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Bryan1 Guru Joined: 22/02/2006 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1344
Posted: 01:54am 15 Sep 2017
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G'day Guy's, Well got a heap of canola vege oil here and a couple of suppliers that are both interested in me making it.
After doing some research a 5:1 ratio of oil to methanol is used and for using Naoh(lye) 5.5 grams per litre is needed, if using KoH the 7.5 grams per litre is needed.
Now for making Naoh(lye) one can easily make using charcoal and for the methanol I do make 92-94% vodka with my bubbler so that could be used.
Now one may ask why bother making bio diesel where in my case got got a '95 hilux, old farm tractor and a 16 hp listeriod diesel. Also got a 1,000 litre diesel tank to use as the bowser.
So any member doing it or am I am flogging a dead horse.
Cheers Bryan
yahoo2 Guru Joined: 05/04/2011 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1166
Posted: 10:41pm 15 Sep 2017
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I think you could use a methanol/ethanol blend to make your methoxide if you are making it with fresh canola oil, I doubt it will be great with waste cooking oil, the fatty acids will be too high for the ethanol blend.
The first thing to learn is oil titration to test and calculate the fatty acids in the oil.
The alcohol needs to be dry or you will end up with soap in the product and the hydroxide needs to be good quality not oxidised or decomposed.
There will be a lot of waste glycerin to deal with and to make it viable you will probably have to extract the leftover methanol and ethanol from the fuel to reuse.
When I helped one of my friends we used a dry wash technique using an ion exchange resin for the final polish, I liked that a lot it worked really well.
I dont regret learning how to do it but it is not cheap and here we have to declare it and pay excise if it is used on road (for off road it is more paperwork to claim the money back) so you have to watch the costs closely. For old clunkers it is easier to test and sort the oil and use the best stuff straight and do a rough esterizing process on the worst oil and use it in a burner. I'm confused, no wait... maybe I'm not...
Warpspeed Guru Joined: 09/08/2007 Location: AustraliaPosts: 4406
Posted: 01:36pm 25 Oct 2017
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.
Edited by Warpspeed 2017-10-27Cheers, Tony.
Boppa Guru Joined: 08/11/2016 Location: AustraliaPosts: 814
Posted: 06:41pm 25 Oct 2017
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I started to do it a while back, but it was a pain to do (mostly as it was being done down the side of the house and had to be 'kidproofed' from 4 children- NOT kid friendly stuff involved Then a local started doing it in bulk, and I just started buying from him (all legal and above board in nsw) then I had to ritire the hilux and bought a petrol powered exploder, now I am back in a diesel hilux again, and looking in brisbakers for one, they dont seeem to exist up here (or are keeping it on the quiet)
Another thing to put into the 'to do' list when I get set up on the block....
(its getting to be a pretty bloomin long list!!!)
Revlac Guru Joined: 31/12/2016 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1024
Posted: 02:28am 28 Oct 2017
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A few years ago I started collecting used oil and various bits S/steal drum, fuel storage tanks. And then it all started getting expensive as usual, moved onto other things. We still keep all of our own used canola oil and rice bran oil, some of it runs the old lister generator. Also use the clean oil for the chainsaw cutter bar, just don't let it get wet or cut wet trees it will glue up the chain and oil pump.
Decided to try and grow our own peanut oil, easy to grow, however the mice dig up all the peanut's and so do the local bandicoots, they even drink the oil I had stored near the generator, I would call that environmentally friendly fuel.
I think homemade fuel will come back again in the future.
Aaron Cheers Aaron Off The Grid
dwyer Guru Joined: 19/09/2005 Location: AustraliaPosts: 574
Posted: 02:43am 28 Oct 2017
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I have over 1000 liter of cooking oil mostly animal fat and vegetable oil and thinking using black or green Woolworth or Cole shopping bags to filter out the oil rubbish out into next clean tank on hot day when the shopping bag get full of rubbish can easy replace other bag over again.On hot day is better so oil is heat by the sun make oil hot and thinner but still not sure what i will use for maybe turn into fuel for my diesel ute ??? old country Bushman
M Del Senior Member Joined: 09/04/2012 Location: AustraliaPosts: 155
Posted: 06:26pm 28 Oct 2017
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A group of us did it for a while years ago. We used any old oil or fat we could get, lots from restaurants and fish shops etc.
Oils were poured into large settling tanks/vats with taps at 3 levels. These had large openings on top to make getting the crud out easier. It took a couple of months to settle a tank, but it was an easier method than straining/filtering and a lot less work.
Fats were lumped into a large vat that was heated and strained when we were out of oil, rare at the time.
