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

Wet Oil Sucks

Not many first time veggie oil users are aware that cooking oil absorbs water when food is cooked in it.

Potatoes are mostly water, so is fish, shrimp, chicken, and just about everything else you cook in a deep fryer. What's how it cooks in fact - the oil instantly vaporises the water at the surface of the food. That vapour appears as bubbles in the oil. Some fraction of the vapour doesn't make it to the surface and you in to the air; it is absorbed by the oil.

Filtering, and settling of the oil will help separate the water from the oil (fuel). But how do we know when it's done? In short - it'll never get done. See: Chemical Equilibrium.

How to test for water in oil

1. Pour your suspect oil in to a kitchen fry pan (get a cheap one from the dollar store)
2. Heat the oil on high on your kitchen range
3. If you see bubbles popping, then there's water in your oil

Methods to remove water from oil

1. Centrifuge
2. Evaporation
3. Evaporation under vacuum (uses less energy than #2)
4. Chemically (may leave impurities which will then need to be removed)

I use option #2 above because it's simple, and inexpensive for the volume of oil I dewater.
220 litres of filtered oil, $0.05 per kWh, 1kW element, 10 hours, equals less than 1/5 of a penny to dewater 1L of oil.

Insulation Math

Just for fun, I was reading this site deciding if I should replace all my old mouse-poop-filled blown pink insulation in my attic. [Can Rebate, Ont Rebate]

I have no room to add to the insulation in my attic, so I'll likely need to throw it all out or risk ice built up from lack of soffit venting.

6 inches of blown fiberglass: R-13.2
6 inches of fiberglass batts: R-18.84
16 inches of blown fiberglass: R-35.2
16 inches of fiberglass batts: R-50.24

Hollow Core Wood Door (1 + 3/4 inch): R-2.17
Metal Insulating Door (2 inch): R-15

We're getting a new furnace

This morning the rep from Earth Energy Solutions came by our home at 08:00 and we signed over the first 25% of $25,000 and signed a contract. They'll be installing the unit before Christmas.

Catch? DX systems aren't eligible for the $7,000 in rebates from the Ontario and Canadian governments because they don't meet CSA-448 standards. The other heat pumps cost well more than $7k so this is still the best deal. And the DX systems are apparently this close to getting rubber stamp approved for the rebates. So we may still get our money back.

Home inspection coming over 2007-12-03 to get a baseline.

M's Generator Coming Together

My long time friend M lives away from the city and when the power goes out - he's not in an area with a high priority for restoring power.

Without electricity his home is at risk of flood, freezing/bursting pipes and other damage. Not to mention his little girl would be stuck in the cold with no water (water well needs power to pump) or warm food (electric range and oven).

With his wife's blessing (I assume) he began building a shed to house a lister engine to power his home. His eventual goal is to sell power back to the grid through OPA RESOP at double the market rate.

Here is the engine mounted on the I-beam frame. The I-beam frame is rested on 2cm thick rubber padding - like this. Then the I-beam frame is anchored into about 1,000 kg (2,204.62262 pounds ...) of concrete.

We got the two fly wheels on (about 90kg each) after much grunting. We figure he's close to getting the engine started. We'll start with just diesel. There are still exhaust, cooling, veggie fuel considerations to prepare. Oh yeah, and the alternator, electrical cabling, throw switches in the house, etc. But for now, we're happy.

How to buy a heat pump

Tomorrow we're going to ask a contractor "ok, how do we pay you"?

It's taken 6 months to get to this point. We went through several stages to hunting:

Education

Upon contemplating producing copious amounts of our own electricity (not with dinky solar power) I started to wonder how much hydro we'd need to heat a home. The answer is about 50 kW (over 200 Amps at 220V). Insane. Then I tripped upon ground source heat pumps which are over 500% efficient(heat energy output is 5x the energy required to operate).

The EcoCite condos on Bank St were touting that they we going to be heating the building using this same technology.

What sealed the deal? My wife grew up in home that went from wood fire to GSHP and she didn't freeze. So I got the green light.

Shock

Calling around to a few Heating Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) contractors who specialize in these systems we found the cost to start at $25,000 CAD. We spent less than that on our car.

Justification

$25,000 is a LOT of money for heat. The federal and Ontario government has paired up to provide $3,500 x2 in rebates for these heating systems. On top of this, the Ontario Power Authority offers $750 for GSHPs. Look at my links to the left for "show me the money" links.

If we were to replace our low efficacy gas furnace and air conditioner (which we never use) that would be another $8,000 without even thinking too hard. So we're down to $10,000. Assuming $2,000 per year in natural gas - that's a 5 year return on investment. Hydro costs will be higher with our higher usage, so stretch that to 7 year ROI to be safe.

