Senior Member
I have yet to see anything that makes any sense when it comes to 'harvesting' cooking oil from restaurants, Taco stands, Chinese take-out or whatever. This subject has been around for many years and its one of those 'what if' conversations which always ends the same way, when pigs fly.
Gary & Lise Deinhard, 2003 Elegant Lady Liberty, Dbl slide
No I'm not serious about doing this at present at all. I just find it interesting that several people have successfully done it. And my feeling is that for the ones that have done it it is a labor of love which is to say they want to see if it CAN be done. It is not convenient which is why I pay $4.50 for a gallon of milk at 7-11 instead of $3.00 at the grocery store when that is all I need because it's...........more "convenient". Most of these folks are inovative and do it for the novelty. It is not really practical. Some households with 4 or 5 cars have all VW or Mercedes conversions and have their filtering down to a science (at their house, not a mobile filtering that RV's would have) and they get into the swing of picking up their regular supply and it becomes simple for them after a while.
I think the people that are doing this deserve some credit for trying to make an evolutionary step toward alternative fuel. Or maybe they are just bored. But there are a number of forums of people (several thousand people in this country) that are using WVO in their car every day. frybrid.com is the one I looked at before but haven't looked at it again in a long tmie.
This has some interesting reading for those of you with time on their hands: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel Little of the information on the Wikipedia site pertains to diesel.
I Google "Waste Vegatiable oil diesel engines" and the amount of information that comes up is to extensive.
But Jon (and I love you for putting up with my insanity man), you are right about having to filter the correctly characterization of "Junk" into something usable. To me, the bigger the vessel (ie, yacht) the more sense it might make. For two reasons. The bigger the boat, the deeper your pockets have to be to push the slug through the water. Also, you need ample room for the filtration and auxiliary tanks. You would load the boat with the "junk" and you can run it through the filters 5 times if you like between the raw tank and the clean tank. Filters ? Don't know if they can be cleaned or if there is a cost involved but the filtration systems doesn't take up that much room. You can put 3-5 centrifuge's in series and re filter it as often as you want before you satisfied that it's usable. This is bad. I'm finding myself back where I was a year ago and as I SAID, I'm not considering this at present but I like to keep an ear to the ground of what is going on. You keep your standard fuel supply. You don't (you can't) reply on WVO completely no matter how clean it is. The viscosity is too think and fat which is why (the rumor) is that it is actually providing more lubrication for the engine. It is however less efficient at least if you read the Wikipdedia article link above which states your loosing roughly 30% efficiency in MPG. But you HAVE to stop and start the engine on regular diesel to put the regular (lower viscosity) fuel in the lines and flush the "junk" out otherwise you are screwed. The WVO (no matter how clean) will gel and as Jon says you will have a freaking gunked up mess on your hands.
Now our diesel engines usually run like clocks and rarely die but there are those sensor which will shut you down. You've got the 1 minute override on our buses to give you a chance to restart and get off the road. In that event, you would flip your toggle switches to activate the fuel system to draw over the normal diesel fuel supply. One minute would probably be sufficient to flush out the junk and put regular diesel in your system until you figured out what shut you down. But that would be the biggest fear (in my mind). Somehow shutting down and having everything get gelled up. Ugly.
There are web sites that show a network of people that have filtered WVO to give away ? Why ? Because they have made a deal with the restaurants in their back yard and the restaurants tell them "I will cancel my pick up service and you can have the oil but you have to agree to take it all". They wind up with more than they can use. So they'll give it away. De-watered and filtered oil that is.
I think the people that are dong this now are experimenting and mostly doing this to see if it can be done. The like the idea of being innovative and saying "I did it"
Senior Member
Jeff,
When I created Jamestown Advanced Products our first product line was gravity separators. That's a fancy word for grease traps. We made them from small ones the size of a toaster, up to large ones that required three flat bed semis to carry them to their destination.
Initially we just built what our large customer specified, but it wasn't long before we did the engineering and design work for our customer. As a result I went around the country talking with restaurants, processing plants and code people. I got an extensive education in grease recovery and eventually put on seminars to teach people about grease recovery.
