BioDiesel for non-hobbiests

My dad sent me think link today. Groovy. Expensive, but groovy. Don't know how good it is, but the description seems to suggest they know what they're doing. Acid/base pH balancing, 3 stage water wash, 110V @ 15A power suggests a drying stage.

If you're a boating marina selling fuel or farmer that wants to go with green fuel without modifying your vehicle - this looks like the fastest route. At $9,000 USD you better be prepared to make about 10000L of BioDiesel before this thing breaks even.

Note: you can use BioDiesel in an oil furnace too, so 10,000L may not take too long for some of you.

Tracking Power Generation in Ontario

An excellent site showing the electrical generation in Ontario is www.ieso.ca

They provide a metric dung load of information on:

1. %-age generation by type (hydro, nuclear, gas, coal, etc)


2. Maps showing where all the generating plants are (pdf, page 14)


3. %-age consuption by consumer group (home, business, industrial)


4. Seasonal peak consuptions and average demand by city


5. Historical top-20 peak daysGenerator availability plant-by-plant, day-by-day (2008-04-01)

And the awesomest demonstration of why the internet was invented: Live graphs of today's projected and actual electrical consuption!!!

Interesting things one can gleam from the website:

1. Ontario burns a lot of coal - 20.6% of total installed capacity - but plans exist to decommishon all coal by 2009
2. Ontario has been exporting more power than it brings in over the past two years - but there is still tight dependance on US for even distribution
3. There is a lot of nuclear that never turns off
4. Winter peak electrical demand is 90% of summer peak demand

All in all, very educational

Vids of my GreaseCar

Video 1: Under the hood


Video 2: In the cabin, on the dashboard


Video 3: In the trunk, the tank itself


Bonus Video: Changing veggie fuel filter

My daddy's car is greener than yours!

Ahh. Children are so competitive. But so are green-o nut jobs. And I guess I'm one of them.

Someone on one of my YouTube videos commented a better use of my the 1,000 Watts over 12 hours to dewater my veggie oil would have been to charge an electric car. A very cutting and popular view. But utterly wrong.

In my attempt to fill the blogosphere with cluons, I will tear his statement down with objective analysis and not rude language.

To his defense - he's kinda right. Electric cars would be the best way to go. Centralized energy generation (generating plants) and unified energy distribution (the electrical grid). But to say that 12 kilowatt-hours to charge a car is better use than 200 litres of veggie oil shows how the poster was talking out of their butt. But that assumes a lot about the efficient generation, distribution and storage of said energy. Hint: lead acid is very heavy and isn't the answer.

Some things to know about the SI (Systeme Internationale) units:

• 1 Watt is the instantaneous energy required to push 1 Ampare of current through 1 Ohm of impedance (resistance x inductance).
  
• 1 Joule is the quantity of energy required to run 1 Watt for 1 second
  
• 1 kilowatt-hour is the energy to push 1,000 Watts for 1 hour.
• For 1000 Watts for 12 hours (or 43,200 seconds) that would total 43.2 megajoules
  

Now. Look at these sources:

• http://www.green-trust.org/2005/09/uk-based-veggie-fueled-co-gen-chp.html
  
• http://www.southwestbiodiesel.co.uk/oil.html
  
• http://vegburner.co.uk/oils.htm
  
• and many others on google

You can see that 1 litre of veggie oil has about 35 kilojoules per litre. So my 205L barrel (rounded down to 200L to account for the fact I don't fill it to the top) has about 7.0 gigajoules of energy (7,000 megajoules).



That means I'm spending one 160^th the energy in the fuel to refine it. I find that perfectly acceptable.

Yeah yeah, I didn't account for the energy it took to make the heating element, or the barrel, or the containers, or the filter bags. But he didn't account for the energy it took to manufacture the transmission lines, lead acid batteries, electric motors, etc.

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.

Mark's Lister in operation

Here are two videos of Mark's generator in operation.

Added since last post:
1. exhaust pipes vent to outside (flex pipe on left)
2. glow plugs added for easier starting (battery powered - right)
3. 3 40L fuel jugs hung from cieling
4. 3-to-1 fuel valve to select fuel (diesel or veggie)

Still to-do:
1. cooling system
2. muffler
3. sound-proof the shed
4. install electrical cables to his house

With any luck, he'll have a generator working for this spring's thaw-and-melt-and-flood-your-basement season.


Video 1: Single cylinder firing.


Video 2: Both cylinders firing.

Dumb people and the environment

My biggest beef with the environmental craze that's going on right now is how mis-information and dis-information is everywhere. There are so many people out there who haven't thought things through and spout out a load of crap as fact.

