The off-road diesel that my friends have gotten so far is no. 2 diesel and not the low sulphur variety.
<SNIP> Each of his trucks gets stopped and tested once a month <SNIP>
None of them can remember having a diesel car stopped and tested.
Number 2 Diesel doesn't refer to Low Sulphur or Ultra Low Sulphur designations. There is No. 2 LSD and No. 2 ULSD both, so the fuel grade doesn't convey any info about the sulphur content. The Canadian and US deadlines for phase-in were about the same for on-road (October of '07) but most refiners and stations were ahead of schedule. In Canada at least, the refiners have all said "Why make multiple grades of sulphur content?" and they make both on-road and off-road to the same spec (ULSD) rather than have multiple grades of fuel. I can't speak to the processes used by the American refiners, but I know we do a good bit of refining for you guys up here as well, suggesting that at the very least, MOST off-road diesel is already ULSD in the U.S. as well, even though the government isn't mandating it until as late as 2010.
So if you're buying off-road in hopes of saving your pump, you may be misguided. If you're doing it to avoid paying road tax at the pump (because of course you are planning to remit it later like a good citizen
) Then you should be just fine.
Nobody really bothers to test diesel cars so far... but then, a lot of people still don't realize that you can get diesel cars here. I could see myself getting dipped / checked back home, but that's because I grew up on a farm.
in my jetta you can't dip the tank.. there's some kind of screen blocking it. i tried syphoning my tank once... wrecked car with practically a full tank of fuel :evil:
Can you see any semi-transparent fuel lines?
Called my fuel supplier. He said everything is ultra low sulphur, on and off road. So Giles might be getting a few off road pumps to overhaul.
Yep - as far as I know, North American refiners and distributors have just switched to one standard, rather than have to double their fuel storage facilities, refining processes, etc. Cheaper and faster to have one kind of fuel rather than two, and that allows them to do less precise forecasting, because they don't have to account separately for on-road and off-road fuels. Actually, for that matter it would also raise the quality of off-road fuel available, because they don't have to sit on old off-road fuel for months and months if it doesn't sell, since the central distributors are just blending the dye onsite rather than the refiners making totally separate fuels.
I heard from a old Mercedes guy that of road diesel (or Red-Fuel) has a higher cetane rating then on road diesel.
<SNIP>
Or is he just a crazy old tax dodging fool?
-E
Crazy old tax dodging fool. Off-road diesel is THE SAME as on-road diesel, broadly speaking. The only difference is the red dye that is added - otherwise, it is just on-road diesel, refined at the same place from the same source. If anything, off-road diesel will typically have poorer characteristics because it is cycled / replaced less frequently and usually stored privately for fleet or commercial purposes.
He may have meant "It smokes more, which means it must be running better" as this is a pretty commonly-held misconception. So much so that new tractors with electronically-controlled injection systems now have smoke built in because the old farmers kept coming back saying "It doesn't smoke anymore, it hasn't got enough power". The engineers scratched their heads for a long time before they realized that modding the injection maps to yield some smoke resolved the end-user "power" complaints, although dyno results remained identical.
i have heard of the state highway patrol dipping tanks of farm trucks at our farm science review show.
Wouldn't a farm truck like a normal diesel pickup be considered a off-road use vehicle because it is being used for heavy duty.
I was hauling alot I would rather use the red high sulfur diesel.
Nope. A certain portion of it can be considered agricultural, and depending on where you are, you CAN get away with using off-road fuel, but there are legal requirements as to how much you need to be pulling, what percentage of the time, and how close you need to be to the farm and stuff. As a general rule, if you're on the highway, you need to be running on-road fuel, but legal requirements vary from place to place.
As mentioned above, red number 2 diesel isn't (by definition, at least) any higher in sulphur than clear / blue / yellow / standard number 2 diesel. Home heating oil will be, but it's just bad stuff for vehicular use generally speaking.
Here's a link to another Diesel No. 2 thread from earlier with some good info on diesel fuel standards and characteristics in North America in particular:
http://vwdiesel.net/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=12117{Edited To Combine Two Posts Rather than Double-Posting}
