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How Can You Fill Your Car's Tank For 20 Cents A Gallon?
POSTED: 5:40 pm EDT May 2,
2007
UPDATED: 6:49 pm EDT May 2,
2007
The national average gas price for regular unleaded is $2.98, which is a pain for the pocketbook.In Pittsburgh, the price isn't as damaging to your wallet at $2.87, but many drivers are still lookingBut what if you could run your car for only 20 cents per gallon?
Two young men have been doing it for about four years now, but they're not using regular gas. They're using vegetable oil.Under the hood of David Rosenstraus's 1983 Mercedes Benz Turbo Diesel is an engine not like most others."This is a vegetable oil fuel filter that's heated," said Rosenstraus.He converted the engine more than three years ago."You know how if you take olive oil out of the fridge and try to pour it, it is very thick and then it hits the frying pan and gets extremely thin?" said Rosenstraus. "Same thing with the car. "There's a lot of waste heat from the engine, so we harness it and apply it to the vegetable oil."The process has worked so well that Rosenstraus and friend Colin Huwyler decided to build a business called Fossil Free Fuel.The two opened their business two days ago in Braddock after creating a self-contained filtering system on wheels. It takes the raw nasty cooking oil from restaurants and turns into usable fuel."Out of those two filters, it comes to this nozzle, which is just like you would see at a gas station," said Huwyler. "It allows people to have their own gas station at home."A 55 gallon unit sells for about $1,200.You plug it into a regular electric outlet, and it creates more fuel than most people use in a week.The cost to convert Rosenstraus's vehicle was about $3,500.It still does use a bit of diesel to turn on and off, but since he gets the leftover cooking oil free from restaurants who otherwise would have to pay to dispose of it, he's actually saved thousands of dollars compared to using regular gas.For more information, visit www.FossilFreeFuel.com.
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