Intake Cleaning

It's been a while since my last post, here we go.

Took my 2001 Jetta TDI over to a fellow Veggie Jetta TDI driver to have the intake manifold and exhaust gas recirculation control valve cleaned after another 100,000km. I did this before, so here are some of today's photos.

A (clean) TDI Manifold:


What came out of mine using scrapers and steel brushes:


Upclose, the stuff is so black, the previous photo couldn't Auto White Balance to pick up the detail:


Even after that mess and some time in the solvent station, we could feel with our nitrile covered fingers there was some build up left. So we took a propane torch and some compressed air and ...



Yup, that did it.

Performance of the car is now a lot better, and I'm sure better efficiency. I'll update the fuel effciancy graphs in the top-left of this blog after our next refill (2-3 weeks from now).

Spent Nuclear Fuel

Like it or not, in Canada we use nuclear power (mostly in Ontario). This source of electrical power has a nasty side-effect: waste from the reactor is possibly the most toxic substance known to man.

The cost of stewardship of this waste grows proportionally with the amount of waste produced. The more nuclear power we consume, the more waste we have to take care of for the coming centuries.

It would be nice if we could just turn the 'nukes' off and cut our losses. But our need for electricity isn't dropping. When talk about electric cars, we need to be honest and realize we're talking about moving our demand for gasoline to a demand for electricity. We will need 3,000 giant wind turbines or PV solar fields for every 1 nuclear reactor - and they will not produce reliable sustained power needed for our businesses and society.

As of this post, the price of Uranium is $65 USD/lb, about the same price as silver. This represents about 10% of the life-time cost of a reactor. This doesn't include the centuries of waste fuel management.

What if we could re-use waste fuel? What if we could re-use it 3, 5, or even 10 times? The CANDU reactor design allows us to do precisely this. We can turn the waste fuel cost centre into an asset and reduce our need for fresh uranium. This processes is similar to enrichment - remove the less than 10% of mass that inhibit fission, and re-use.

Waste fuel from American, Russian, British, and Japanese reactors only need to be cut into shape for a CANDU - even easier.



Now that there is enough waste fuel in Canada (and the world) to justify construction, isn't it time to consider a waste-fuel processing plant to reduce our mining of uranium? With technology like that, Canada can become a nuclear powerhouse helping countries reduce production nuclear waste. This will create high paying Canadian jobs in a growing sector of the world economy.

Hotwater from Geothermal

Last night it dipped down to -20C, the furnace was running quite a bit in the afternoon so I took this chance to turn off the electricity to our electrical hot water tank and let the furnace heat our hot water.



Here you see how the tank is hooked up to the furnace. As you can see, the hot water comes out the top of the tank (since heat rises). The furnace draws from the bottom, and returns to the bottom on the other side.

Once the power was turned off to the tank we ran the dish washer, did a sink full of dishes and our daughter had her bath.

Drilling Completed

The drilling is done. It was loud. It was dusty. It was awesome!

The drill holes were done at 11 degrees in one direction, and 22 degrees in the other. This is approximate based on my measurements.

Top view, looking down on the roof of the house:


Front view, looking at a cross section towards the front of the house.


Some videos:
Drill through overburden (aka. top soil).


Drilling through sandstone.


Feeding the copper heat exchanger down the 100ft hole.


The target.


The equipment arrives at 09:00.


45min later it's ready to go.


What I see from my living room.


Drilling gets underway.




It makes a mess.


What the drill bit looks like. It sounded LOUD. I measured it at 105dB at 5 meters away. When the drill shaft is pulled up and each link is separated - it would spike at 120dB.


Examine the hole.


Prepare the heat exchanger to go down. Notice the block of metal for grounding in case of lightning strikes.


Send the copper heat exchanger down the hole.


Fill it with silica sand (crushed quartz) up to the rock-overburden interface.


Then fill the top with "hole plug" bentonite. This is a form of clay that seals the top of the drill hole to prevent surface water from getting down deep in the rock.


Repeat 2 more times, and you're done for the day.


Next - we wait for the furnace unit to arrive and final stages of installation take place.

Washing waste veggie oil and why I don't do it.

I've read around that it's a good idea to wash waste veggie oil (WVO) - I wasn't convinced.

I know one must wash biodiesel to get methanol, glycerin and Sodium-hydroxide by products out. But to wash straight-up WVO?

There are two common ways to wash BioDiesel (which some people recommend for WVO as well):

1. Mist washing
2. Bubble washing

Both methods can cause emulsification of the water and oil (aka. salad dressing) so heating the water and oil is important to inhibit this behaviour. 50C will do fine if you're gentle - higher temperatures will be needed if you really agitate the two fluids.

