Biodiesel Testing

March 1st, 2009 | diesel

There’s nothing like a bad batch of biodiesel to ruin your day. Biodiesel is biodegradable and inadequate storage can lead to degradation. That’s why systematic biodiesel testing is absolutely crucial. The good news is that biodiesel is easy to test. With the right kits, testing biodiesel for quality, impurities, and contamination is as easy as testing pool water.

I spent some time with the folks from Fleet Biodiesel at the 2008 Alternative Fuels and Vehicles Conference in Las Vegas, where we shot this video:

Fleet has developed a range of relatively inexpensive biodiesel test kits to check for water and visual appearance, microbial contamination, acid number, biodiesel percentage, and total glycerin.

If you’re running biodiesel in your vehicle, you should keep a test kit (or two!) on the shelf in the garage …