The 2 industrial chemists in the group did our titration and chemical wizardry. The rest of us learnt it as well so we could make fuel when the guys were away. We used air washers/bubblers to dry our fuel, I don't remember reclaiming any methanol, but have had a few drinks since then. The glycerine was turned into soap and sold at markets. Properly marketed the soap could have nearly paid for the bio diesel.
It all came to an end when used oils & fat became a valuable commodity to a large recycler and the level of paperwork/governance for the shops we were getting our stock from became a bit of a burden to them.
Our large vats etc came from closed industrial sites and the rest was made by the group.
It is mostly easy to do, but the chemicals involved need to handled properly and not left lying around. Not something to leave for little ones to get hold of. We never dealt with the excise side of things, I think it was becoming a thing when we finished up. I would do it again if I get my hands on some acres. Mark
bitdog Newbie Joined: 13/11/2016 Location: United StatesPosts: 15
Posted: 10:27am 04 Jan 2018
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I ran an old Mac 10 yard dump truck on used veggie oil just by mixing filtered veggie and diesel #1 at a 50-50 ratio. In warm weather, running every day, no alterations to the truck. Half fill the tank with diesel at the end of the day, so it starts in the morning on a diesel rich fuel. After it warmed up and driven a 2 blocks, the 50% veggie was added, and mixed in by driving. Veggie eats up copper over time, so avoid copper plumbing, bearings, etc. Don't leave veggie in the machine to sit for the winter, run diesel only it's last day to clean it out. Keep adding diesel to an empty tank type thing. Bio Diesel is just veggie oil with a bunch of chemicals in it that I would never want to put in my fuel tank. So I made my fuel as follows. Veggie comes in clearish 5 gallon jugs from the restaurants, I let them settle for days and using 3 empty clean jugs, poured off the top good oil into the first jug, then the next good oil into the second, etc, until the jug was empty. This just gave me good oil to work with. Then I dumped the good oil through a screen into a tank. The tank was a 40 gallon pressure tank with a hole on top large enough to drop in a 5 gallon bucket to it's rim so it stuck out of the tank 3 inches or so. I cut two 5 gal buckets down 6 inches from the top and stuck one inside the other with bug screen from a window screen inbetween & 3 screws to hold it together and set in into my tank that had a 1 inch pipe welded on the round bottom of the tank and a ball valve hell high enough by 3 angle iron legs welded to the tank that a 5 gal bucket could sit under the 40 gal tank. This was my dump in tank. A pipe outlet welded half way up was my outlet. I would fill it up in the day, let it sit over night, flow the top half into a settling tank in the morning. Two settling tanks, one filling, and one emptying by having a 3/8 inch flex tube attached to a float that held the end of the tube just below the surface of the oil. This ran down hill to a screw on large fuel filter for a motor and into a 50 gallon drum. Constant low pressure through the filter ment that I could back blow it clean and reuse it every day for years. I could have put an old T-shirt inbetween two cut down 5 gallon buckets for a better filter, but setteling & filtering worked fine. Remember, always carry an extra filter for your vehicle with you. I hope this helps some one, some where, some how. Bitdog PS. Common sense rules............
George65 Guru Joined: 18/09/2017 Location: AustraliaPosts: 308
Posted: 01:48pm 04 Jan 2018
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Amazes me the paranoia people go on with about the chemicals in Bio. you'd think they were talking Nuke waste or biological weapons the way they carry on with safety drivel and ridiculous warnings. The chemicals are Booze and soap. Yes, if you are a moron and handle them like one, they will hurt you. Just like petrol or cleaning products or electricity or anything else.
Mate and I made 10's of thousands of litres of bio. Best effort was 3000L in a weekend. We geared up for it with 1500L processing tanks we could just pump a drm of meth in and throw in a bag of Koh and mix it all up with a 22.5 HP engine turning a geared down boat prop.
Our oil heating evolved over time. 20L drums sitting on fires boiling away to dry the oil through to 3 200L drums in a triangle being blasted by a 200K oil burner that could bring a drum of wet oil to boiling point in 17 minutes. At first it took half the day to get the oil up to temp. Later on it took half a day to let the oil cool down to processing temp.
I collected oil in a 200L drum with a pump I made myself from an old Chev SB oil pump. Bored ports into the side and drove it with a 300W scooter motor and it would move oil at over 50L a min if it were around 20oC but would also work with oil that was so cold or fatty it came out like sausage and held it's shape. We would also go out on weekends with an IBC in the back of my mates ute and either use the oil pump or a petrol 2" pump. That was OK if you were pumping out of tanks but a bit of over kill with the hoses and setting up for just a 200L drum.
