Bio diesel and the quest to be self suffient

[cowboy]

Thought some of you may be interestred in what we are trying

Been looking into the bio diesel thing. And powering and heating our homes in the winter with diesel generators. (I do not use enought power in the summer to worry about it)

bio diesel terms
SVO strait vegtable oil, you need to heat it to use it
WVO waste vegtable oil
bio diesel you take svo or wvo heat it mix it with lye and methanol let it settle out. wash it let the water settle out and then use it for as diesel fuel

My brothers bought a press to get oil from soy beans or rape seed (canola oil) I do not know if they are planing to use it as svo or converting it to bio diesel yet.

The first project we are setting up with is a 12kv generator head. We are trying out two different engines on it. One of the engines is a low speed 650 rpm diesel with this engine it is supposed to develop 4700 watts and burn 2-3 gallons of diesel or bio diesel a day. The one I am setting up uses a 20 hp diesel with max power at 2200 rpm. I intend to set it up with belt drive to the generator and two sets of pullies. The gererator head needs to spin at 1800 rpm. One set of pullies will be setup to run the engine at 1100 rpm and gen at 1800 rpm for low power low fuel use and provide continous use for 1 house. The other set of pullies will use the full hp of the engine for hi power usage. As I understand it I will have to readjust the goverer each time I change engine speeds..


I am going to build the gererator set onto a trailer that I can put my welder on too so I can weld in the field.

My brother is going to run copper water lines under his floors hooked the engine with a water jacket around the exhust and pump the engine heat into the house to help heat it in the winter. I will probally just use a radiator in the house with a fan.

The 6.5 hp diesel weighs about 800 pounds (it has big flywheels and looks like a old hit amd mill engine.
The 20 hp engine 300 to 400 lbs and the generator is a bout 200lbs.

I have $1,700 into the engine and generator. But as propane was delivered here last week at $1.75 a gallon. With making our own fuel this is worth a try. If I do not get the heat I need out of it I plan on using electric heaters on it and that will make the engine work harder putting out more heat too.

Don't know yet how it will work out but seems to be worth a try.

[Bigdog]

Cowboy, let us know how you make out. It sounds really interesting.

[beaconlight]

Cow boy I worked in thew Aleutians installing Radar. I worked on Project Bluergrass. We had 4 White Superior diesels at each station. The main station at Cold bay had 5 engines. We ran the engines under a 10 pound head of steam. We had banks of calrod heaters. You were to run an engine at least at half load. If less than half or you had more than 1 engine on line and the were at less than half you were to cut in 5 KW at a time till you reached at least half load. We had heat exchangers to provide domestic hot water, other het exchangers to provide hot air heat in the radar and communication rooms. There was a heat exchanger to provide hot water heat in the office and lining space as well. Over the stoves in the kitchen there was a steam fire extinguisher for grease fires. At the far end of the rec room there was a heat exchanger to provide replacement air for that lost through the exhaust over the stoves. On the roof of the engine room there was a steam turbine that cut in at 12 lbs. It drove a fan in front of a radiator in to which steam was introduced at 14 lbs and a vent system that vented steam at 15 lbs. This was in 1959. AT&T designed for the Air Force. Man that was the most efficient thing I was ever able to conceive. We had two 2 or 3 hundred thousand tanks at the beach and 2 40 thousand gal tanks at the site with 2 500 gal day tanks
You would pump from the beach in to the 40 00 gal tanks. Then whe necessary pump in to 1 500 gal tank. From that you would run it through a centrafuge to remove condensation, sand or welding slag so tht only claen oil hit the diesels. When you changed lub oil it was over 60 gal at a time. We had 2 lub oil tanks. You would run it through another centrifuge from on e tank to the other. Samples were sent back to a lab and had to give them how many gals you had. Then a report and the correct additives were sent you or an order to dump it was received. When we had a dump it I took it to the near by indian village and it was used for fuel. This was the most effecient system I ever dreamed of. I don't remember ever venting to the atmosphere except on a test. If we needed more steam we added an extra engine or if theload was low enough an extra calrod heater. There were 5 in each bank and each one was 5 KW. Lots of luck on what you are doing. I heat my house in Franklin entirely with wood. I have 20 acres of wood and will not live long enough to run out. I admire what you are doing but with your job wonder what will happen when you are gone. In my case I pitched the pipes to drain them and add antifreeze to the traps.

Bill

[Lurker Carl]

Sounds like the Lister diesels that are being made in India. I've had an ongoing interest in these babies since our brushes with hurricanes and ice storms and other weather-related power blackouts.

