Running on veggie oil

Discussion in 'Planting, growing, nurturing Plants' started by earthbound, Sep 12, 2005.

  1. Snake

    Snake Junior Member

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    Oil Supply

    G'day Earthbound,

    I neglected to mention that my used oil comes from the local roadhouse which changes its fryer oil weekly and it comes free - used to be a bloke here who took it away and made it into biodiesel but he left town so now it is a waste product that would otherwise just go to the tip (no such thing as recycling here in Meekatharra!). That's about the right price for me - check your local chippies and fast food places - even some of the petrol stations that do food as well might be only too happy to get rid of it to you.

    I would echo your resulting problem of accumulated empty containers - my supply comes in the original 20L metal drums and if I don't come up with an alternative use for them soon, they will be off to the tip as well unfortunately as we are leaving town. So as we address one problem & recycle the waste oil, we create another with the 'packaging'!

    Good luck with it. Cheers,

    Mark
     
  2. barely run

    barely run Junior Member

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    Keep up the long winded technical posts. You've got my husband very interested in recycled veggie oil and bio-diesal. Will post if we get any results here.
    Cathy
     
  3. derekh

    derekh Junior Member

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  4. mark

    mark New Member

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    Hi all,

    I have been considering changing over to veggie oil for some time and with the price of diesel now i've had a kick in the pants...

    Can anyone tell me roughly how much to convert my rear tank (1990 troopy), and where I can get an inline fuel heater etc in Melbourne?

    Also one other query: once the tank lines are heated etc, does this affect using deisel though that tank in any way?

    Thanks for any info,

    Regards

    Mark
     
  5. Richard on Maui

    Richard on Maui Junior Member

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    you can make your own inline heater(s) from salvaged parts or common off the shelf hardware store materials. dana linscott of minnesota has an online business where he sells plans for how to make your own parts for a vegoil conversion. they aren't overly expensive and well worth it. I think he is a lot busier now, but a few years back when I bought his plans and converted my ford escort station wagon 1985 & a 1/2, he was extremely generous with his time in helping me to understand some basics about cars. (the escort was my first car and I knew next to nothing about working on any sort of car at that point). anyway, he is also often giving good advice at the infopop boards that I mentioned in an earlier post in this thread.
    https://vegoilconversions.netfirms.com/
    obviously in minnesota you have pretty cold weather so his conversions will work in any climate. when it comes to wvo, Dana is the man!
     
  6. christopher

    christopher Junior Member

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    Richard,

    What did you do with the Escort? Do you still have it, or is someone else running it? How cool!

    Mark. I read an article somewhere, can't find it, that suggested not to put diesel in your veg tank because the point of raising the temp is to increase the viscosity and flash point of the less flammable veg oil. Yer diesel burns at lower temperatures. They said that heating it up is not a good idea.

    Christopher
     
  7. Richard on Maui

    Richard on Maui Junior Member

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    Yeh, I converted the escort with a little help from some friends. We went on a few holidays in it and I used it to commute between Las Cruces and T or C in NM, which was 130 miles or something. Didn't work well for around town driving so well, because the thing was so damn fuel efficient (50 mpg) that the purge time was longer than most trips! I had some dramas associated with my own stupidity, a tank that rusted away and plugged my filters all the time so that I had to watch the vaccuum gauge more than I would've liked. I also had some problems getting water out of the oil, and realised as much after collecting a few hundred gallons of pretty poxy wvo.
    But it it is pretty simple and totally doable. If someone with as little automotive experience and mechanical aptitude as me can do it, ANYONE can!
    I sold the car to a guy from Boulder or somewhere in Coloradojust days before we moved to Hawaii. He was going to use it to deliver pizzas or something I think. I hope it still working out for him. Even though it ran on vegoil and that's beautiful, it was a pretty ugly car I have to say! :lol:
    I thought my VW diesel pickup was much cooler and had big plans to convert it until all the cooling water dumped itself on the Hana Hwy and I toasted the engine. Now I'm looking out for an oxy torch to convert it into a mulch trailer. :(
     
  8. baldcat

    baldcat Junior Member

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    Just reading an Article in Earth Garden number 133 It say's

     
  9. sydneybiodiesel

    sydneybiodiesel New Member

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    New Sydney Biodiesel website and Forum

    I got sick of looking for a Sydney biodiesel scene that was scattered across many different web forums in many other parts of the world and on many other subjects, so a few weeks ago, I made my own:

    www.sydneybiodiesel.com

    I noticed that there have been some older posts here with the link to biodiesel.org.au, which is run by the Biodiesel Association of Australia. I tried to join their group a few times last year, faxed off my credit card details, and have since never managed to get a single phone call or email returned (fortunately my card was never charged!). I am now hearing similar stories from other people. This is a real shame as it actually discourages people from the scene. This site was setup with the best of intentions, but is more than a couple of years out of date and also tries to charge for memberships before letting you into the "cooperative" which does not actually exist. Be careful!

