Man fattens up wallet with conversion vehicle
Published: Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2005
Misty-eyed tree huggers and steely-eyed business owners don’t overlap much. But when Ken Ngoon zips along in his “chicken-mobile,” a converted Volkswagen powered by used cooking oil, he’s practically bipolar in the way he switches between roles.
“I’m doing everything I can to save money for my business,” said the 51-year-old owner of Chicken ’N Chips, deep in steely-eyed mode during a Tuesday demonstration drive. “With this I can still offer free delivery – and that is huge for my customers!”
Then, suddenly the eco-freak emerges with a chuckle: “I get a lot of pleasure out of the fact that everybody I drive past gets worse gas mileage than me!”
These days, Ngoon’s ecological side has a lot to chuckle about.
Since he bought a used VW New Beetle and installed a conversion kit from Massachusetts-based Greasecar a few months ago, he has racked up almost 4,000 miles of driving, much of it in fuel-hungry, stop-and-go deliveries. Yet his diesel usage is topping 100 mpg – twice the efficiency of the sleekest of hybrid cars.
“I used to fill up (a four-wheel-drive delivery truck) twice a week. This, I fill once a month,” said Ngoon.
The secret is the $800 “vegetable fuel system” that Ngoon and some buddies installed over a long, but not always efficient, weekend: “We spent one day drinking and cursing, and two days working.”
They installed a 12-gallon circular tank in the spare-tire well; ran a fuel line from it under the car to the engine and hooked it into the existing fuel system; installed a filter, some solenoids and a three-way switch in the dashboard, and they were done.
Now, after the Beetle’s engine is warmed up enough to liquefy the vegetable oil in the tank, Ngoon flips the switch and used cooking oil replaces the diesel getting squirted into the cylinders.
As he demonstrated on a drive through rainy Nashua streets, the transition happens so smoothly that passengers don’t even notice. The engine sounds the same, the acceleration stays the same, and if there’s any odor of French fries, as some critics maintain, I couldn’t detect it – not even when sniffing around the tailpipe after the drive.
“I think it sounds smoother,” said Ngoon. “There doesn’t seem to be as much knocking.”
Several companies offer conversion systems like that of Greasecar, allowing street-legal diesel vehicles (not gasoline cars; Question & Answer) to run on new or used vegetable oil. This sounds goofy to us, but when Rudolph Diesel patented his eponymous engine in 1892, he boasted that it would run on peanut oil and envisioned farmers fueling the horseless-carriage bonanza.
Cheap fossil fuel squelched that dream, but biofuel proponents are trying to resurrect it. Most notably, many cars in Brazil regularly switch back and forth between regular diesel and biodiesel made from sugar cane.
Here in the U.S., conversion kits like Greasecar’s are the most common alternative, outside a bit of midwestern corn-fed biofuel.
Conversion cars don’t free us entirely from fossil fuels – diesel is needed to start and stop the car after a quick purge of vegetable oil from the engine, to keep congealed oil from gumming up the works – but they’re a huge step.
Ngoon is in a better position to make financial sense of the move than most of us, because every week his business generates 70 to 80 gallons of used cooking oil, filtered and ready to go into the engine.
Ngoon (pronounced “noon”) is a Nashua native whose grandfather came from China to run a laundry on Pearl Street and whose father owned Ning Wa, one of the city’s first Chinese restaurants, in the 1950s and ’60s.
Five years ago, Ngoon bought Chicken ’N Chips, a West Hollis Street institution that will soon turn 40. All that waste oil bugged him, so he went online looking for solutions.
Right now he pays to have the oil hauled away. When he converts three vehicles to vegetable oil, that $700 annual cost will greatly shrink, on top of gas savings that he thinks could reach $5,000 a year.
“I don’t see why every restaurant with a Frialater doesn’t do this, especially if they deliver,” he said.
As far as I know, Ngoon has the first cooking-oil car in the Nashua area. But they exist all over the country, spurred by a 2000 book called “From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank,” and goodness knows they have no trouble finding fuel. The National Biodiesel board, a Missouri-based industry group, estimates that 2½ billion gallons of waste cooking oil and grease is produced annually in this country.
Now, even if every drop of that was dumped into gas tanks, it would reduce our diesel consumption by only a few percentage points, but in this age of petro-squandering, every little bit helps.
Ngoon agrees. He is even looking into another usage for his extra oil: Running the furnace in the restaurant’s building, which he owns.
“Wouldn’t that be great – heating Chicken ’N Chips with our own cooking oil!” he said.
It’s not clear whether it was the business owner or the tree-hugger who proceeded to chuckle.
Science From the Sidelines appears Wednesdays in The Telegraph. David Brooks can be reached at 594-5831 or brooksd@telegraph-nh.com. |
