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That's how much I have collected and filtered in order to heat my home this winter. It took my a while to get the process down, but I think I've mostly got the hang of it now. I know I'll need a lot more, but I'll continue collecting it over the summer.
I've also been playing with an oil burner to try to modify it to run the WVO in my furnace. I'm a little nervous that it may not be reliable enough to get me through the coldest part of the winter without cutting out and freezing my pipes. I haven't actually made test run on the burner yet, but I'm getting close.
[ December 31, 2006, 04:48 PM: Message edited by: Glenn Arnold ]
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I saw a MythBusters last week were the boys filtered waste vegetable oil and ran a diesel engine off of it. I think that the stats were something like regular diesel got 33 mpg and the vegetable oil got 30 mpg.
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There's quite a few converted diesel cars around here running off of grease. They're always in the parades and festivals. Posts: 1681 | Registered: Jun 2004
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Grease-burning for fuel will remain economical as long as restaurants keep giving it away for free. Once there are more people requesting grease than there are restaurants willing to part with it, it'll cease to be the cheap option.
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quote:Once there are more people requesting grease than there are restaurants willing to part with it, it'll cease to be the cheap option.
That was the Mythbuster's point as well.
From an ecological point of view, how 'safe' is used cooking oil?
From an economical point of view, how useful is switching to cooking oil? I assume that vegetable oil is a renewable resource, but I don't know anything about how it's created.
Posts: 14554 | Registered: Dec 1999
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Scott, from a carbon dioxide perspective it's much better, because the CO2 released was taken from the atmosphere sometime recently as opposed to millions of years ago.
With respect to other emissions, I have no idea.
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The other thing to consider is the chemicals used in growing the plants to make the oil. Chances are good, that these come from fossil fuels (mainly natural gas).
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quote:Originally posted by Dagonee: Scott, from a carbon dioxide perspective it's much better, because the CO2 released was taken from the atmosphere sometime recently as opposed to millions of years ago.
So what? CO2 is CO2, regardless of what produced it.
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Vegetable oil burns very cleanly. It has virtually no sulfur content, so it doesn't produce SO2. It also produces less soot than diesel and no fly ash.
As far as biodiesel is concerned, it requires methanol and lye to process, which is nasty on a lot of levels. It also produces soap and glycerol as byproducts, which could be useful if you find a market, but otherwise it's just something I'd have to dispose of. I'm just burning the WVO straight. It just seems much more straightforward than trying to mess with the components of an internal combustion engine.
As far as cost is concerned, I only hope the WVO stays free until I recoup some of the cost of conversion. I don't see WVO as the replacement for oil, just a part of the solution, but I do like the intrinsic value that comes from using a product that has already paid for itself once.
Oh, and thanks for the concern Dag. It's a little different doing combustion research in my basement instead of in a lab, but I do have professional experience here, so I think I'll be alright. Burner tests will be outdoors until I'm ready to put it in the furnace. As it is I'm trying to stay with commercial equipment with minimum modifications, so it's pretty straightforward.
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quote:Originally posted by Dagonee: Scott, from a carbon dioxide perspective it's much better, because the CO2 released was taken from the atmosphere sometime recently as opposed to millions of years ago.
So what? CO2 is CO2, regardless of what produced it.
It matters a lot to the overall level of CO2 in the atmosphere.
quote:A third CGRER project, the Biomass Power for Rural Development Program, is attempting to create an entire new loop for the production of energy, a closed loop that provides for the trapping as well as release of CO2. This trial program, funded primarily by the U.S. Department of Energy, proposes to tie up CO2 in "biofuels," fast-growing plants that can be used as fuel sources. Since any CO2 released by the combustion of these plants would have been drawn from the atmosphere quite recently, the resulting energy would be produced without any net CO2 emissions. Actually, biofuels do better than breaking even on CO2 emissions. Because of the relatively small amount of energy needed to process biofuels, and the ability of their roots to store carbon in the soil, the use of biofuels leads to a net reduction of atmospheric CO2 relative to fossil fuel combustion. Chariton Valley Resource Conservation and Development, Inc. plans to establish switchgrass on 40,000 acres of marginal, Conservation Reserve Program-enrolled cropland as an energy crop. This switchgrass is slated to be burned with coal in an existing power plant, with the expectation of its generating 35MW of power. CGRER’s role will be to develop the estimates of net emissions of CO2 (as well as other gases) from the switchgrass growth, harvest, and combustion, and to compare these data to emissions data relating to coal mining, processing, and combustion.
quote:Oh, and thanks for the concern Dag. It's a little different doing combustion research in my basement instead of in a lab, but I do have professional experience here, so I think I'll be alright. Burner tests will be outdoors until I'm ready to put it in the furnace. As it is I'm trying to stay with commercial equipment with minimum modifications, so it's pretty straightforward.