    I made a site with webforums to be free to all, owned by no one and with no commercial connections. The idea is purely to kick off the biodiesel scene in Sydney again (but we welcome the rest of Australia as well). Please stop in and visit, register in the forums and contribute. The site is new, but will get better when everyone else contributes questions and answers there. I'm happy to answer any questions that any of you may have if you post them in the forums there. One of our West Australian members has also posted up some nice pics of his vegetable oil conversion recently which looks quite interesting.

    Of course there are also many other great sites and forums on biodiesel. The infopop one mentioned earlier in this thread contains a wealth of great information. I'd made this site to be a bit more local and provide a place for Australian biodiesel communities to share and grow properly.

    Once I get a feel for what people are asking about most, I will also post up more static information, lists of biodiesel making equipment suppliers etc.

    The most recent and exciting development there is the opportunity to buy some commercialy produced biodiesel, which has been made to Australian Standards. It is the same fuel that Sydney Ferries are running their biodiesel trial on. As it cannot be made available to the general public (yet), I have negotiated with the supplier to supply it to our group. We only now need interested parties to "put their hand up" by registering on this thread in our forum". Please do so if you want to be a part of this.

    Please have a look and let me know.


    Cheers,
     
  10. Penny

    Penny Junior Member

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    Waste from Bio

    The glycerine from the biodiesel can be used as soap, rough but usable in laundry. if it can be composted might as well have it do two jobs instead of one!
    Just an aside, the diesel was an australian invention on which the patent elapsed due to lack of interest!
     
  11. Cornonthecob

    Cornonthecob Junior Member

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    You would think that something like this would be seen as an important issue for any government. Amazing how knowledge like this is almost 'hidden' from the person on the street.

    The link is a news story on yahoo.

    https://au.news.yahoo.com/050928/15/w4wt.html
     
  12. earthbound

    earthbound Junior Member

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    I think it's kept hush hush because it's a difficult issue to deal with. Petrol is easy, it's a fuel and nothing else, it's used in cars and the government can stick a big levy on it "to help pay for roads".

    Veggie oil is used as a food product, how are they going to collect their revenue from it and decern between oil for consumption and oil for fuel. How do you collect your taxes if people are collecting old used oil from fish and chip shops, or growing their own canola or algae and pressing the oil themselves.

    Unfortunately it comes down to the fact that like so many other things it is a brilliant idea, but there is no money to be made, or very little at least , and soooo hard to organise and administrate from a govermental side, it's easy just not to tell the masses... And like in France, fine the buggers if they try and do it, that will deter them.

    Thats why permaculture will never be mainstream in society as it stands today. No government is going to push the idea of people growing their own food as efficiently as possible at home or in community gardens even though this is the best possible thing to do... Because this doesn't make any money for anyone and money is the basis of our society. There would be less supermarkets paying lots of taxes, less food transport paying lots of taxes, less of all the infrastructure which is a money generating machine for big business and the government.

    Good ideas just don't count. They have to be profitable ideas....

    Joel
     
  13. Cornonthecob

    Cornonthecob Junior Member

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    Yeps...governments can't see pass the next election. Heavens forbid if anyone actually sat down to plan well into the future. But then, the only thing politicians are good at is looking after themselves.

    I wonder....would Permaculture become more 'mainstream' if people stop charging $1,000's to do a course? Worth a thought?
     
  14. earthbound

    earthbound Junior Member

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    I wouldn't think so.... Many people on this group have never done a permaculture course, myself included.. If your interested in something you are just interested, and you learn and discover things yourself through books, magazines, the web etc.....
     
  15. Cornonthecob

    Cornonthecob Junior Member

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    Yes, that's a good point. In the other forum someone had a great idea for their local town. I think it was Dan?? great idea anyways.

    And I personnally think individuals can make a difference....over time. Am sure it will all come to a head somewhere within our lifetime.
     
  16. christopher

    christopher Junior Member

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    It would be great if we as a species were able to plan ahead, see the changes we need to make and make them. Sadly I don't think that is the case.

    The Veggie Oil diesel option is great, it is "an" answer, but it is not a uiniversal solution. Whoever is doing it is doing good for the planet, and good on them. That gov'ts downplay, minimize or refuse to acknowledge that this possible solution exists is not a suprize. No tax revenue and it challenges the powers that be, the same powers that paid for the poiticians campaings and bought them the election.