The "green revolution" is a perfect example of Quantum Bogodynamics where Bogons and Cluons are interacting - and in my opinion the Bogons out number the Cluons 10:1 right now.

Example 1 - "Tap Water is unsafe, dontchaknow?"
I have a co-worker who started a conversation taking the position that city run tap water is unsafe because the recently published report on pharmaceutical chemicals discovered in tap water of several US cities. Being married to a hydro-geologist (aka. water geologist, aka. ground water scientist) I am privy to her complete confidence in city run water treatment.

Aforementioned co-worker was of the opinion - nay - the conviction that his well water is "pure" because he "got one of those expensive lab tests done" and everything passed.

Thing is - the city of Ottawa performs over 125,000 tests per year on over 350 different parameters while his well is tested, what, once per year? Check the report yourself.

And don't even get me started on bottled water vs. tap water (hint - they're the same thing).

Example 2 - "Compact fluorescent lamps are not better for the environment"
Same co-worker. His argument was:

1. CFL's don't produce as much heat, increases the heating bill
2. CFL's have mercury in them and are hazardous - "think of the children"
3. Hazardous material waste disposal requires going to a landfill - burning fossil fuel
4. Hazardous material waste days at the landfill are busy - everyone's cars are idling - burning fossil fuel
5. When he went to the HazMat day, the line up took "so long" that he just left is HazMat at the side of the road and left
6. The city should collect hazardous waste are the road side so he doesn't have to make the trip.

My responses:

1. Every dollar spend heating our house using electrical resistance would cost you $0.40 (approx) in natural gas.
2. The CFLs last for 5 years. Incandescents last for 1. Mercury and other heavy metals are recycled because they are valuable.
3. Hazardous material water disposal is a once every 5 year occurrence for most households (sometimes never, thanks to hardware store drop-offs). Don't complain about something you do once every 5 years with proper storage - "go when you have enough to make it worth the trip"
4. See response #3. If you only go once every 5 years, suck it up.
5. His fifth point revokes is right to talk to me
6. The city should also pay someone to wipe the poo from my bum so I don't have to do it. But that would not be cost effective. The same argument applies to his point.

Round 2.

Him:

1. I like soft incandescent light.
2. I have a chandelier that don't take standard type-2 bulb sizes - do I have to buy a new chandelier?

Me:

1. CFLs exist with softer, diffused light so solve this problem. We don't live in an autocratic society - shelve your bleeding hart.
2. CFLs exist on all the same socket sizes as conventional incandescents.

End result:

He still thinks "the man" is out to get him. I still think he others like him will eventually out-breed people like me.

Jets and BioFuel

So, Virgin Atlantic flew a short flight on biofuel. What remarkable about this is Sir Branson pointed out that Algae based biofuels are targeted to produce their Jet Fuel.

Stroke of common sense, brilliant.

Plant-oil is People! Er, petro-oil...

CBC is carrying something today few people know about: that plastic doesn't need to come from crude (aka. petroleum oil) oil. Orignally plastics were made from Soy bean.

Infact, just about any plant oil can be be used as raw matirial for creating plastics. If only there was a plant that could be grown in sufficant quantity to make a significant dent in the plastics industry...

Delay to our furnace

Installation of our geoexchange furnace has been delayed untill the spring.

We had hoped to get it in for Christmas, but the 150cm of snow we got really but a wrench in the plans. Add to that the Ontario ground water Regulation 903 (aka. the Walkerton regulation) you get more delays as the company investigates better ways to grout the bore hole. And to top it off, the company is going though a change of ownership (for the better in my opinion).

But all is not lost. We'll get our furnace in the spring when the ground is soft, and the snow is gone. Less of a point getting it now when the coldest parts of winter are done.

A MP3 podcast audio feature from CBC's Quirks and Quarks on the technology of our new furnace.

M's Generator is getting closer

So M's generator is getting closer to being operational.

Todo:

1. install cooling system (205L steel barrel filled with water/coolant, convection cooling)
2. install veggie fuel lines (currently only using diesel)
3. install exhaust system!

Today we got woodnstuff's man John to come over with the new fly-wheel and between 3 of us we took turns cranking the sucker. With the help of break cleaner from CdnTire (ether is so last century) we got a few successful power strokes. The -10C overnight temperatures made the engine quite cold. M will need to install some glow plugs for winter starting.

The problem with biofuel

The problem is the people who make biofuel are chemical companies and not agricultural companies.


Fundamentally, a company will focus its efforts on the things it does best. Why would a chemical company making fuel ever want to grow the crops used to make the fuel? It makes about as much sense as a bank getting into the business of real estate.



So why is this a problem? Because as a chemical producer, you care only about price and availability.