We made Bio from everything. Every sort of Veg oil, lard, coconut oil, Duck fat, Chicken grease.... you name it. We got the foulest Yecch imagineable but we realised, it all cleaned up in the end. the variable was how much work you had to put into it and what you had left after you got rid of all the rubbish.
My mate was a Bio guru and tried every which way to make bio. he had a good knowledge of chemistry and understood it well although that wasn't his field. He could look at a method and find the flaws, weaknesses and guess problems and yeilds off the top of his head.
We made a LOT of bio to supply the 6 cars between out 2 families and had a lot of fun doing it.
Myself, I have run straight oil for 15 years now last october. there is endless crap written and believed about that too. Unlike about 98% of people I have hands on personally tested just about every reasonable idea, procedure and method out there and found the huge majority of it is crap. I have run a completely stock fuel system on my car for about 8 years now save for a different fuel filter from another car which I get for nothing as against the vehicles OWM filter for about $80. I run straight oil summer and winter save for occasionally adding in some ULP in the dead of winter when temps fall below -5C.
I have started the vehicle with no undue hassle on straight oil at -2 oC . Your engine and the prep of the oil has more to do with cold starting than the temperature. Heating the oil is also largely BS especially the way some people carry on about it like it has to be hotter than the sun by running it through multiple overkill heat exchangers.
I set up a processor for my oil that was designed to be dirty oil in, clean oil out and not shall it see the light of day between. I would load the processor up, come back 30 min, an hour or 2 or next morning depending on the ambient conditions and what suited me and the oil was clean, dried and ready to be poured into the tank. No dicking around with filter bags and scooping oil from one bucket to another and all that mess and wasted time, In, walk away, come back, done. Repeat.
Complicated and expensive piece of gear my processor. 200L drum, pump, inline fan, water filter, few irrigation fittings, couple of valves and some hose. Must have had $120 initially tied up in that thing! Almost the price of a tank of fuel in my 4WD. I later added a timer so the thing would shut off in 30 min or 3 hours, whatever was needed so I could come back whenever I was ready rather than just to turn it off.
For those paranoid about Bio making, the solution for you is Blending. Forget adding diesel to oil, that just gives you thick diesel, ULP is far more effective on a number of levels beside thinning which is also largely a misnomer. If you can get it, Kero, turps, jet fuel, AvGas and various solvent derivitives are also good If a pump will run oil at all like an inline or rotary, it will run oil up to0 the point the oil is too thick to flow through the fuel lines properly. Any inline or rotary pump has more than enough capacity viscosity wise to handle oil be it veg or used motor oil.
I recommend up to 15% ULP in winter and 5% summer. If you need it at all. It is my opinion that 5% or more ULP in veg brings back the combustion timing to that of diesel or much closer to it. Veg on it's own is delayed timing and few people ever adjust their engine to suit the delayed light off. ULP having a much lower compression ignition rating will light off earlier in the cycle and bring the peak combustion pressures a lot nearer to where they should be.
Bryan, Unless you use a high amount of KOH, you need to titrate your oil to see the correct amount of caustic needed. there are a LOT of ways around this though. You can make low conversion bio which is like a 80% bio, 20% oil mix, you can over kill on the caustic and then pre wash your next batch of oil with the Glyc from the first batch which makes use of the residual caustic and lowers the PH of the oil. Koh is a lot easier to work with than Naoh because the sodium will go hard like soap where the potassium will remain liquid. You can let the batch settle for a month if you want and then drain your tank of the glyc. Going to have a lot of trouble doing that when the lye sets up like lard in the fridge.
I have run my CS lister for years on Straight oil as I have with all my Chinese Vertical yanmar copies, my Chinese horizontals, the Lombardi, ruggerini, Hatz and all the other I can't remember as well as the Mercedes, Peugeot, , Nissan, Mitsubishi and What ever that other thing was I had a while I now forget.
All the engines you have will run Fine on straight oil. Bio is great for blending and cleaning and if your engines are tired will make them start easier in winter. then again, so will a shot of Metho down the intake as I did on my mercs for years or petrol if I ran out.
Lister will run on tar if you get it hot enough to run down the fuel lines and get the gravel out. :0)
For what you have, cleaning the oil AND DRYING it and throwing in some ULP would be the easiest way to go and a lot cheaper than making bio which if you do it in qty and buy the meth at the right price will cost you around .30C per litre.
You'll get up to 20L of blend from a litre of oil which works out at about 7? cents per litre and a lot less hands on time and setting up of processors, pumps, wash tanks, drying tanks etc.