I have nursed several B&S and Tecumseh powered generators thru storms, too prone to failure without much use. Looking for a robust power plant, not a portable POS. Diesel is better for me than gasoline, I can use it from my oil heating system and not worry with degrading gasoline. Running a power head from a PTO sounds like a good idea until you compare the fuel comsumption from a Cub to a Lister diesel. My brother is looking into natural gas generators - there are issues with delivery pressure and volume. So many questions, not enough answers.

[beaconlight]

Billy After that long convulated discussion I gave you before I must mention cycles. All if not most AC clocks run on cycles. We had two clocks in the engine roon. One was calibrated from the radar and daily if niot more often calibrated to WWRL the national standards. The second clock was run by AC off the diesels. WQE would goose up RPM or hold back on the RPM to keep the two clocks in sync. Today with the digital clocks on Micros and TV's I don't have any idea whee they get their cycles from could be from the line vo;tage or could be from an internal clock. Boils down to the fact that to accurately tell time you may have to fight with RPM. As far as speeding up your engine to cover more load you might let the governor have more room to put the gas to it to give more tourq and not more speed. More speed is good in DC but gives more Cycles in AC. If I have thourghly confused you give me a pm and we will work it out.

Bill

[Mac from NS]

cowboy there is a man just up the road that burns waste vegtable oil in
his pickup.

[beaconlight]

Mac what does he do in winter? We used to pump more fuel that we needed to the engine and return the extra to the tank heated to keep the diesel from gelling in Artic situations. He could do the lye trick Billy mentioned or throw some gasoline in to it or any of a number of other things. The old starting tablets, either, glow plugs or what ever.

Bill

[George Willer]

The second clock was run by AC off the diesels. WQE would goose up RPM or hold back on the RPM to keep the two clocks in sync. Today with the digital clocks on Micros and TV's I don't have any idea whee they get their cycles from could be from the line vo;tage or could be from an internal clock.

Bill,

It has been many years since I worked around the big Superior and the slightly smaller Atlas, both running alternators, but they had the advantage of line power to keep pace with and were mainly to keep demand under control when starting big motors... some as large as 300HP. They ran in parallel with the power grid.

The tricky part was to have them exactly in phase when connecting them together with the line. You can easily imagine the explosion if the big knife switch was thrown when they were out of phase.

There was a bank of light bulbs wired between the two systems that would be lit when the phases were opposite and not when the phases matched. When the speeds were slightly different, the lights flashed. The trick was to watch the flashes slow down as the speeds came closer to matching. When the flashing slowed almost to a stop, the knife switches were thrown exactly when the lights were out. Once locked in to phase they couldn't change.

[Mac from NS]

Bill i was talking to him about it and he shuts down and starts up
on diesel.He only fixed it up this summer but he does have some hind of heater in the tank and i'm not sure how that works but i think he can heat it from 110v also

[beaconlight]

Ok mac Looks as if he is just starting and a good thing he is.
George we didn't have to worry about cyncing with the grid. There was none. We were the only AC with in a couple of hundred miles. We had to use that same watch the lights trick when we put a second or third engine on line. They locked in cync with the load each other when you had them together. You would speed up or slow down so that the lights blinked slowly and when they went out hit the breaker button.
In the indian village near by (port Heiden or Mesik) Henry Carlson had a generator. He put a gallon of gas in every night and the whole village had lights. If no one else put any in gallon gone lights out. I understand things have changed since 1969 and the Village moved in land because of tidal waves and they have power and telephone. Times change.

Bill

[Rudi]

There seems to be a lot of interest in alternate energy forms.

Bio-diesel makes a heck of a lot of sense for specific areas at least. These areas could be/but not limited to:

Farming Communities - use harvest by-products as well as primary crops for bio fuel source
Fishing Communties - use fish offal and by-catch not useable for human or animal consumption as source for bio fuel
Waste Management Facilities such as our Westmorland & Albert Solid Wast facility which composts.. (methane capture would be an excellent solution)
Lumbering Communities - use the bark and by-products from the milling process to provide power for the mills themselves at a minimum.
Restaurants - use their waste vegetable oils and animal fats as fuel

Another form of generation that can be utilized where the right conditions exist, such as large open areas, continuous stable winds from predictable directions render wind farms viable and are a soft addition to the grid without the environmental impacts that hydro dams are well known for such as fish habitat and migration impacts. However, little is known yet on what type of environmental impacts will result from the changing thermal patterns around wind farms and of course the resultant velocity changes that will be the norm when large farms consiting of hundreds of vanes are employed.

