Be Excellent To Each Other

Tesco sell diesel for those now, give it a try.

I don't have a diesel car (unless you count my tractor). But Maybe Ace is planning to run her diesel car on veggie oil.

Don't they smell like a chip shop when you do that, or is that just a rumour?

They smell of burning fat, that for sure. Not that strongly, though. It's no more noticeable than the smell of a petrol car.

Do they smoke a lot?

Not really.

My cousin used to run his diesel fiesta on cooking oil. Got him some odd looks when he drove it to the nick.

No, you can get it cheaper than that. I thought it was about 30p/ litre.

Buy it wholesale, from somewhere like #one">http://www.mamma-roma.com/prodlist/oil.htm#one .

Yeah, the Indian shops near me sell massive drums of vegetable oil (and others) for only a few quid. Get some of those wholesale and you're laughing.

Do you run your car off of oil too, CUS? Is this a common thing then?

Does anyone know how it effects the environment in comparison to a more standard car fuel? Better or worse?

Can you mix it with standard fuel or do you have to decide one or the other? Also, is it legal?

It's legal if you declare and pay fuel duty on it. I *think* you can mix it with diesel (don't try it in a petrol car), or use a little meths to thin it out and run it nearly neat.

If you use used (ie. cooked with) vegetable oil, that's good for the environment, as it's recycling that oil. I don't know how the emissions compare, though.

Nope, I rely on British public transport my dear. I work from home a lot if possible

You can run it completely neat as long as you install a pre-heater for the oil.



If it's just been thrown in the tank it's not very good for the engine long term, as it doesn't atomise properly when cold, gums up the piston rings and so on (and this affects the emissions too). OTOH, no sulphur, which is good.

However, bigger problems result from using a food as a transport fuel. This just really isn't very sensible and is one reason that vegetable oil has jumped from about 30p to £1 per litre in the last year or so, since this became popularised. Not to mention rainforests being cleared to grow palm oil as a cash crop, and all the rest of it.


Back to the topic, I believe both Tescos and Sainsburys are rapidly swapping their home delivery fleets for electric vehicles, which is excellent.

I was just thinking that ninety-odd pence for a litre of vegetable oil was darn expensive so looked on Asda and Sainsbury's to see how much it was there, but the cheapest I can find is £1.19 for a litre! I remember it being about 40p a year or so ago. I hardly ever buy or use oil so never noticed the price rise until I looked it up just then. It's quite astonishing.

Marketing FTFY

FTFY

There are no "immense problems". Replacing the battery and recycling the old one is included in the vehicle lease cost. The recycling process is very simple, as the worn out battery is directly used as feedstock in the nearest metal foundry.

FTFY

(How long can we keep this up?)

What kind of batteries do electric vehicles use nowadays? Do they have big scary banks of lead-acid ones, or equally scary banks of fancy modern ones? Or, as I secretly hope, 100,000 AAAs all in parallel?

Millions of those little Game and Watch batteries, held in modified metal bubblewrap.

Pretty wide choice now.
Mainly you've got various types of lithium ion, lithium polymer which are pretty good and in the cars that are coming out this year and next. One of them does indeed use several thousand laptop cells!

The delivery vans mentioned use a "molten salt" battery which is a really excellent and cost effective and benign technology, but is more suited to fleet use than random use personal cars.

NiMH is also a proven and very robust solution but Chevron-Texaco bought the patents to it and won't let anyone put them in EVs.

NiCD is also good but, even though they are always recycled, it does have an image problem and carmakers have phased those out. Most of my EVs use these.

And lead is still an option, it's not really scary, just heavy. Man.

What have you got?
I seem to remember someone had 'electrified' their bike - was that you?

Probably not but I do have an electric bike. Which reminds me I should be riding it to work instead of my..

Electric citroen berlingo.

I also have a peugeot 106, and I'm building a locost style thing for fun.

What sort of range do you get on the Berlingo?

Greenily, I'm having my (Big 4x4 thing - Ed) converted to LPG if it passes it's MOT.

Did you notice you can get a Cayenne for 15k nowadays?

50 miles. I actually managed to clock up 120 in it on Saturday, somehow.

I also have an LPG corsa which is a piece of junk and keeps breaking down. However, when it is broken down it is at least "green" then because it's not burning any fuel. I recommend this.

Oh dear, my sainsburys shopping arrived earlier, and before just before it came I had a call from the driver:

'Hello?'
'Hello, it's Sainsburys, driver here. Where are you?'

Literally, using those words. I asked him if he was lost, and he said his satnav had brought him to where he was but now couldn't find me. Idiot.

They substituted my cheap shit bottle of wine for another cheap shit bottle of wine, which was fine, and gave me expiry warnings on some fruit (strawberrys, blackberrys, and blueberries, yum!) and an iceberg lettuce I'd bought. They're all due to expire tomorrow or Sunday, and since I don't forsee a weekend filled with fruit and lettuce parties I've made him take them back. What use is stuff that goes off TOMORROW? Do they assume I'm going to wolf it down on the doorstep?

Also, strangely, a lot of my items weren't in bags. They'd just been placed in the crate, bagless, so I had the situation where the driver was handing me a bag filled with 2 small items, and then handing me a loose item. There were at least 7 or 8 things that hadn't seen a bag.

Not terribly impressed, I must say, which is a shame as I'd clocked Sainsburys at being a bit tidier. As it is some of the other veg I bought goes off on Monday so I'm going to have to eat things in a certain order now to make sure it doesn't go bad. Pffft.

That's not like my Sainsbury's experience. Maybe I just have a great depot or something. One thing I forgot to mention was that Sainsbury's round here are much better than Tesco at sending things with a long time to go before the Best Before date.

We don't get everything in bags, either, but it's big stuff like two-litre bottles that they don't bag.

I worked in Sainsbury's for 3 years in my early working days, and to be honest the calibre of people there I'm surprised they could open the bags let alone put things in them. All this "Sainsbury's for posh people, Asda for poor people etc" is such awesome marketing spin - the staff really couldn't give two shits, like most places.

Of course it could have just been my store but I find the others to be the same. Having worked in these places I know all the little tricks the staff pull. Sometimes I just tell them I worked in the same places and sympathise, other times I give them the rope with which to hang themselves.

That said, my Sainsbury's online delivery man is absolute aces, he usually phones up and asks if he can come early to help with his rounds but never complains if he can't for some reason. Happily bring stuff to the kitchen too.

We don't use Tesco because their website is crap and keeps getting all the way to the end of the shopping then emptying the cart. I think it's because I don't accept 3rd party cookies or something, but to be honest they can fuck off with their shonky piece of crap.

I've pretty much always shopped at Sainsbury's (and safeway in Canterbury before Morrisons bought them - their frozen stuff was cheaper and nicer), and I've always been poor as fuck. The number of times people have acted or spoken like sainsbury's is expensive or upmarket is ridiculous. It's really not, or I'd have starved to death years ago.

Tesco and Asda can eat my hole (although tesco used to do some quite nice ham, for a supermarket). Sainsbury's are little better, but they're the lesser evil, and the only place I can walk to that has what we need.

Siansburys online grocery shopping has been down for at least four days now. I wonder how much money they are losing...

Mine, for a start.

Grump.

Well I bet Sian's not happy for a start.

Mine too. I have had to resort to Asda, who last time tried not to give me half of the things that I paid for, and it was only because I noticed that some items were missing as she was about to drive off that I got them.

'Oh yeah, I saw them there' she said, bizarrely.

It's back!

Oh

I gave in and ordered from evilasda in the end.