    There IS money to be made with biodiesel, and farmers in the US state of Florida are growing soybeans for oil to make biodiesel. There are problems with this model tho, including the fact that probably all of the soy grown to make biodiesel this way is genetically modified, and that it takes alot of petroleum to make that soy oil. This program gets federal subsidies, which are great for the farmers, but not so great for everyone else as the production of this type of biodiesel is a poor exchange for regular petroleum, and merely puts the petroleum out of other tailpipes.

    Using reused veggie oile from the fryer is another things altogether because waste veggie oile (WVO)_ is a disposal problem, and this nmakes use of something that would otherwise be a problem to discard.

    On another digressive topic in response to what Cornonthecob said, we are working here on practical solutions to food security in the lowland humid tropics. We see permaculture principals as being applicable on a larger scale, strengthening food security and reducing, minimizing and reversing the damaging effects of agriculture. At this stage of development in most of Latin America and the Caribbean, this has to happen NOW as the underlying stability of most food producing systems is in peril because the practices are simply not sustainable. The way we see that information transfer taking place here is via training, workshops and farmer to farmer exchanges. The easiest and fastest way to do that is a 72 hour Permaculture Design Course.

    We are talking with the Government of Belize about having participation from Minstry of Agriculture here during the Permaculture Design Course that Toby Hemenway and Penny Livingston are teaching in February. We are also working on getting various NGOs and CBOs (Community Based Organizations) involved in community development. The organizations we are talking with are all critically located, and a PDC is the easiest way to transfer that information.

    I have said this before (before our project was working on being a host for a PDC :lol: ), but the course I took in 1992 with Chuck Marsh, Rick Valley and Michael Pilarski (among others) was money well spent for me and I would and have recommended to anyone who owns or is thinking of buying a piece of land and developing it. I learned so much, but more than learning the individual bits and pieces, which was in some ways overwhelming, I learned a way to look at farming which has helped me on our farm and in my work with cacao farmers.

    As much as I learned at the course, I also had a great time. I met lots of great forward thinking and working people, and the whole experience was positive for me.

    I know from experience hosting Peace Corps trainees here that hosting a group is a lot of work. You have to feed everyone, house them, come up with a curriculum take care of them, etc.

    For a PDC we also have to hire or involve the trainers, and we will be having Toby Hemenway and Penny Livingston, who are great teachers, and conduct field visits to various farms where you can see permaculture principles at work. Our project may make some money, and it might lose some, either way, we aren't going to make much, or lose a whole loit, either, but for us, the information trasfer is important.

    My PDC course was a valuable intense session of information transfer which I enjoyed immensely, and I personally, am very, very very glad I took mine. While it looks like a lot of money, if you own a piece of land, it is money well spent (at least in my limited experience).

    And, I am not saying that someone couldn't get all of that information I was exposed to through other means, books, magazines, conversation, this forum (for example), but that information transfer would have been slower, and we would have made a lot more mistakes on the farm than we did anyway (and we made lots of mistakes).

    Huge digression, apologies all around, but wanted to plug PDCs in general because the one I took was very valuable to us and our land (and, also, our project is holding one..... ).

    Christopher
     
  17. Cornonthecob

    Cornonthecob Junior Member

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    Hey Christopher, yeps I can relate to what you're saying. Am going to start a PDC myself in a couple of months. My point wasn't to 'knock' those that teach permaculture...I have a lot of respect for people who are helping to make this world a better place.

    Maybe being the cynical type I do think that there are lots of people who are more than happy to spruik to any and all how we all should live. And for a price they'll happily show you the way.

    lol, damn now I sound all bitter and twisted! :p

    hopefully I'm not......yet! I guess to me....important things shouldn't come with a price tag. I know that's a crazy thing to say in todays world......but still. that's why forums like this are worth their weight in gold.....advice without the 'bill'......though some of the jokes.......

    :p
     
  18. ~Tullymoor~

    ~Tullymoor~ Junior Member

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    Where/when are you doing your course Corn :D ya lucky bugger...

    LOL at "without the bill"....don't you know that putting up with the jokes is the price you pay!!?? :lol:
     
  19. christopher

    christopher Junior Member

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    Cornonthecob,

    I am with you about "open sourcing" permaculture information, but it takes funding to make the world move... and this is a way to get it done.

    I agree that one of the reasons this forum is so valuable is that the information here is accesible freely. I enjoy reading and writing here. I try to give as much as I take. And, oh, I don't know, the jokes are precious, worth their weight in rabbit droppings.....

    C
     
  20. Cornonthecob

    Cornonthecob Junior Member

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    The jokes are precious??!!

    hmmm...I might have to add humourless to cynical :(

    lol :p
     

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