for free, control system and all, but to get it here from Alabama would have cost us a fortune...(c; It was in a hospital and only had 700 hours on it. The hospital got a bigger one....two, actually. I sure would have loved to been operating that thing sync'd to the grid....nuts.

Larry

Larry

I suggest that if you compare the pollutants produced by a modern computer controlled diesel engine to that produced by a modern gasoline engine you might find a different picture.

As for the odors produced by engines I am assuming you are referring to the exhaust. A properly designed diesel system produces little, if any odor.

As far as your statement that "I find this appalling. That people would knowingly pollute the air and water during any 'optional' activity tells me these people have no regard for anybody but their own selfish selves." is quite simply self serving bullshit. If you really find the use of polluting devices appalling then you would be rowing your dinghy out to the mooring and sailing away -- no engine at all.

But that isn't what you are doing. You have a gasoline engine that you use and then you try to justify your actions by saying, in effect, that your engine produces less pollutants than mine -- My daddy can lick your daddy, in other words. Very reminiscent of the 4th grade.

Your final comment that "One other thing, if one can't abide being becalmed from time to time then don't take up sailing" simply indicates that you have never actually "cruised". Oh, maybe a little day sailing but how many trips have you made where you didn't expect to see land for three weeks to a month? When you are sitting 250 miles off shore and the wind hasn't made a ripple on the water for three days, as happened to a friend of mine, you too might find the thought of trying to motor that 250 miles to get to a place you can buy some food and water as somewhat appealing. I had another friend that was depending on one of your recommended outboards, because his sail drive ate it's gears, and the wind stopped. It took him 10 days to make just a bit over 100 miles to shore, drifting most of the way. Those little outboard tanks sure don't carry much fuel.

No Wildur, you go out and make a couple of real voyages and then come back and talk to me. You might even find that we'd agree on a lot more things that you think we would.

Bruce in Bangkok (brucepaigeatgmaildotcom)

Dirty Dan, Reggie Retardo, and Herringbrain John...the troika of trash.

Larry

According to the greenies, because we were ALL burning gas mixed 10:1 or 15:1 with Quaker State SAE 30 motor oil from the Flying A for the first 100 years or so of outboard motor technology, by the millions......All the lakes in the USA should be between 6 inches and 3 feet deep in greasy motor oil the old motors used to be covered with, preventing them from ever corroding, by the way.

The lakes, as you may have noticed, where greasy outboard motors leave a trail of pollution on their surfaces...but who are not being used as a sewer by cities and industries...are just fine and full of fish. Why is that? Could 2-stroke Quaker State EVAPORATE...like it does in the crankcase?? What a silly idea! That's not going to create panic and a government grant that goes on forever!

Case in point is the lake I grew up on, Owasco Lake in the Finger Lakes of upstate NY. Everyone had septic tanks or cesspools, even in Moravia, my hometown. There was no "sewer system" until the Feds moved in and forced everyone to feed a new system that dumped its shit into the "Inlet", the inlet to Owasco Lake. We all drank the lake water while fishing for the first 18 years of my life. The lake was overrun on any Saturday with nasty old Evinrudes, Kieffauver Mercurys, Johnsons, Scott Atwaters (Grandpa had a Scott 40 on the big boat), etc. We ran 10:1 tractor gas with Quaker State SAE 30 in it. When I was little, I used to get to pour the oil into the gas can....by the quart! I still love that smell...(c; The lake was full of fish, bullheads, pickerel, walleyed pike, trout, bass, etc. Bullheads used to run towards the Coleman gas lanterns my grandfather and his friends would line the shore with after dark and we would snatchhook them as fast as you could cast. Everyone had 3 or 4 freezers to stuff them all in.

Then the greenies showed up. We had to stop polluting the valley with our septic tanks, cesspools, pissing in the lawns, and all the old 1800's "camps", little houses along the lake used by the city folks only in summer, had to tear down their outhouses behind the garages across the dirt road from their camps. (If you were out fishing and "had to go", you simply stopped at any lakeside camp, knocked on a door, and asked to use their outhouse. It was fine. The BEST nightcrawlers for more fishing were in the leaves right behind the outhouses, too...real MONSTERS!) Towns were all forced into the sewage business. It dumped into the inlet, polluting the lake.

Google "Owasco Lake", with the quote marks for better sorting. Read the terrible reports of algae blooms, dead fish, etc., that is Owasco Lake, Sewer, in 2007. They should have left my lake and its people alone. They were fine.....

Larry

I have no sympathy for anybody who runs a diesel engine for recreational purposes. Don't you realize how much pollution a marine diesel engine produces? It's totally selfish and irresponsible. Anybody running a marine diesel for recreational purposes is sick in my opinion. No regard whatsoever for clean air and a clean marine environment. When somebody's 'fun' takes precedence over my rights (to a clean environment) then I cannot excuse such hedonism.

I wish they'd jack the price of recreational marine diesel up to about fifty bucks a gallon. Maybe people would be forced to buy environmentally friendly sailboats that use small, clean-air, 4-stroke, gasoline outboards when needed but use sails most of the time. When your 'cruising' is a blatant act of pollution and you don't even realize it then you're just clueless and nobody I want to associate with....

Wilbur Hubbard

By the way, if your theory about motor boats was really correct the world's ocean freight would still be carried on sailing ships.....

Bruce in Bangkok (brucepaigeatgmaildotcom)

But, when it comes to recreational use of diesel engines in boats I find this to be totally unacceptable. The typical marine recreational diesel meets NO emission standards that I know of. They are often old, decrepit, in ill-repair and in need of an overhaul. Visible smoke is more the rule than the exception. The stench of them is enough to sicken even the crew. And people continue to use them for recreational purposes. In other words, strictly for selfish reasons - their 'fun.'

I find this appalling. That people would knowingly pollute the air and water during any 'optional' activity tells me these people have no regard for anybody but their own selfish selves. If they were responsible human beings they would use an engine that meets or exceeds current emission standards. That means a late-model gasoline engine. And don't tell me no such engines exist for marine use. The choice of a diesel engine is the wrong choice when looked at from the environmental standpoint.

One other thing, if one can't abide being becalmed from time to time then don't take up sailing.

Wilbur Hubbard

If only Algore were president then we'd have free petrol, the children would all be strong and straight, flowers would bloom in all seasons, the honeybees would offer us free honey, spiders would sing the national anthem, al Queda would decide to quit their mischiefs and instead become florists....

why oh why did the demons have to visit upon us at this otherwise wonderful era? The world wonders.