Why convert a bus to an RV? There are many reasons, one of which is that used school buses are incredibly resilient and they tend to be pretty cheap. A large amount of them run on diesel. The goal is to convert the bus to run on waste vegetable oil.
Why waste vegetable oil (WVO)? It’s cheaper than diesel per gallon and it’s a renewable source of energy. There is a ton of reading that I would suggest you do if you’re looking to do the same. Chief resources for us have been From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank. Another resource has been the http://www.skoolie.net/ forums. There is an absolute wealth of information and ideas for converting school buses to RVs. There are also many users on there who have converted their diesel buses to run on WVO. Read read read read and read some more. That’s what we’ve been doing.
We’ve actually nixed the WVO setup after talking with some other people with a short bus doing a cross country road trip as well. They said that it was hard to find sources of WVO to filter. So we opted to forego that for now and possibly do it in the future where ever we end up. That way we could process the WVO to biodiesel and not have to setup the extra tank/heater/etc.
Why have this blog? I (Dan) have worked in web hosting and have a server and I thought, why not document the process? I’ve always loved photo blogs, so I was hoping to take as many pictures as possible so that other people can get a glimpse into what goes into this. Post conversion? I think we’ll use the blog as a place to chronicle our travels.
We’re definitely using the blog as a way to chronicle our travels. Read on.
Our restaurant group has a guy who converts all of our waste oil… and we have a lot of it. He converted his
diesel SUV and if you drive behind him it smells like calamari!
Haha, nice. I was thinking about setting up another fuel tank for WVO (waste vegetable oil), but the primary problem is being able to collect enough for it to make sense on the investment of the gear. We figured we would struggle finding reliable WVO sites while on the road so opted to just keep it straight diesel.