Can Biodiesel be safely used in fuel-oil furnaces?
Energy wise, you would probably be better off running the vegetable oil in your boiler/furnace. This would actually require some extra modifications though, which you might not be able to make. If you wanter to mix the veg with regular fuel oil, you could do it without modifications with a 20/80 veg/oil mixtures. You can probably use biodiesel in place of #2 heating oil, but biodiesel will gel just like normal #2 diesel. The reason the #2 heating oil (and diesel for that matter) doesn’t gel is because it has been treated with some additives to prevent gelling. Again, the gelling problem can be avoided by using a 20/80 bio/oil mixture. Gelling is caused when the longer hydrocarbons start freezing out, so you could also do a low-temperature filtering of your biodiesel. You might also try adding some off-the-shelf additives normally used to prevent diesel gelling. But these might not be good for your furnace (or you). You could also try a tank modification. Most tanks are either in the ce