I tried to wash 10L of my 10 micron filtered oil (my car fuel) with 10L of tap water in a small 30L glass aquarium. I bought an aquarium air pump, a 30cm wand bubbler (to make a bubble curtain), and a 150W aquarium heater. I hooked it all up, poured it all in and let it all go for 48 hours.



Result? No much changed in the colour or clarity of the oil. There isn't an other way to know if the quality improved without getting scientific testing equipment. The water got smokey - but that might just be oil suspended in the water. Plus I'd have to spend more time and mess dewatering now.

As it stands, I will not add any washing stage to my filtering operation until I can see more evidence.

More photos of Mark's Generator

Here are some pictures of the recent videos of Mark's Generator.


Picture 1:
- 12HP 2cyl engine, 8KW 220V AC alternator ESA approved
- currently unused water tower for cooling


Picture 2:
- Flexible Aluminum exhaust pipe
- 2 piston exhaust joined in a Y-joint
- Copper fuel line is wrapped around exhaust for pre-heating (better burn, better flow)


Picture 3:
- 3 fuel tanks (Veg-1, Diesel, Veg-2)
- Flexible Aluminum exhaust pipe
- Copper fuel line is wrapped around exhaust for pre-heating (better burn, better flow)
- Exhaust going out the fron door for now.

The Grease Car Mod

The GreaseCar modification to my car doesn't change anything with the engine - it's a 2nd fuel tank that's heated from the waste heat of the engine (coolant).

The GreaseCar website has an excellent flash animation explaining everything.

Here's what the modification looked like once I got it back from Young Street Garage.

1) Under the hood.
The red hoses contain coolant to heat up the fuel filter assembly on the right. At the bottom, you see the two solenoids to switch diesel/veggie/diesel-backflush. You can see the VW engine cover is still there, I eventually remove it.



2) The dashboard.
An aluminium plate holding the fuel gauge and 3-way illuminated rocker switch is attached quite snugly to the bottom of the standard centre dash. Below, the ash tray is removed (we don't smoke) and the GreaseCar temperature gauge is installed.



3) In the trunk.
The spare wheel is removed, and we now carry cans of RideFlat wheel sealant in our emergency kit. I've tried to insulate the tank with foil bubble wrap. Fiberglass would just get nasty and loses its insulating properties if compressed. Notice how we don't lose any trunk space with the modification. I suggest using a end of a roll of masking tape to protect the fuel-level leads from weight of trunk items (hidden by a block of white foam in the picture below).





Upgrades

I found the heat of the oil to suffer in the winter. So after reading InfoPop a lot, two upgrades that should solve my problems of winter vegoil fuel heating were discovered.

1) Brazed Plate Heat Exchanger


Click to animate.

Brazed plates have more surface area than flat plates, so they can transfer heat from the coolant to the vegoil fuel better. This is the "heavy lifter" for vegoil temp. The thermal energy transferred is much greater than the GreaseCar thermal filter assembly or the PlantDrive VegTherm. But it is limited by how hot the coolant is.



The engine cover doesn't fit anymore with all the extra hoses. I didn't like it anyways.

2) PlantDrive.ca's VegTherm Mega

30cm long, 32Amp at 12V of electrical resistance heating. This sucker burns skin on contact. After the oil is heated in the trunk tank, after it's insulated in the hose-in-hose line under the car, after it's warmed up a bit by the GreaseCar thermal filter assembly, after it's raised to the same temp as the coolant by the BPHE - the VegThermMega does it's thing.



I also stopped using foil bubble wrap for insulation and moved to copper pipe foamies - they insulate way better.

As you can see, things are getting very tight. But it's still manageable, even for me.

Yesterday, my BFHE was showing temperatures of 50C (it was likely warmer, temperature sensor heat loss to ambient air temp) I turned on the VegTherm and the oil temp out the other side was 68C.

Time will tell how it does in -30C.

Veggie Oil Performance

There are three questions I'm always asked when I tell people about the veggie oil conversion I did to our car.

1. Are you pulling my leg?
2. What's the fuel economy of veggie oil vs diesel?
3. Is there any loss in power / acceleration?

The fuel economy is hard to measure as accurately as diesel since I don't have the fuel station's 0.001 Litre accuracy in my plastic jugs.

The power question I can never answer definitively since you need special equipment to perform the test. That and my 2001 JettaTDI sedan is spec'd at 90 hp - not exactly a hot rod.

So when the local Ottawa Volkswagen enthusiasts group had their annual dynamometer day (wiki), I paid for two runs on the device. One diesel, one veggie.



The Test
For both runs the engine was hot for ideal performance (20min driving at 80km/h). For the veggie run, I made sure I was running on veggie for at least 10min before the test started - 100% veggie no diesel on the side. The oil temp was over 70C.

The Videos

1) Calibration. Dynos need to know what wheel speed your car has in relation to the RPM of your engine. With that, they can graph torque and horsepower against engine speed. They say it was tricky because they rarely test automatic transmissions.



