Cheap bastards
The world is full of them, and I’ve known my share.
years ago, i had a friend who was a staff photographer for one of the big CHicago papers. He also moonlighted as a crime scene photographer, and I got to help him, from time to time, at the latter of the two gigs. During that time, trust me, I saw some things I’d rather unsee, if I could.
Anyway, this was one cheap bastard, and a man after my own heart. IN 1981, thanks to Jimmah, Gas prices were nuts and diesel was the way to go. Cheap Bastard had recently converted his furnace from oil to natural gas, and still had quite a few gallons of fuel oil in his tank, He drained them out into watering cans, and unwilling to waste, poured the fuel into his 1981 Olds 98 diesel.
The diesel ran fine.
Home heating oil was still pretty cheap back then, so he decided to keep getting it filled. The oil guy was tickled to have the extra business, and the olds ran fine on the kerosene. So well, in fact, that Cheap bastard, who had experienced trouble with the diesel starting cold, decided to just leave the sonofabitch running all the time. To my knowledge, other than to change oil and filters, the Olds never got turned off from 1981 to 1984. At idle, it barely used any fuel, and diesels being coldblooded bastards anyway, it made more sense from a “start quickly and leave” standpoint.
Not one to let a car sit and idle and not benefit from the power, Cheap Bastard built a battery of batteries, and plugged them into the Olds’ charging circuit when he slept, and a power invertor yanked juice from the batteries to run lights in the house. AND he got a fuel allowance from work.
A cheap bastard, and man after my own heart, in many ways.
10 comments Og | Uncategorized
Holy Crap!!! Now that’s cheap!
Well, good for him, I bet he loved doing all that too. *grin*
Actually I don’t see that chap as cheap so much as exercising the American pioneer spirit of “improvise, adapt and overcome.”
More, as an engineer’s son I particularly like the semi-Rube Goldberg idea of using the power generated by the idling car.
I seem to recall reading that the main difference between home heating oil and diesel is that diesel has road tax on it.
Whre I work we keep two different types of diesel fuel. One is for vehicles and has road tax as part of the price. The other is for things that don’t run on thr road, like D-11 Caterpillar bulldozers and stationary electric generators.
It also strikes me that the fellow could claim his setup was to be as green as possible.
My compliments on an excellant entry.
My name is Dick, and I’m a cheap bastard.
Charles: That’s the main price difference.
The other difference is that HHO doesn’t have the engine-and-fuel-injector-pleasing additive packages that commercial diesel fuel has.
It’d probably take a long time for any difference in wear to show, especially with those already-awful early-80s American diesels, most of which, IIRC, were hastily converted (by the design teams) gasoline engines.
(I don’t think it’s really “green” to let a car idle to charge batteries – its engine isn’t designed to run at idle for hours on end, and will be one or both of inefficiently combusting the fuel (in terms of both power output to the alternator, which isn’t set up to charge batteries at idle for hours on end, AND emissions) and causing excessive wear or gunking-up of the engine.
I know, for instance, that many passenger diesels tend to accumulate carbon deposits if run at low interior temperatures for long periods of time (such as slow driving, let alone idling for hours) – they’re designed to be driven, after all.)
I think he was just being cheap.
Wow!
He is the man!!
My God, I have a new hero. Cheap bastard, no way! A cheap bastard is one who reuses wax paper cups he gets his soda-pop in at the Kwiki Mart, mashes soap scraps together to make d.i.y. bars, and buys the box of apples to eat all winter instead of a bag at a time just to save 50 cents.
That man is an Innovator, an Improviser. He exhibits that extra trait that separates the American from everyone else on Earth. The one who sees the soap overcooked and says “it’s not ruined, let’s sell it as the soap that floats (Ivory).” Or the one who looks at the buoys he makes and says, “let’s cut that in half and make a BBQ grill for s**ts and giggles just to see how it comes out (Weber).”
Btw, the diesel engine CAN run for days and weeks on end, but yes you DO have to keep the idle up, and I think it has more to do with spinning the alternator fast enough to keep the battery charged/not drained than engine temperature. Trucks come with a toggle switch so you can kick it into “high idle” for the night when it’s under 20 deg F to keep the fuel from gelling.
Bingo, MTS! When my folks were running trucks, it was almost always cheaper to leave the rig running. It isn’t (or wasn’t in the ’80s and ’90s) worth the fuel of cranking it again after eating, and they barely burned any fuel when stranded in ND by a blizzard–just had to remember to clear the grill so the radiator could breathe.
Belay “grill”; make it “grille”.
Damn, I feel dumb.
Must have been a real engineer.
Good ol’ American ingenuity.
There’s a good chance I’m mistaken, but to my knowledge the only major difference between fuel oil and diesel is the taxes the government levies on the diesel….