Result - biofuels are mass produced using human food crops. Why would BiofuelCompany grow its own crops when they can get soy or canola cheap prices? The return on investment isn't there for BiofuelCompany.

So now - as I'm sure you know - we're in a state where biofuels are trendy (ignoring ethenol, rightfully so) and food prices are going up because there are two markets buying the product.

Solution - grow crops specifically designed for fuel. What would this crop look like?

No intellectual property concerns
Anyone can grow it without fear of litigation. After all, more competition means more product. It's very very hard to conceive of supply outstripping demand for any cheap energy source.

Inexpensive to grow
The raw materials needed to grow the crop have to be cheap. Little to no pesticides is a bonus. Less work the better.

High fuel content
The crop needs to produce very high amounts of fuel per acre.

What would my solution be? Algae. Algae will grow in just about any body water (ask anyone who owns a chlorinated pool). All it needs is CO2, some nitrogen, 25C temperatures and lots of sunlight. You don't even need to displace prime food crops to grow it. Deserts have lots of sunlight, a water-tight greenhouses will conserve almost all the water.

As for fuel content? Corn - 145kg of oil per hectare. Soybean - 375kg/ha. Canola (rapeseed) - 1,000 kg/ha. Algae - 6,894kg/ha (theoretical 39,916kg/ha).

Staggering? Not if you answer these questions:

• What produced 99% of the oxygen present in our atmosphere during the primordial years of our planet?
• What is the base of the food chain for most of the world's ecosystems?
  
• Algae has been harvesting power from the sun for billions of years, humans have been at it (photovoltaic/solarcell technology) for 40 years. Who would you expect is better at it?
• Why is photosynthesis almost 100% efficient while photovoltaic research has only gotten 42.8% with super-expensive Gallium-Arsenide triple-junction semiconductor crystals?
  

The oil from algae can be used to produce plastics (1950's plastics were made from soy bean oil until the farmers couldn't keep up with demand and Tupperware started using slag from oil refinement).

The oil from algae can be blended (say, 50%) with home heating fuel which doesn't need the same level of refinement as transportation. Or better yet, displace large amounts of petroleum oil used in electrical generation.

Addi tonal energy can be spent to convert the oil into BioDiesel for transportation.

Hurry up and wait

The geothermal contractor we've made arrangements with has had a rough December with all the snow.

Drilling though snow isn't the problem. Operating a drill rig with exposed machine parts in blowing snow - that's the problem. With luck, I'll have a firm date soon on when the drill can start.

A neighbour emailed me today explaining a new local temple is having construction difficulties because bedrock is so close to the surface. That's great news. Hydraulic conductivity of fractured sandstone (the geological formation our house is most likely on) is very high.

Split rock == good water flow. Good water flow == good heat transfer. Good heat transfer + geothermal furnace == excellent heating.

Justifying the cost of a MADNESS

$25,000 is a lot of money for a furnace. If you won $25k, you'd be dancing. If you misplaced $25k you'd be depressed.

In spite of my tone in this blog, my wife and I took this decision seriously and here's how we came to it.

1. Assume we're replacing our furnace and air conditioner

That's $7,000 of assumed cost right there. Our furnace was mid-efficiency (by today's standards low-efficiency) natural gas. Our air conditioner is a piece of junk and we've never used it. With a baby on the way, it's a good plan to have one for emergencies. And resale of a home is quite difficult with no summer cooling.

2. Assume we'll get rebates

• $3,500 from the Ontario Provincial Government,
• $3,500 from the Canadian Federal Government, and
• $800 from the Ontario Power Authority

Total: $8,000

3. Assume we save $1,500 per year

• No natural gas bill (no delivery charges, debt reduction, or cost per cubic meter).
• Increase in hydro usage will only occur in low electricity demand months (electricity demand is always highest in the summer months as cooling systems operate)

Items 1 to 3 puts our pay-back period at about 5-7 years.

4. Assume there are no environmentally friendly investment mechanisms that make money

We wanted to save some of our money in "ethical" or "green" investments. My (and a few other) financial planners basically told us "don't bother".

The problem it seems is "green funds" are managed by people whose primary motives are not to make you money but to invest in green technology and historical performance (as short as it has been) is poor. Like losing money poor.

And companies who qualify as "green" are often run by people whose primary motives are not to increase shareholder value but to be the best green company they can be. Not a bad thing, just not money making for investors.

So, we decided if we're going to invest, we'll do it on our terms. Our veggie fueled car, our heat pump, super insulating the house, etc.

This blog doesn't just chronicle our "greeny" whims. These are our green investments and we treat each decision as such.

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

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.