2) The first run.



3) Under the hood. See all my foamy fuel-line insulation? See my foil bubble wrap FPHE and GreaseCar fuel filter insulation?



4) Computer display. Wheel speed in kilometre per hour at bottom left. Engine speed in rotations per minute converted from wheel speed at bottom right.



5) Up close. Look at that monster (cough) engine heave under the hood. Seriously, I didn't realize they do that.



The Results (drum roll)


Click to enlarge

Veggie (in green) - 192 ft-lb Torque, 107 hp
Diesel (in red) - 172 ft-lb Torque, 102 hp

Powering a home on the fat of the land

No man is an island. I have a good friend M whom I feed my need to talk about crazy ideas like heating your home without gas, wood, or fuel. We also talk about running a car using waste oil.

We had an agreement - that I would get a ground source heat pump and he'll get a Lister generator powered by veggie oil.

Lister engines were made in Lister England in the 1930's and knock-offs are now made everywhere - especially in India. These engines are very primitive. Hand crank to start, no muffler or transmission. But primitive it good - it can run on veggie oil no problem.

If you strap a large alternator to it - you now have a waste oil to electricity device. Free power.

In this blog I will present how we setup M his very own grease sucking power plant.

Heat from the Earth

Now a little something about the furnace we're looking to get.

When we bought our home in 2005, the previous owner put in the cheapest furnace he could get - he was just flipping the house. At the time (nothing's changed I understand) the efficacy of a furnace did not have an effect on the value of a house.

One cold winter day the price of natural gas jumped in sympathy of high crude oil prices. Yay capitalism. The good old CBC morning radio was interviewing someone who heated their home using the stored heat in the ground. What bent my brain was this statement:

"The ground in Ottawa stays 10C year round and that's plenty to heat my house, yeehaw."

A house @ 10C just isn't comfy. I knew of geothermal heating using hot geysers in Iceland, but heating your house using something that's colder than what you would find comfortable didn't make sense.

Then a web site beat me with a clue stick (Images in this post are from that link, more info from CanRen, Wikipedia, and GeoExchange.org). Let me summarize it for you.

Air Conditioners
An air conditioner compresses a gas (refrigerant) to make it hotter by grace of thermodynamics. That hot gas is then cooled to air temperature using that big loud thing outside your house you identify as your air conditioner. The gas is then decompressed inside your ductwork - usually near a fan - where it cools down. The cold gas then cools the circulating air in your house and the cycle repeats. An air conditioner is moving heat out of your house - it doesn't "make cold" (I will not get started on how wrong that statement is). Your refrigerator and basement freezer operate on the same principal - cool down the inside while heating up the outside.

Air Sourced Head Pumps
One can reverse this and heat your house while cooling the outside air. This is commonly called an air source heat pump. Problem is the thermodynamics of refrigerants can't move much heat from -40C air to heat your house to +25C. That's 65C difference in temperature. In the summer you're only trying to cool your house by 10C (35C outside, 25C inside). Think about it.

Ground and Water Sourced Heat Pumps
A ground source heat pump tries to refrigerate the ground to keep your house warm. Consider that the density of air at STP is 1.2kg per cubic meter while rock averages 2,400kg per cubic meter. 2000x more dense. Not taking into account the greater specific heat capacity - you'll have a very very hard time freezing the ground over the course of a Canadian winter before the summer sun warms it up again. Now you're heating your home to 25C from ground that is 10C - a manageable 15C temperature differential.

And as a bonus - it's much easier to cool your home in the summer.
And as a second bonus - domestic hot water heating is taken care of as an after thought.

How does it work? Well, there are a few flavours of heat pumps.

1. Air Source
2. Water Source
3. Ground Source

Air source I've mentioned above. Water source uses well water - or a lake, pond, spring, etc). Ground water itself comes in a few sub-flavours.

1. Closed loop horizontal
   
2. Closed loop vertical
3. Direct Expansion (DX) vertical

Horizontal is just as it sounds. Loops of plastic coil containing a water-ethanol anti-freeze solution circulate a few feet below the surface of your property. This requires you tear up at least a 1/2 acre of lawn.

Vertical requires drilling 30 to100 metres down into the ground far from the colder surface. In these bore holes, plastic piping containing water-ethanol is put in for heat exchange.

DX is a vertical system but copper piping containing refrigerant is put into 30 metre drilled holes. The copper piping is a better heat exchanger and the refrigerant is now circulated in the ground where the heat is. Heat exchange is amplified.

BioDiesel vs. Streight Veggie Oil

One Tuesday night in September 2005 the Arbour Environmental Shoppe had a guest speaker present after store hours; his name was Steve Anderson and he made is own BioDiesel.

