Cant afford petrol?

[datestamp]

Watch for very cold weather as the viscosity of veg oil means trouble starting at high % mix with mineral diesel.

A quick slosh of parafin in winter - if HM Goose-Stepping and Torture don't see you

[sparklelard]

Or white spirit or methanol

[DimPrawn]

If you forget to declare the duty on the vegetable oil, what are the chances of being caught? I mean, how many people in the UK have been done for sticking a bit of ASDA veg oil in their tanks and not remembering to pay the £27p/litre duty?

I know in theory the C&E could setup checkpoints all over the country and then analyse each fuel tank, but is this likely?

[Lucifer Box]

It's started already. No price is too great to pay where tax revenues are under threat.

When staff at a Welsh supermarket first noticed dramatic increases in the sale of cooking oil, they thought the locals were doing a lot of frying. They weren't. They were filling up their cars with it - not surprising, as it's only 42p a litre. Trouble is, if you don't pay duty, it's illegal. Jim White reports

According to Mike Hebson, the manager of Asda's store in Swansea, south Wales, there was no reason to be suspicious that sales of the company's cheapest bottles of cooking oil were running 20% higher than the previous year, way above any other store in Britain. "We just thought it was one of those things," says Hebson.

Why should he and his staff have been remotely questioning, he suggests, if men in overalls and lived-in denims had started buying Smart Price vegetable oil in batches of six, eight and 12 litres at a time. When one customer came in and filled a trolley to the brim with plastic containers of the thin, urine-coloured liquid, the checkout operator barely gave him a second glance. "Naturally, we assumed they were buying on price," says Hebson, an Asda man to the soles of his own-brand brogues. There was another reason that his staff were unlikely to see anything untoward in bulk-buying cheap vegetable oil. "We just thought they were doing a lot of frying," he says. "You have to remember, healthy eating has not hit Swansea in a big way."

It wasn't until the Department of Transport began a series of trial tests in the city last March that staff realised something odd had been going on. In an attempt to take diesel vehicles belching out illegal emissions off the road, department inspectors introduced experimental spot checks on roads in Bristol, Westminster, Glasgow, Middlesbrough, Canterbury and Swansea. It was in the latter that they found something surprising: a car with a fuel tank half full of cooking oil.

Read On: Fry and Drive

[sparklelard]

C&E do carry out spot checks, normally to catch vehicles using red diesel. It's relatively easy to identify a car using SVO as the smell, although some claim no smell at all.

C&E do not know how much SVO you use and the quartely return is based on trust . As long as you have registered yourself on form EX103 and are stopped, there is nothing C&E can do.

[threaded]

Indeed Mercedes motors are so accommodating that they will, apparently, run on lard.

[DimPrawn]

C&E do carry out spot checks, normally to catch vehicles using red diesel. It's relatively easy to identify a car using SVO as the smell, although some claim no smell at all.

C&E do not know how much SVO you use and the quartely return is based on trust . As long as you have registered yourself on form EX103 and are stopped, there is nothing C&E can do.

I see. So register and then if you are stopped you can wave the form at them and say "All legal and above board fellas".

Well I think as dyed-in-the-wool tax evaders it's every Contractors duty (duty get it!) to run on veg oil and be a little inaccurate about the amount of veg oil used.

Good luck to you Sparklelard.

[sparklelard]

In a nutshell, C&E's left hand doesn't know what it's right hand is doing.

There is conflict of information from different people in the same office.

As mentioned on the Pajero Owners Club Bio-Diesel Forum, get your self registered and every quarter send in a return for SVO at 27p per litre. It's up the individual how much they want to declare. There is now way, at present, C&E will find out how much you actually use.

Actually, one thing I've noticed since using SVO is an improvement in performance.

[The Late, Great JC]

Drove behind a taxi this morning that smelled a lot like one of my model aircraft...