Good deal.

Investigation

We started by talking to a contractor who had a lot of experience with GSHPs. Problem was, he was too busy with other work to get to us. His price was quite a bit lower than others we had contacted, so we waited. And waited. And waited. And gave up.

Contractor-2 was friendly and knowledgeable. His initial price for closed loop (our preferred option) was $50,000. Too rich for us. We asked for a different configuration (open loop) and he could to $25,000.

Contractor-3 equally nice, priced $30,000 closed-loop, $20,000 open-loop.

Contractor-4, $25,000 closed loop DX from Nordic. Price is right, smaller chance of ground water contamination than open-loop, and they were prepared to show us a contract.

References

We called references from all the contractors. Everyone was pleased (surprise, surprise) with the functioning of the units. Only complaints were unavoidable things like "it made a mess of our yard" and "I didn't have ventilation before, and that was a mess".

So tomorrow, I hand over 1/4 of the $25,000 to get things going. Let's hope we get it before Christmas so I can put up videos.

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.

My Filtering

Filtering is important. Find out to the micron rating of your standard diesel fuel filter and filter below that.

My veggie fuel filter from GreaseCar (Fleetguard FF-5156) filters to 15 micron. I filter my oil to 10 micron using two bags - one in the other. Next season I'm going to 1 micron. You can never be too careful I figure.

I found gravity feed to be very easy and simple for the amount of fuel I process (1000-1500 Litres per year).
I get my filters from FilterBag.com.

Check out the video, it explains things better than I can with a keyboard.

Car Fuel Consuption Charts

Here are some historic charts of our fuel consumption in our cars. My wife is the daughter of an accountant - does it show?

Chart 1: Fuel Prices vs Time

• Red: Gas CAD per litre
• Purple: Diesel CAD per litre (post pump price jump)

Chart 2: Cumulative fuel volume purchased

• Pink: Gas (Ford Taurus)
• Black: Diesel (Jetta TDI)
  

Chart 3: Cumulative fuel volume purchased (just diesel)

Notice how fuel consumption per day does up when winter comes - efficiency goes down.

• Grey boxes: winter months
• Purple box: road trip from Ottawa to Florida
• Red box: summer
  

Chart 4: km per day

• Blue: Gas (Ford Taurus)
• Purple: Diesel (Jetta TDI)
  

Chart 5: km per day (just diesel)

Brown gold

Oil's density is about 0.9kg per liter. Making a 20L bucket of waste veggie oil worth about $18 (Diesel is about $1/L) after you account for dregs and cost of processing.

Gold's price is over $740CAD at the time of this posting. 32.15 Troy Ounces per kg.
18L of oil is about 16.2kg. 16.2kg of gold is worth $385,414.20.

Not quite gold - but money in your pocket just the same.

Here's a video intended to show you the ugly side of oil collection.

Things to note:

1. This is garbage
2. Don't use the oil that's left outside


1. Once water gets in and heat from the elements is applied - it starts to grow bacteria and ferment
2. If there was a dead animal at the bottom of the barrel / dumpster you couldn't tell - it's that bad
3. Provide your oil supplier with sealed metal buckets and be prompt in oil pickup
   
3. Use rubber gloves all the times - life's too short.

Here's the video:

A peek in my Garage

There are many great resources online describing how people have setup their oil processing plants. There are very few videos and pictures showing the details of how they process their oil on a daily basis.

Here's the first video of many to come describing how I solicit, collect, filter, dewater, store and use vegetable oil as fuel for my car. Here's a summary

You need 4 locations:

1. Pre-filter storage - store all the raw used oil before filtering
2. Filtering - gravity feed is easy, cheap and simple
3. Dewatering - removal of any water suspended in the oil is crucial for long term storage and the life of your car
4. Storage - storing the finished product

Things you need handy:

1. Kitchen gloves - keep your hands clean
2. Newsprint - cover the ground for easy clean up
3. Plastic vapour barrier - use when transporting oil in car and under dewatering setup
4. Toilet paper - handy to clean up small dips and spills; store it in a clean dry yogourt container to keep clean
   

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:

First post

This is a first for me. These fancy-shmancy blogs that all these trendy 'kids' have to talk about this and that. So why did I betray my stubbern mindset to avoid being trendy?

Because the stuff I'm doing to my car, my house, my friend's house is just too damn cool. I want to share what I've learned about using waste vegetable oil as car/home/power fuel, furnaces, and other misc things that happen to peak my interest.

There will be photos, videos, howtos, diagrams, and comedy. Let the fun begin.