He would collect waste cooking oil (canola typically) from the local chip waggons in Arnprior outside of Ottawa and process it in to fuel for his diesel pick-up truck. The process which he demonstrated for the audience that night was very simple.

1. Filter the used oil - he suggested ladies' pantyhose
2. Mix Lye (aka. NaOH) and Methanol (aka. Wood Alcohol) in solution (100g of Lye, 1/4 oil volume of Methanol, I'm skipping a big part here so don't use this recipe)
3. Heat oil to 60C
4. Mix "MethOxide" solution with Oil and continue mixing
   
5. Wait for the mixture to separate into (top to bottom)
1. BioDiesel
2. a thin water/soap interface
3. Glycerine / Glycol
   

This is important:

BioDiesel is not Veggie Oil. It's made from vegetable oil, but it's entirely different.
The lower viscosity is the prime difference - this is why they sell BioDiesel not VeggieOil at the pumps. Thick veggie oil will kill your injector pump. BioDiesel is thin - your injector pump doesn't know the difference.

If you've ever made soap at home or in school you'll notice this almost identical. But instead of adding water, you add Methanol. Making soap bonds a water and oil molecule using Lye. This reaction bond oil (triglyceride) to the Methane ion after the lye is used to remove the glycerines from the oil.

The only major cost is the methanol - typically $1CAD / Litre. So little lye is used that it's a non factor ($30CAD/kg). Oh, and methanol is highly flammable, odourless, and carcinogenic. Nasty stuff. The cooking oil is free if you find the right restaurant - they pay for a special service to dispose of the oil. They typically restaurants will go through 60L per week - more if they're picky about flavour or get a lot of fried-food business.

So I went about to try to make some myself. It wasn't a disaster, but it wasn't a success. Using an electric hot water tank element found at any hardware store I cooked up some oil. A pub in Bell's Corners called The Cock & Bull had a head chef nice enough to let me have 20L for my first experiment. I bought methanol from Canadian Tire (labelled as cooking stove fuel) and my good friend M had got himself a 1kg pail of lye. Cooked up the oil in a HDPE plastic pail, added the methoxide, and poured it into a glass carboy used for making wine.

The result:

A big disgusting mess.

There are cleaner ways to make biodiesel in much larger quantities for the run-of-the-mill homebrewer. The hot water tank design seems to be the most popular and sensible.

But this is the point were I learned that making fuel for my car is tricky for a few reasons:

1. Methanol is dangerous
2. I'd need by 205L (50gal) barrels at a time to keep costs down
   
3. Cost per litre of fuel is generally $0.30CAD after accounting for bulk purchase of methanol
4. It makes a f'ing mess
5. If I mess this up, I could hurt my car and need to pump out my fuel tank
6. I have no real way of knowing if I messed this up until it's too late

I tried to get a biodiesel co-op going from the interested parties at Steve A's presentation. But basic human "what's in it for me" out-weighed "let's do something cool". Nice people and all, just not my kind of crazy and the whole thing fell apart. I was even going to put in $5,000 of my own money to get rental space and equipment.

I started to look what it would take to run on veggie oil - no biodiesel - just pure filtered veggie oil. I found happiness in simplicity and cost. More on that later.

Oh, and I did get a good batch of biodiesel made. Using fresh oil I bought at the grocery store I was able to make 1.5L of pretty biodiesel. Notice that I removed the glycol from the bottom of the batch except for a little bit more water and glycol at the bottom of the jar.



As messy as it was - I tried it and learned what I am not willing to tolerate in my adventure of mine.

Next - how to make a 2001 diesel VW Jetta run on used cooking oil.

How it started

Picture it ... Ottawa ... 2005.

My fiancée (currently promoted to wife) and I had a big blue Ford Taurus sedan whose exhaust system was going to cost $900 in repairs. The boat of a car had a book value of $500. We should have been wearing ear protection while driving in that thing - I'm sure some greasy bar-hopping men with well lubricated hair would have been very impressed.

As luck would have it, we were researching our next car that would be fuel friendly, stylish, and practical for a small family (we were planning to keep it for several years). Some resources that we used was the EPA of the US&A and trusty google.

Things we discovered:

1. Gasoline-Battery hybrids are damn expensive
2. Sub-compact cars have very little storage room
3. Diesel internal combustion engines will burn a whole family of non-fossil fuels
   

Number 3 intrigued us. It had excellent fuel consumption (1000km per 55L tank on the highway, 800km in the city). We knew of the Topia GreenStop selling biodiesel so we could use that as our main fill-up stop. Then we saw we could make our own BioDiesel. And if we were crazy enough we could convert our car to safely run on waste vegetable oil.

We had no developed plans for this kind of madness. But we'd get a sexy black VW Jetta 4-door automatic that has good fuel consumption. So we got this: