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From Alexa’s New Blog

May 21st, 2008 by wnorton

Starting out as just a far-fetched idea now is one of the most innovative ways of fueling a vehicle.

Because of the high cost of electricity and fuel Roger Taylor, the owner of Taylor Made cabinets decided to try something new, biodiesel.

Roger started Taylor made cabinets from the ground up. He has a shop at his house just outside of Lakeville. The cost of electricity was so much for his shop along with his house he knew that there had to be a betterway.

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“My electricity bill was so high, I wanted to find something that would be more affordable but still efficient,” said Taylor. So he turned to a generator that would run on biodiesel, or in other words vegetable oil.

When I say oil, I mean the left over grease that you would see in the fryer at McDonalds at the end of the day.

This oil of course has to go through acleaning process before it can be used in generating electricity.

Along with the generator, you also need a processor toproduce the biodiesel. The processor will clean the grease so that it can be run in your cars. When you receive the grease from the fast food places it is full of animal fat and also excess food. All this oil he receives he stores in huge

When Taylor discovered how well this was working his next idea was to start running his vehicles on the biodiesel. Generator conversionis very similar to converting a car engine so in no time at all he got hisdiesel van running on the oil.

Taylor went on to say, “I got a 03 Chevy Duramaxthat I paid 31,000 for and after having it converted, only a year later Icalculated out the difference and I have saved enough on gas to pay for thevehicle itself.”In first starting Taylor only had one supplier of oil, HappyPotato Chips. When he set up an account here he was receiving 500 gallons ofoil every two weeks. This oil is one of the easiest to process due to it onlyhaving corn contaminants in it instead of fast food oil that had a lot ofanimal contaminants in it as well. “That oil is just so easy to process, andthat’s key because when we first started we didn’t know what the heck we were doing,” says Taylor.He was collecting so much oil and the economy in a strugglehe decided to make his employees a deal. Instead of giving his cabinet makers abonus he gave them a proposition. He told them that if they wanted to converttheir diesel cars over, he would give them free oil. After this he had aboutsix vehicles running on this oil.Still though, he was bringing in more oil then he could use.He started to tell people to convert their vehicles and he would sell them oilfor much cheaper than what gas costs today. There were a few problems with thisthough. Many didn’t want to go through the trouble of converting, while othersdidn’t want to take the risk. Taylor says, “People don’t want to take their30,000 dollar vehicles and convert it to vegetable oil because they areskeptical.” When I asked what he meant by skeptical, he explained that when youconvert your car to this biodiesel the car is then taken off of the warranty.The oil process is still very new and the car companies don’t want to chancethat is could ruin the cars and they would lose big money.Taylor now has a small semi-truck company relying on him tosupply them with oil, along with the six vehicles him and his employees areusing. Not to mention the generator that all the electricity for the cabinetshop and his house. In finishing up my interview Taylor had one last thing toadd, “We drove all the way to New York in back for sixty dollars.” That is anaccomplishment in itself.

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