Stupid Newbie question #87342: Regular Diesel vs “off-road diesel” vs home heating oil

[sd455dan]

OK, now I'll add my own (dumb? not so dumb?) question to the thread: how do you get red diesel? I have a few 5 gallon safety cans and drive them to the same filling station I buy car gasoline. I use one of those receiver hitch mounted platforms, so any drips don't get into the car, which is a major improvement. But I don't remember ever seeing someplace I could buy red/off road diesel. Where can you buy it? What do you have to do to prove it's not going to get used on road?

For that matter, how in the world do they enforce that? I mean, how would you look in somebody's truck fuel tank to see if there's red in there? I'm just thinking out loud on that one, I don't have any road vehicles that can even use diesel. Any color diesel.

Do you have a Co-Op / Cenex locally? Very Good (all most certain) chance they carry red diesel.

 

[LD48750]

OK, now I'll add my own (dumb? not so dumb?) question to the thread: how do you get red diesel? I have a few 5 gallon safety cans and drive them to the same filling station I buy car gasoline. I use one of those receiver hitch mounted platforms, so any drips don't get into the car, which is a major improvement. But I don't remember ever seeing someplace I could buy red/off road diesel. Where can you buy it? What do you have to do to prove it's not going to get used on road?

For that matter, how in the world do they enforce that? I mean, how would you look in somebody's truck fuel tank to see if there's red in there? I'm just thinking out loud on that one, I don't have any road vehicles that can even use diesel. Any color diesel.

Google home heating oil.
It's the same thing.

 

[mo1]

OK, now I'll add my own (dumb? not so dumb?) question to the thread: how do you get red diesel? I have a few 5 gallon safety cans and drive them to the same filling station I buy car gasoline. I use one of those receiver hitch mounted platforms, so any drips don't get into the car, which is a major improvement. But I don't remember ever seeing someplace I could buy red/off road diesel. Where can you buy it? What do you have to do to prove it's not going to get used on road?

For that matter, how in the world do they enforce that? I mean, how would you look in somebody's truck fuel tank to see if there's red in there? I'm just thinking out loud on that one, I don't have any road vehicles that can even use diesel. Any color diesel.

You can either buy red diesel at a pump like you would for on-road diesel or you can have it delivered by a fuel company into a tank that you own that sits on your premises. I live in a fairly rural area with a lot of agriculture and "the local co-op" is who I buy red diesel from. They have an unattended card-swipe gas station that sells red diesel at a pump about 10 minutes away from where I live and they will also deliver fuel to your tank if you buy at least 200 gallons at a time. This has been the case everywhere I have lived, there has always been at least one gas station at the edge of town with a red diesel pump and there was always a fuel supplier (generally but not always the same one that delivers propane) who could deliver red diesel to a farm tank. But then again, I have always lived in agricultural areas in the Midwest, so your mileage may vary. I personally have five 5 gallon cans that I fill up from the red diesel pump from the card-swipe station as I don't want to have a grand or more of diesel sitting around outside in a tank that some yahoo could drain when I am at work.

There is no special permission around here to buy red diesel. The only thing you need to have on file with the vendor is a sales tax exemption if you are a farmer, else you will pay sales tax on the red diesel by default. (Farmers in Missouri are exempt from paying sales tax on anything directly ag-related.) You are expected to use it only in off-road vehicles under threat of a fine that starts at roughly $10,000 and can be much higher than that. The authorities dip samples from fuel tanks of diesel vehicles to see if there's any detectable red dye in the fuel in the tanks of on-road vehicles. Around here, they have been known to show up at the cattle sale barns and dip tanks to see if farmers are illegally filling their on-road trucks with red diesel from the farm tank.

 

[lman]

I was thinking of categorical answers like "TSC sells it around the back", "Always just go to your dealership", "Any truck stop but they call it X", et cetera.

But if you know local sources, I live in northern Cecil County Maryland and do most of my shopping in Newark DE (Newcastle county) or Aberdeen MD (Harford county).

Thanks!

Thanks, somebody in that area may be able to help you.

 

[KilroyJC]

I was thinking of categorical answers like "TSC sells it around the back", "Always just go to your dealership", "Any truck stop but they call it X", et cetera.

But if you know local sources, I live in northern Cecil County Maryland and do most of my shopping in Newark DE (Newcastle county) or Aberdeen MD (Harford county).

Thanks!

Hey - is the little diner just west of the Chrome Dairy still open?

that was a favorite stop when I would go hhelp a friend get racing transmissions from GER back in the day...

 

[SmallChange]

Hey - is the little diner just west of the Chrome Dairy still open?

You mean the one at the bottom of that hill on Route 273? Yes it is. Or, there's still a restaurant/bar of some sort there. But it has changed names a few times, and I guess that means it's been bought and sold again and again. I thought its best name was "Impressions from a Rooftop", because my impression from their rooftop would have been "if I look more than a thousand feet in any direction, I still have to look up". If I remember right its current name is "Bottom of the Hill", which makes more sense. Just a little further west is the intersection with Tome Highway, and that has been evolving too. They put in a traffic circle there, and another a few miles east at Blue Ball road too. Traffic circles have not been that easy for locals to adjust to. More than once I've encountered somebody going the wrong way around.

 

[DarkBlack]

As I wrote in another very similar thread…#2 HHO and diesel, can be, and most likely are the same.
BUT, there can be differences. They have different specifications. For those confidently saying they KNOW it’s identical….sorry, but you can’t say that.
It’s 2 different products made to pass different specifications. Sure, you can run HHO in your diesel and vice-versa, but that doesn’t mean they are identical.
Diesel fuel has more demanding specifications than fuel oil. Diesel fuel has been under the stringent EPA regulations. Here’s just 2 examples where they most certainly are NOT the same:

Cetane is very important for diesel engines. What’s the cetane rating of your heating oil? Good luck finding it, you won’t, because heating oil has no specification for it to pass. That means it could be low- which is ok for heating devices, but not so good for a Diesel engine. California and most of Texas, for example, have required diesel fuel cetane levels much higher than normal diesel fuel production puts out, which requires either further refinement, and/ or additives to meet the diesel fuel specifications. In these areas HHO would be guaranteed to have a significantly lower cetane level, as it’s an added cost to boost the level.
Second example: There’s still tanks across the country with 500ppm sulfur heating oil, as it wasn’t under the EPA’s mandated 15ppm maximum for diesel fuel law.
3’rd Freebie here- Heating oil being used in less demanding applications, is allowed to be sold as is off-spec, with/without downstream additional mixing, when certain criteria is met. This isn’t allowed with diesel fuel.

 

[LouNY]

And unless you have a DOC or DPF filter or EGR the additional sulfer will not hurt any thing and in most states even HHO is mandated to be low/almost no sulfer. And I don't believe even with an egr system that the sulfer would bother.
The EPA regulations have certainly required greater expenses for a limited improvement.

 

[CobyRupert]

Maybe already stated, and I didn’t see, but…

I thought with the low sulfur fuel, or modern pumps, etc.. that diesel fuel had added lubricants? Part of a spec? Could this make a difference between it and HHO?
But I think in many places #2 diesel is also sold as HHO. (Unless your tank is outdoors, then a mix with #1 or kerosene…)

 

[hosspuller]

Maybe already stated, and I didn’t see, but…

I thought with the low sulfur fuel, or modern pumps, etc.. that diesel fuel had added lubricants? Part of a spec? Could this make a difference between it and HHO?
But I think in many places #2 diesel is also sold as HHO. (Unless your tank is outdoors, then a mix with #1 or kerosene…)

Regarding the whole subject ... Think of the analogy of Drinking water and Bath water. They are both water... I can and do bathe in drinking water, but I would not drink bath water. (For the dense among us... HHO is akin to bath water. Both delirious to health when consumed in critical applications.)