Another form, which although may have some drawbacks, but is a good recycling model is Used Oil Burners such as my local CaseIH Dearler utilizes to heat his buildings/shops. They must dispose of the oil, so intead of having it hauled away to a larger facitilty to be burned, and buying fresh heating oil, major savings are realized as well as providing a place for smaller users such as myself to recycle used oil at no charge. I like that

Whilst I was stationed in such wonderful places such as Inuvik up on the McKenzie Delta -- similar in region to Prudhoe Bay Alaska, the only way to get oil to the delta prior to the pipelines was to barge it up in the summer months. This made fuels of any type extremely expensive. Even with the pipelines and the proximity to both US and Canadian fields, there is no resultant savings, only increased prices as the world commodity prices for fuels remains volatile and stays above the $15US a barrel historical benchmark.

When I was stationed at CFS Alert -- 1,000 miles or so NORTH of the Magnetic North Pole and 400 miles south of the geographical North Pole, you can bet what you sit on that temperatures were in the extreme range of the minus part of any thermometer except maybe Kelvin.. Fuel could be brought in by ship on very few ocassions and usually years apart, which left air the only avenue open. Not only is this expensive, if it were not for the Military imperative to keep the base open, it would not even be viable. All power was generated by petroleum based products, and no LNG.

An idea was floated back in the late 60's early 70's about utilizing what was known as a Slow Poke reactor - small - less than 2 megawatt facility which would use lower grades of uranium and produce less hazardly by-products. This would have made sense, but the ideologically challenged environmentalists killed that one.

Oh, I am not down on environmentalists, but I will say this, the CANDU reactor is not only the safest reactor in the world, it's safety record is unparalleled. A Chernobyl or 3 mile Island would not be possible.

I have been thinking for decades on this, and I wish I was more educated, and had more access to those that count... but I have always said that the best way to utilize expended uranium from a reactor is not by using it for artillery rounds, but to use it as a fuel pellet to power vehicles. A small pellet would be able to provide all the motive power a vehicle could use. Larger transport trucks would of course probably require either a larger pellet or more of them. Then, once those pellets were expended, they could then be recycled into something more useable -- like an artillery shell if that was what was needed...

Sure would save on the cost of gas.......

I really believe that nuclear energy is safe. We have a reactor less than 2 hours from my house. Am I worried about an event - not... I have got to know many of the managers and technicians myself for varying reasons over the years, and they are all professionals... doing what they have learned to do.. safely.

I think all forms of alternative energy should be explored. None should be cold-shouldered, especially based on a fear of the unknown or the fear of the imagined catastrophy...

Good design and safety principles are required wether you are utilizing the oldest fuel sources know to man such as wood and coal, to gas, hydro and nuclear as well as wind and solar energy.

Time to get off of me

[cowboy]

Carl you are right the one is a lister. On the 6.5 hp lister it hand start only and you have to oil the rocker arms and push rods every day. I do not know about the larger ones.

Bill I am gererally layed off in the winter and thats when I plan on running it. What I am trying to say is I want to gears in this thing a 1st for full power engine running 2,200rpm and 20 hp and a over drive with the engine running about 1,000 rpm and 8-10 hp for fuel econ and just enought power to run the house. In both cases the gererator will be spinning at 1,800 rpm and fine tune the govener till the gererator is at 60hz. My brother has a meter to set it with.

Rudi the US does not want us to have fuel effient vehicals. Look at what we can buy here a nice big overpowered gas hog or a go cart with a cab and no comfort nothing in between. Ford makes a 4 cyl diesel ranger that gets good milage. Funny you cannot buy it here only in europe Pat can chip in and let us know but I have heard that 50% of the vehicels over there are diesel and thay mandate 5% bio diesel.

Right now there is a lot of bio diesel on the market wether you know it or not. The company supplying the diesel for the job I am on started sending us 20% bio diesel without telling us.

Bio diesel will loosen up all the crud in the tank and lines and plug up your fuel filters. Anyone driving a diesel ought to be carrying spare fuel filters. I like the bio diesel I did not realise how much diesel fumes I breathed in during the day. The bio D smells like cooking or standing next to a deep frier. Although it does make hungry as it blowes through the cab

Billy

[Patbretagne]

Hi Billy, Bill, Mac Rudi et al
Sorry I just picked up on this post and see that the Eupoean view is saught!

I left UK over 16 years ago and diesel was not the major car fuel by a long chalk, for example BMW didn't sell deisel cars in UK at that time.

as soon as I arrived in France one of the first BMWs I saw was Deisel! At that time 1989/90 diesel was extremely cheap in relation to petrol (gas); It was seen as the less poluting fuel, less co² less co etc. BUT all of a sudden they found that the particulate content of the exhaust gas was perhaps worse, more abrasive etc than petrol so they started taxing deisel till it came into line recently with petrol pricewise.
Deisel is somewhat more economic, miles per galon, or litres per 100km as it is measured here in France, so it is still advantageous to use it as a fuel for transport.
in our area in the deserted west of France as close to the USA as it's possible to be the majority of cars and vans are deisel, that is the vehicles younger than 5 years old, this is only my own observation and not backed up by statistics, I would say 80% of car sales here are deisel, 99% of vans, pickups etc are deisel. Petrol seems to be reserved more for the larger plush cabinet minister's type of cers where performance is important.
At a show a few weeks ago the "Chambre d'Agriculture" had a stand with a little electric machine feeding in black colza (rape) seed into a hopper, and getting oil one side and animal feed the other, said to be good enough filtered to run in the average tractor.
Aparently, according to the manufacturers, it will not work overly well in modern engines with computerised fuel control. Why, who knows, no explanation!
At present with the price of Crude based fuels going through the ceiling, supermarkets are mysteriously having their stocks of Rape Cooking Oil go down very quickly, people are using it mixed with ordinary deisel in their cars. It is mighty less expensive than the real thing.

Guess What it is illegal in France to use Biodeisel in your road vehicle!!!!!
Why? Taxes!! A report I saw recently, using the base of 97 cents of an Euro before retailer's profit per litre, the basic price of road deisel is 39cents, the fuel tax to the government is 42 cents and after that sales tax 16 cents.

So the basic price is taxed, a fuel tax is added then that tax is again taxed with the sales tax, not bad eh! 59% of the price is Tax 146% tax on the basic price! Phew!!
Who's the winner?
By the way does the Euro symbol that I am going to type next come out on your screen??? €€€€€ € € I tend to not use it in my posts to US as not being sure it may cause even more confusion than my ramblings.

We use deisel as heating fuel with a very eficient condensing boiler for underfloor heatin on the ground floor and rads on the first floor.
As an adjunct but not a main source of heat, we have built a large open fire in Granite in our main room, during the winter this is alight and snoozing all the time, a lot of the heat does go up the chimney but someone has to keep the aeroplanes warm! I am considereing fitting a second domestic hot water heat exchanger with a copper coil in the ashes of the fire, a small circulating pump.
This will preheat the water entering the fuel heated heat exchanger thereby using less fuel, just a little elec for the pump. I'll keep you posted.

Always in my mind I've had the dream of generating my own elec, water wheel, never enough water nearby; wind farm, local council objections; deisel generator, yes, but we live on the edge of a vilage and noise could be a nuisance. A nice big rolls royce with a several MW genny, pure bliss.
As an aside we used to have an ERF tractor unit with a 6cyl Rolls engine in it 1957 I think. Apoaramently, that engine in a truck with a full load would use as much oxegen on the trip from London to Glasgow as a person would consume in all his lifetime.
Pat

[beaconlight]

Pat yes the Euro symbol came through.

Bill

[Rudi]

Pat:

Yup, the Euro viewpoint is sought after as well. Especially nice is to see the comparisons in price increases over the years.

When I was there, petrol in France was about 7Ffrancs/litre if I remember correctly. How does that compare to the newer Euro pricing?

I never paid a lot of attention to local pricing the 2-1/2 years we lived in Europe as being on a Canadian base, we had gas stamps to use on the economy. Thank God, because our pay was not that good - apparently for military folks today, it isn't much better still

I have seen pictures of the old wood burners, coal burners, methane burners and other assorted jury rigged automobiles used during the war years by the civilians..

this discussion and the volatility of prices conjoined with the interest in alternative fuels, brings back into focus those pictures from years ago for me at least...

Also, it occurs to me, that there must be some form of scrubber or whatever one wants to call it to apply to a diesel engine to remove the offending particulates, at least one would think.

I see the black soot coming out of trucks here and I shake my head wondering why oh why the companies cannot figure out how to reduce the emmissions - they have for train engines... and why oh why diesel mechanics cannot seem to keep those engines tuned properly -- some of these trucks need more than just TLC, they need major reconstructive surgery.....

I guess it all comes down to the bottom line I assume, as it is in many things.

Best to both you and No-No...