Boppa Guru Joined: 08/11/2016 Location: AustraliaPosts: 814
Posted: 01:53pm 04 Jan 2018
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old thread lol Biodiesel isnt just `vege with chemicals' it is (after having run both strained and filtered used vege oil and homemade and commercial biodiesel) far superior to vege oil
I made my biodiesel kit out of stacked 20l drums with taps fitted, all interconnected by hoses- worked very well indeed with gravity flow and the taps allowed you to turn off to change filters etc
One thing to be VERY aware of when using biodiesel for the first time in an old dino burner- is that biodiesel is incredible at cleaning all the accumulated gunge that has bult up over the years in the tank,pipes and pump/injectors. I had to change the fuel filter 5 times in the first couple of hundred kms, the first only lasted 30km! Once it was clean tho, hp was markedly up (top speed on the 2.4d hilux went from 103 to 115, the hill up to my house at the time went from 3rd to 4th gear
One thing I would do differently these days was I just kept changing the factory filter (at 30 odd dollars a pop), afterwards I found a tractor prefilter setup that had filters for under 5 bucks- I'd fit one of those before the factory filter and change them instead- save a lot of $$
eta
I havent anything against vege, but at the time where I was living, it often dropped to minus numbers overnight and pure vege oil turned into basically jelly, I tried the various preheater systems and dual tanks where you started on dino, once the engine warmed up it piped hot water through the vege tank to liquefy it then when the temp guage on the tank showed it was hot enough, switch tanks In the end it was just easier to make biodiesel... Of course where I am now, vege might actually be easier (got sensible and moved to where you dont have to unfreeze the dogs water bowl in the morning!!!) My dog used to sit there when he heard us moving around inside the house and whine and bump his water bowl against the back door until we gave him unfrozen water lolEdited by Boppa 2018-01-06
Revlac Guru Joined: 31/12/2016 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1024
Posted: 02:16pm 04 Jan 2018
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Some good info here, I like the smell of the stuff out the exhaust when running the ST2 Lister genny. Would like to run our Rolls Royce Perkins c6 220g with 250Kva generator need to find some more veg oil.
Methanol is a bit hard on Orings and seals if too much is left in the Bio diesel
Cheers Aaron Edited by Revlac 2018-01-06Cheers Aaron Off The Grid
George65 Guru Joined: 18/09/2017 Location: AustraliaPosts: 308
Posted: 10:19am 05 Jan 2018
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If there is ANY meth left in the bio, you haven't done it nearly right. You are going to have a lot more problems with Bio made that poorly than just rings and seals let me tell you! :0)
Revlac Guru Joined: 31/12/2016 Location: AustraliaPosts: 1024
Posted: 12:14pm 11 Jan 2018
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NOPE ITS NOT A LARGE CAT CRAP!
Its some of the worst looking greasy used oil I have.
Left it in the sun all day and it cleared up at around 30 degrees C.Cheers Aaron Off The Grid
George65 Guru Joined: 18/09/2017 Location: AustraliaPosts: 308
Posted: 01:47pm 11 Jan 2018
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After many years of Doing this, I can tell you that's not all that bad. Cleared up pretty nice from my POV.
The problem here is most likely not fat in the oil, it's water. To test, put it on the stove and heat. It will bubble and when the bubbles stop it starts to smoke. It will be dry enough by then. Let it cool and it will stay liquid. Filter it and you will have something entirely different to what you are seeing now.
You can clean any oil up. It's just a matter of getting the water and particles out. Everything after that is just oil. Don't really matter what colour it is, any darkening is just microscopic particles that you cannot remove same as engine oil.
If the oil has a lot of fat in it, let it settle a month or so in a cool place and the oil will be on top and the fat on the bottom. In reality though the overall percentage of fat is very low unless lard was specifically mixed in. Cooking still only puts a relatively small fat percentage in the oil. As you are in Oz and it's summer, the fat don't matter anyway. As long as it's liquid it's good fuel with a high energy content.
I have put melted fat in my car in summer and driven it and had no problems and I did not have any fuel heaters. The oil is warm returning from the engine and the heat of a summers day is way more than enough to keep DRY fat liquid.
You don't have to get pedantic with purging etc at the end of the day, just throw in a good amount of oil to dilute any remaining fats and that's all you need to do. If there is plenty of liquid oil, time the fats start to block the filter on restart the engine and underbonnet temps will have warmed up enough to melt it out again. Ran my car for years like that while everyone else was in a panic about purging and fuel heating.
Notice. New forum software under development. It's going to miss a few functions and look a bit ugly for a while, but I'm working on it full time now as the old forum was too unstable. Couple days, all good. If you notice any issues, please contact me.
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