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Thursday, June 01, 2006

Research continues, fuel for pennies!

This is what I have learned about using waste vegetable oil(wvo) to date.
If I do home brew or bio diesel I would collect the wvo, filter it, let it settle out for several days to a couple of weeks,add methanol to it, cook it , add caustic(naoh, sodium hydroxide) to it, and rinse it. It produces about 20 percent glycerin as a waste and the biodeisel, which you can mix in your deisel tank. The cost would be getting a few drums and a new or used water heater(this sould be used as your still from brewing. The cost calculates out to about 70 cents a gallon. The process is a little more in depth than this, but you get the picture.
The other alternative and the one I'm looking at is you again secure you a supply of wvo, preferrably from a Chinese Restaraunt( less animal fat is better, less gelling up) and filter it. This is where it is different from home brew. You have to set up an auxillary tank(unless you have duel fuel tanks, which my truck doesn't have) and you pump the good grease into this tank. You buy or can research and set up a system that runs your vehicle on grease. Basically what this system does is this, you start your vehicle up on deisel and you drive it for a couple of miles, this lets the wvo heat up, either by heating it with a 12 volt heater off your vehicle or tying off the heater hose. Once you've driven for a couple of minutes you switch it to the grease and boogie on. A minute or 2 before you are going to shut the vehicle down you switch back over to deisel to flush the lines so it won't gel up. I have a 26 gallon tank so the estimate is 1200 miles on a tank of deisel. The wvo would cost me about 7 to 40 cents a gallon to run my truck depending if I can get it free or not. The kit costs about $2400 with a tank, and I can lower that by $800 if I set up my own tank. Greasel .com sells a complete system(pump out of the grease tank from said Chinese Restaraunt and you are good to go). I don't know about this one because all the research suggests filtering the grease and letting it settle for days or a couple of weeks. Anyway as of yet there are no special liscensing required or road tax, but I sure wouldn't be putting a bumper sticker on it that said "Powered by Grease" or anything like that. I'll keep you posted on what else I find out and if I do this or not. Grease is the word!lol.
Oh and the workouts and eats, well the eats could be better, but haven't missed but 1 day in 10 weeks!
Later.

2 Comments:

  • At 11:52 AM, Blogger Erin said…

    T-R-O-Y... you are IT... please share... see my blog for details :)

     
  • At 10:29 PM, Blogger Janel said…

    Troy, you are a genius!! How do you know all of that about the gas??? That totally rocks!!!!!

     

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