Heating oil vs diesel for electricity generation?

[clv101]

I presume heating oil is cheaper than diesel due to lower duty. Are there any significant differences between heating oil and diesel? I'm not talking about running a car on heating oil since it's illegal but rather running a diesel generator for home electricity on heating oil. Will it work technically (is heating oil the same as diesel)? Is it legal, can heating oil be used for home electricity generation without paying the diesel duty?

[fishertrop]

http://www.cecarf.org/Programs/Fuels/FuelsQA.html

Q: What is the difference between diesel fuel and home heating oil?

A: Home heating oil and transportation diesel are chemically identical, but in the refinery they are processed in slightly different ways for their respective sectors. In addition to having specified regulations and taxes, transportation diesel has a low sulfur standard, meaning that it must contain 0.05 percent sulfur or less. Home heating oil is required by law to contain a maximum of 0.5 percent sulfur, but due to unintentional mixing of transportation diesel and home heating oil at the refinery, the sulfur content of home heating oil usually hovers around 0.2 percent. In order to distinguish home heating oil from transportation diesel, the refiner will typically dye heating oil a cranberry color, but otherwise these fuels are the same.

As I understand it, if you have a low-tech diesel engine that isn't designed to be ultra-clean-burning then you can run it on fuels that go a long way "down" the diesel/heating oil/crappy veg oil quality table and it'll still run, tho efficieny might be sub-par.

If you access to a lot of cheap fuel and an old (say) marine diesel engine I bet you could make a decent setup.

BUT I would have to ask why you would go for this at all, heating oil isn't that much cheaper than diesel?

Presuming you have some room for a diesel genny and large fuel tank presumes you have room for maybe a wind turbine or 2?

Are you planning to knock over a delivery tanker?

I think that fuel for static generators has a different tax class but that it may still be taxable, if you care about such things. It might be the same low-tax as "red" agri-diesel, but I'm not sure.

[bigtoe]

I presume heating oil is cheaper than diesel due to lower duty. Are there any significant differences between heating oil and diesel? I'm not talking about running a car on heating oil since it's illegal but rather running a diesel generator for home electricity on heating oil. Will it work technically (is heating oil the same as diesel)? Is it legal, can heating oil be used for home electricity generation without paying the diesel duty?

I think you have to add some quantity of lubricating oil to the kerosene. At least thats what I think I remember reading in a Lister engine manual.

It might be wise to consult a distributor of small diesel engines.

If you have access to usenet or google groups, you could try asking on uk.rec.engines.stationary. I'm sure they will have an answer.

[mikepepler]

What about running on waste (or fresh) veg oil? You need to warm up on diesel first, and pre-heat the veg oil (using a heat exhcanger from the coolant ) before feeding it in. Remember the first diesel engine was designed to run on peanut oil!

[RevdTess]

I'm a bit late to this thread as I've been on holiday, but just to add to the fine explanations already given:-

If you check out the EIA inventory numbers on the web each week you will see that they split 'middle distillates' into three categories, differentiated by the sulphur content, i.e. <15 parts per million (ppm), 15-500ppm and >500ppm.

The latter is heating oil, the middle category is diesel and the <15 category is ultra low sulphur diesel, which is going to take over as the main diesel category in the US in 2006 with the arrival of new regulation (if I remember correctly).

Anyway, as already noted, it is very easy for refineries to switch between heating oil and diesel, especially when compared to producing gasoline, which is quite different.