Family Drives Cross-Country in Motor Home Fueled by Fast-Food Fat; Chinese Buffets Provide Best Oil
By Richard DujardinThe Providence Journal
Providence, RI (SHNS) -- He sees it as the realization of a dream: to have traveled from coast to coast with his wife and family in a luxury motor home running on little more than the used fat from America's restaurants.
When Steven and Anke Adler, along with their children, Lilly, Julia and Jonah, pulled up to their home several weeks ago in a 40-foot-long motor home made to run on vegetable oil, it marked the culmination of a 78-day adventure that, despite its scary moments, is one they say they would do again in a heartbeat.
"We know there are hippies who have traveled the country in old school buses running on vegetable oil," says Steve, "but I don't think anyone has ever done it with a luxury motor home with this kind of on-the-fly filtration system and a 50-foot retractable hose that lets you cruise indefinitely and refuel at your whim."
The Adlers' last oil fill-up on the way home from Seattle was at a Chinese
buffet restaurant in Chicago, where they took on enough vegetable oil --140
gallons in the main tank and 58 gallons in their filtration tank -- to get
them back to Providence using only a small amount of diesel fuel and no
gasoline.
Just a year ago, Adler, a 40-year-old computer specialist and consultant, made news when he converted his 1991 diesel-powered 350 SDL Mercedes to run on used vegetable oil, saying that if he was going to ride in a car that didn't need gasoline, he might as well get a big, luxurious car that "even the rich people" would envy.
He says that had it not been for his experience of converting the Mercedes -- and finding out that it actually runs more smoothly on vegetable oil -- he would not have dared to take his family to the West Coast for what seemed like a crazy quest.
He began by calling Chris Goodwin, the Seattle man who developed the conversion kit that he had installed last year, to ask if he would be willing to help him convert a motor home. After getting a tentative yes, he searched the Internet and found just the kind of vehicle he was looking for.
The Love Bus, or "El Bee" as he and his wife affectionately call it, is an enormous vehicle, custom made by the Blue Bird bus company. The size of a 57-passenger bus, with lots of storage space in the luggage area, it listed for $440,000 soon after it was made in 1997, but was selling on the Internet for $150,000 when Adler saw it on eBay. He got the price down to $106,000 and bought it from a dealership in Junction City, Ore., sight unseen, taking out a 20-year mortgage to do so.
But the real adventure, and gamble, came on July 12 when Adler flew his family out to Oregon on one-way tickets to pick it up. El Bee, it turned out, was quite a sight. Formerly owned by a corporation in Louisiana whose owner apparently liked entertaining guests at NASCAR races, it came with a reinforced steel roof strong enough for a crowd to walk on and party. It also has a queen-size bed, a sofa, a glass shower big enough for two people, a huge refrigerator with an icemaker, a stove, microwave, and a $1,200 washer and dryer, and lots of expensive cabinetry.
As with the Mercedes, the vehicle has to run on diesel during the first few minutes of operation to raise the temperature so it can run on vegetable oil.
But where does one get such oil? The Adlers used pure vegetable oil purchased from Costco to launch their return home beginning on Labor Day. But a day or two into the trip, they started to take on the waste oil from trash bins at fast-food restaurants in British Columbia, being careful to explain their project to managers. That's when they hit their first problem.
A manager at a Wendy's was so happy to provide them with oil he got out some extremely hot oil directly from the fryer. It was so hot it melted the Adlers' hose, forcing family members to spend the next couple of days looking for a replacement. They found one in a store that sells hot tubs.
But the bigger lesson came in the discovery that while used oil from Wendy's and McDonald's may be fine in a pinch, it tends to have lots of other nasty things mixed in -- pieces of meat scraped up from the grill -- that will clog even the most sophisticated filtration system. "That's when I realized that Chinese buffets are where it's at," Adler says. "You may find a wonton now and then, but their oil doesn't clog the system."
In Chicago they stopped at a Chinese buffet restaurant, coming back for oil twice since they could only take 58 gallons at a time.
"All the workers came out to see us fill up, and the owner said, 'You a winner, I a winner. We are all winners.' "
Editor’s Note: For more on the Adlers' adventure, visit this Web site:
www.frybrid.com/forum/showthread.php?t=5326&page=2&pp=10
Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.