Good to know.
I have an active imagination, and we just studied torts in the bar review. Everything explodes in torts. Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote: don't think that natural gas is used as a chemical to grow the plants to make the oil, HE
Yes, actually it is. CH4 is broken down to create NH3, which is then used to create ammonium nitrate fertilizer. Our whole agribusiness economy is based on this.
Still it doesn't negate the value of using waste vegetable oil, since it's already been used to fry food, and would otherwise be landfilled or incinerated (there's some irony there).
Also, corn oil is very fertilizer dependent. Other crops such as rape seed (canola) and hemp are much less fertilizer intensive. I've mostly been gathering soybean oil. I don't know how fertilizer dependent that is.
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I made the first test of the burner tonight. Didn't really have time to dial it in, but it lit up and it didn't leak. That's a start.
I was using an old nozzle, just so I didn't mess up a new one. I think that was a major reason why the flame didn't look quite right. I also need to put a pressure gauge on the pump, and adjust the pressure.
I also have to heat the oil more before it reaches the burner. I've got a cartridge heater in the oil gun, but it doesn't seem up to the load. I've got another temperature controller around here somewhere, if I can find it. So I'm going to add a band heater around the oil filter to preheat it a little.
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I have an old friend I ran into recently who is in Colorado promoting SVO (straight vegetable oil) conversions for diesels. He was driving a diesel (VW) at the time I talked to him, and he showed me the setup and explained it. Pretty awesome. He drove from Denver to here (about 11 hours) on about 2 bucks (has to start up in diesel mode and shut down in diesel mode, convert to SVO for the long-in between time there).
He said the concept works well in Colorado because restaurants there have to pay to have their old vegetable oil hauled off. Here in Kansas, he said it would not be as popular because restaurants are paid for their old oil cast-off, isn't having to pay to have it removed.
The burner produces more soot than I'd like. I increased the combustion air but it didn't affect the soot problem. Must be an atomization issue.
The burner ignites just like it's supposed to, and all the controls work.
Looking back at my previous post I realize that I've made a huge jump between where I was when I last posted and now. There are lots of little details I've been working on, but the most annoying is that the burner dribbles oil from the nozzle for about 3 minutes after it shuts down.
I only ran it in the furnace after I convinced myself that I could prevent the dribble by cracking the fitting on the line to the oil gun so the oil would dribble into a can OUTSIDE of the furnace instead of INTO the furnace. Consequently I still can't run the burner unattended.
I'll be switching back to the regular burner before tonight, but I think I'll run it a few more times before I do. Makes a good excuse to heat the house up to 75 deg or so for my mother in law on new years.
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Let me know when we are capable of using the fat/oils from my midsection to power my car/home.
Loose weight and heat your house for free. America would no longer be obese, wouldn't have to meddle in middle east affairs, oh this would be great!!! So who has been assigned to work on this??
Posts: 65 | Registered: Oct 2006
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There was an article recently in our local paper about a former resident who now lives in Florida. He has been running an old Mercedes Benz sedan on WVO for years now. He chooses a Mercedes with a diesel engine because he claims that the engine needs no alterations or modifications, it can run on WVO right out of the box. What he does when he drives from Florida to Pennsylvania is he contacts restaurants that will give away used oil to him for free. He then strains the WVO with an old sock before putting it in the tank, and recently made the trek completely on WVO...
Posts: 1870 | Registered: Mar 2003
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Already been done. Back in the '70's people were building "superinsulated" homes which supposedly could be heated with "body heat and lightbulbs."
More realistically, these homes were supposed to be insulated well enough that waste heat from appliances such as stoves, lamps, etc. along with domestic hot water, and yes, even body heat factored into it.
In reality these homes were so airtight that indoor pollution was a big problem. They still needed a small furnace or heater anyway, so they didn't really work as advertised.
If you want to use your body fat to heat your house, all you need to do is exercise. You need to lose ~8 lbs per hour to heat at the same rate as a conventional furnace.
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