My brothers father in-law, Greg, has built himself a grease Jetta. I haven’t inspected it much, but I think its about a 1997 Jetta, and he put the aftermarket kit into the car himself. Total cost was around $750. He hasn’t really had many problems at all, but it is definitely a car for a tinkerer as opposed to someone who wants to “set it and forget it”. My criteria for a successful, mass use, grease mobile is one that any old lady or unskilled manual laborer (accounting nerd, etc) could run without having to get their clothes dirty or be late due to vehicular malfunction.
So, his car doesn’t quite fit that model, but for someone who is a tinkerer and wants to save some coin along the way, its perfect. He gets his oil from a few restaurants around the Portland (Oregon) area for free. He takes it home and processes about 10-15 gallons a week in his garage with his home setup. His take from the restaurants is about 50 gallons of oil per week, so he’s got a pretty good setup for storage from what I hear. In turn, with the remaindered 35+ gallons of oil, he takes it to Sun Break BioFuels in Canby (Oregon). This small company has high aspirations including making their own oil from seeds, as well as refining used commercial restaurant oil into biofuel for cars and trucks.
For those of you interested in kits, or in having someone do it for you, check out the listing at ModenConversions.com. They specialize in listings for biofuel conversion shops.
Keep an eye out, as i’m looking down the road a year or so and see a conversion in my future. As well as maybe a Lister generator. The bad-mutha of generators (Lister Generator at Lovecraft Biofuel — Portland)