Red deisel alarm bell

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Petercatterall

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Just read on the 'red deisel' forum that red deisel is essential for the well being of my Perkins engine.
It was considered that 'ordinary road deisel' was too light for the older engines like perkins which were designed to run on the heavier agricultural grades.
Do the experts agree with this? if so what do we do if and when we can't obtain red deisel?
 
I don't think you will find that there is any difference between red diesel and road diesel apart from the die that they put in it.
 
What engine have you got?

cos (as per my post) i am waiting for a message from perkins at the moment, just to get clarification - Lets get a proper assessment from the experts before we have a mass panic.

I cannot see why we would have a problem apart from an injector pump rebuild.
 
red diesel is simply white diesel with a red dye in it to identify it as untaxed diesel. Otherwise it's the same. If this was not the case people would have been having problems when they refuelled in France on white diesel would they not?
 
at our boat club after talking to the driver it is the same apart from the dye he goes to the refinery at Immingham to pick it up.Sulphur a lubricant ? H2SO4= sulphuric acid H2O = water if youve got the water you have a problem and its not lubrication!
 
Most places that sell red are selling Gas Oil , not white-with-a-die-in-it, next time you fill up ask to see the BS EN no, cos white is BS EN 590 and red is something like BS 2869 or ISO 8217

Nigel_Luther will corrrect me here (hopefully)

cos i checked my supplier, and they were selling gas oil
 
Leyton
May I ask a quick question, which I,m sure has been covered before, but is there a differance in Diesel quility between GASOIL and Red Diesel

Many Thanks
 
As far as i am aware, Gas Oil IS Red Diesel (I did have a data sheet from Texaco once, now i cannot find it :-( Typical!, and they said there red diesel IS Gas Oil ) so they are the same - Nigel is the expert here, so hopefully he will comment on this.

Does this help? if not please post!!!
 
[ QUOTE ]
red diesel is simply white diesel with a red dye in it to identify it as untaxed diesel. Otherwise it's the same. If this was not the case people would have been having problems when they refuelled in France on white diesel would they not?

[/ QUOTE ]

What a good way of getting this message hopefully over to the disbelievers......nice one.

Vica versa also applies when using red diesel in truck engines. Fyi There are other additives as well as colouring in red diesel - but HMC&E will not disclose what they are as if known - naughty people could remove them.

In NI for several years some very naughty people doctored red diesel to make it look 'white', created bogus companies, and sold the doctored fuel in bulk to transport companies.

Whilst when caught there was hell (and lots of tax) to pay - I am not aware it caused any issues with any truck engines.

Cheers
JOHN
 
apologies to you Duncan. just had a talk with my 83 year old friend who has worked on everything from aircraft to steel rolling mills, a very qualified man. When they had a gearbox on the rolling mill that was overheating they used to use a high sulphur oil, this would coat the high stressed gears with sulphur compound and stop the overheating.
 
no problem.

wasn't going to push the point!

get's even funnier when they talk about 'washing' the diesel to reduce the sulphur - again the conatations for us poor folk who spend our lives trying to keep water out of our tanks sound horrific.

as has been said there are differences, they will affect some and no doubt 90% of those affected negatively will be advised and be able to take remedial action if the fuel changes. The other 10% will be like the Vauxhall valve guides and low octane unleaded - find out when the failures start! (joking)
Many/most boat diesels are established truck derivatives, or based on that manufacturing technology, and most of the others are designed with significant fuel tollerances for the varied markets and conditions they are expected to operate in so I would bet on worse case being the 'recomendation to use an additive'
 
Thanks for all the comments. I will need to look further in to this before I would be confident about using white diesel.
There have been several statements that red and white are the same but for the dye. This was my previuos assumption but other comments suggest that there are differences (ie in sulpher content) which could cause problems on older engines.
Perhaps we can use an additive to restore these qualities??
 
Easy answer , to add extra lubricating qualities to low sulphur diesel , just add lubricant !! probably 1 litre to 100 Ltrs of fuel , use engine oil or sunflower oil , I do this with my JCB (perkins engine ) . Low sulphur fuel good for environment but crap for fuel pumps and injectors whatever the age or design of engine
 
[ QUOTE ]
red diesel is simply white diesel with a red dye in it to identify it as untaxed diesel. Otherwise it's the same. If this was not the case people would have been having problems when they refuelled in France on white diesel would they not?

[/ QUOTE ]

It's not the same.

When the Volvo D series was introduced to the UK some models had problems with stalling on tickover. It turned out to be the quality of our diesel compared to that in Sweden/europe. The management sytems had to be re worked to take account of the poor quality of red.
 
Red diesel is just white diesel there is no diffrence except for the dye as when we had our plant fuel tanks filled they filled them with white and on producing the bill for white the supplier of the diesel was told no chance we orded red no one is ever going to fill with white so the supplier soon sent a man down with the dye to put in the tanks its the same as some companys put black dye in there diesel to stop theft. Its not the colour that you want to worry about its the cost so if i were u i would be collecting 45 gallon drumbs and stocking up
 
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