To the generator it is garbage. It is scrap material they want someone else to deal with. The only people that really care about grease collection are those that have their own sewage treatment plants and infrastructure because they need to trap FOG to protect that infrastructure. To everyone else such as restaurants they would pour grease down the drain followed by a gallon of Dawn if they could get away with it. All they cared about was keeping their pipes clean and the hell with the city's sewer system.
So the grease, fats, and oils that are collected around the country are typically available because of tough codes and tougher enforcement. The collected FOG has solids in it such as chicken bones or flour. It has water in it. It is loaded with all sorts of chemicals because every foot of plumbing up to the grease trap is likely to plug so emulsifiers are used extensively. The fryer grease that actually makes it out the back door into the collection container is as contaminated as the crud that is vacuumed from a grease trap. We have seen or found everything from silverware to towels to salt shakers in the grease collection devices.
Companies that collect and render the FOG have an extensive recovery process. They heat it to make it flow. They separate the water and solids. Then the waste that is separated goes to the landfill or down the sewer if it is FOG free. The resulting material is sold as a raw material for animal feeds, lamp oil, cosmetics (yuk), munitions, and many other products.
There is a reason it is not sold as fuel. It has a low BTU content, it has variable characteristics so on some days it might gel at room temperature, others it might have to get colder before it stops flowing. It is not a good lubricant unlike the fuels we use from the Flying J. The people that use it in their Volkswagon Rabbit go through a lot of effort to use it and I suspect these folks also have chickens and cows so they don't have to buy their eggs or milk. It is my opinion every user of waste grease and oils subscribes to "Mother Earth" magazine and also uses solar power. Good for them for proving a point, but at what cost to them?
In short, the bigger the vehicle that uses waste FOG the more effort that is required to get enough, and in my opinion the greater the cost when that "fuel" screws up the engine. I have no idea how DDEC would react to a fuel that is of such poor and inconsistent quality, but I do know Detroit Diesel will not back an engine that uses it unless it meets their standards, something that is not going to happen.
I think you have a better chance of converting water into hydrogen and oxygen and running your yacht on hydrogen and using the water that is the exhaust for cooking.
Good detailed reply. Thank you. The guy at http://www.liquidsolarpower.com/ that went coast to coast in his diesel pusher with a custom designed on board system that let him filter while he drove..........he chronicled the trip and he found after a while that there were chains that had "junk" and then there was "Junkier". I think he said Chinese restaurants were the lessor of the evils. But what he did was suck the grease into this dirty tank from the top down since a majority of the bits and pieces of junk fell to the bottom. So he never sucked those bins clean. I just checked his web site again. Funny you mention hydrogen. Check out his video if you want. http://www.hydrolar.com/ I have not looked into Hydrogen generators at all and don't even understand the mechanics of it. I recall a rumor I heard over two decades ago that the technology was practical and feasible (for cars that is) but that either big brother or the petroleum industries saw to it's indefinite death but I think that was, as I said, a rumor I heard when I was in hight school. Is it practical or feasible or the way of the future ? When I have time on my hands I promise to research that and let the grease idea fizzle out.
Senior Member
The cheapest, most efficient way to power a motor vehicle is pumped into your car from a nozzle at your local gas station after it has been pumped from the ground and refined. The exception might be if atomic energy becomes available. If that is the case large commercial vehicles would be sold with the "engine" and a lifetime supply of fuel. Then it would trickle down to the automobile.
Fuel made from corn and sawgrass or hydrogen or almost any other source costs more to produce and or delivers less power.
As to the guy sucking oils and grease from the top of the container recognize he can do so because he is one of the very few who choose to run their vehicles from that stuff. But if more people choose to do that somebody gets to scrape the bottom of the barrel.
Senior Member
You know!, It's bad enough to put all that crap in our body at the fast food joints, We at least need to have a vehicle that burns clean fuel to get us to the hospital to get the old arteries unclogged when need be!
I saw the history of the worlds most notable submarines on The Military Channel. I knew nuclear was efficient but was floored when they said that subs and boats that have run for TWENTY YEARS with no refueling. They have a chunk of plutonium the size of a golf ball in a reactor and thats all they need. They can also dock in Manahattan and power the city if need be. A ball of plutonium the size of a fist can power the city of Boston for 25 years with the least amount of environmental impact, unless of course there is an accident.
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