With biodiesel in the news lately, we decided to take a day and fill up the company truck with biodiesel. There are a lot of theories floating around as to what biodiesel may or may not do to your engine, so we decided to go get some B100 (OK, B99) and head out on the road to see what happened. Would the truck stop? Would it make more power? Would it hurt anything? We were about to find out.
First, we stopped by the fueling station and filled 'er up, which was somewhat easier said than done. In the Los Angeles area, diesel is somewhat hard to find, which makes biodiesel even harder to find. One place where you can check to see who sells biodiesel is www.nearbio.com, which can help you find the nearest biodiesel fueling station.
To see how biodiesel really affected the performance of our diesel, we headed to L.A. Performance Division to have the Super Duty strapped down to the chassis dyno and get back-to-back bio versus regular horsepower readings.
We found diesel prices ranging from $2.99-$3.79 (shop around!), and biodiesel seemed to be around 10 percent more than #2 Diesel, depending where we went. Over in Venice Beach, biodiesel seemed downright reasonable, coming in at $3.29 a gallon. Since we figured running biodiesel for just a day wasn't going to prove anything, we filled our test truck up with B99 whenever we could for a few weeks leading up to our story and then spent a day figuring out what we had learned.
For starters, we took an early morning trip over to a chassis dyno to measure the horsepower of the vehicle and see if we could verify Editor Kennedy's claim that the truck "liked it." Some people think that their truck is a little faster or quicker on bio, so we decided to make back-to-back runs on petroleum-based #2 Diesel and then on biodiesel to see if the dyno would register more, less, or equivalent power. Our test vehicle was the much-abused '02 Ford F-250 Super Duty that was 4-Wheel & Off-Road magazine's project truck awhile back. With the Super Duty being a diesel, borrowed (important if it broke), and having a switchable programmer that we could try different power levels, made it a great vehicle for our test. The Ford had "Stock," "Tow," and "Race" modes that we could toggle through to get different levels of fuel and make more or less power. Our first step was to run the truck on regular diesel and then switch to biodiesel to see if there was any discernable difference in power. After Kennedy drove around town in circles for a few hours and had the fuel light on, we were ready to make our dyno runs.