You need to start to get organised and have a number of people supply you with old oils. You can then see how to refine the oil by looking on the web. Simple refining and filtering is good enough for oil fired heaters and for diesel motors you need a little bit of "fiddling around."
I use old engine oil to heat a furnace for melting metal. This is the burner I use based on a Hago Delavan syphon nozzle. This is the blower that I use with the oil burner.
Is there anyone here who uses reclaimed engine or cooking oil.
I often wonder if I could get some cheap heating for my workshop in winter ... and if clean enough, for our home as well.
Our winters are pretty mild really, and the workshop is built inside a large shed ... lined and well insulated ... so don't really need much just to top it up.
Just occasionally I need more than my beanie and ugg boots.
Maybe even running a generator for some power hungry devices at times as well.
I've been heating my place for about 5 years now on used oil of all types so how in depth do you want to get on how to do it?
I've been following the other threads and quite like the idea of generating bio methane.
I have plenty of shed space to set up a system. IBC's are readily available around here. I have several decent Rinnai gas heaters that with research have discovered can be converted from LPG to Natural gas ... which should allow them to run quite happily on methane.
Personally I use a oil fuel oil furnace burner with a modified nozzle systems that preheats the oil to~ 300F just before it exits the nozzle so that it will be thin enough to spray like normal fuel oil.
Here's the links to the threads I have here on what I work with.
https://www.electro-tech-online.com/threads/alternative-fuels-boiler-system-how-to-build-one.152957/ (thread totorial still in progress.)
https://www.electro-tech-online.com/threads/wind-generators-pros-cons.149508/ More indepth details of the burner and boiler its a part of.
As for finding used oil be careful on asking around. Word will get out and you will become overwhelmed with the stuff in a short time.
I like the principle but my issue is with the realistic scaling required to service a typical home.
In my area I need around 1 million BTU per day average for a winter season which with the bio methane approach at ~1000 BTU per cubic foot of gas that's ~1000 cubic feet per day just for what I am heating now which when the new house, and maybe someday, the big shop get added to the load that number will double or triple.
I have no idea what size of digester would be required to keep up with that but I doubt that a few tote tanks is anywhere close to enough.
Plus beyond that, how much feedstocks would it take to reliably produce that amount of gas on demand and how much labor would be involved in making the system stay functional all winter?
I know how to handle solid fuels and liquid fuels in my boilers easily and efficiently enough but a biological based fuel source that cant be shut off when not needed seems problematic to me.
Also as I get older the labor part seems to be less and less favorable. ~16 - 17 years ago gathering and cutting the ~15 - 20 cords of wood for a winter and spending 15 - 20 minutes a day feeding and cleaning it was no big deal but now it rather sucks compared to bringing in a years plus worth of used oil in a few hours time and spending 10 - 15 minutes every other week servicing and cleaning out the boiler.
Weee i do both! Bio diesel from cooking oil and heating oil from old 'other oils'. I process all mine though, its how i got into the alternative fuel thing
If your in oz you might have to clean it up like we do. I will grabbed you details and how we clean it. Getting a kind of system in place helps alot.
I have two tanks, one i let sit for a few months and one ready to clean and process, then its into storage. But i get more used veg oil now, so its bio diesel mainly. Oil for heating is getting harder to get hold of.
We use a machine like this as first stage cleaning, then we fine filter
my biggest tip is put your first settling tank at a slight slope angel, down that end stick some HDD magnets or whatever you can get hold of, most the waste engine oil we get is agricultural stuff, always has metal bits in it. So i settle it a min 4 months,save me a fortune in fine cartridge filters and nozels for the boilers (those are not cheap here and you have to have the burner tested each year for emissions ).
Once settle put it through a machine like that with o filters on, do it 3 times (two are just pure fun!! they are so cool to watch), first run stop it after you get every 5 ltr and clean the wall of gunk!! if your oil is dirty you get a huge amount of sticky gunk on the wall. The clean oil seeps over the top lip. my final steps are sometime magnetic biochar (home made) and fine cartridge filter.
I always know when there is alot of hydraulic fluid in the waste oil, the burner smells like bananas to me
waste cooking oil keep separate if you got decent amounts, i got a kick ass recipe and fool proof way to make bio diesel with it. if your in oz, then are you in a humid area or dry area?
So does my mums car, she just dosnt know i put a few ltr in each day. she thinks it will damage her car, well for 3 years she been running on maybe 50-60% bio fuel and its her not me that tells people how good her car runs lol.
She thinks the fuel gauge is unreliable however.
You could do both. I am working on a log in for you, the IBC option is very good. You think you can get 4-5? 4 would need to be in a shed or in the ground and insulated? If so then you have options. The thing is no reason you cant use oil and gas, if you cant feed for digester enough then oil is a good back up.
Feeding mine is one reason i attached the septic tank plus add all the organic material i can get (alot with our acreage), but get them right and they produce alot of gas
Mmm ... I'd have to keep a pretty low profile with that quantity of oil storage ... the EPA would be around in a flash ... someone would spot it and dob me in.
That's something I have to study up on for our region. Volts, amps, current are part of my everyday vocabulary ... but BTU's, Degrees Farenheit, kPa etc are like a foreign language.
I'm certain our requirements are probably an order of magnitude lower than yours ... weather here is pretty mild. It's newsworthy if there's ever any snowfall in the state ... maybe once or twice a decade and I've never seen any here.
I'll look more into the how I would use an oil burner. If I were to build one it would have to be out of the house ... but then I'd have to install a heap of water heaters (hydronics?) around the house ... with the associated plumbing. Still sounds easier than collecting sheep manure and grass everyday like you said.
On that aspect I would dig into the actual rules a bit. Contrary to what some wish everyone to believe the EPA regs have a lot of loopholes and grey areas to play with on the private end that the commercial doesn't have.
They work on the same principles. Just different physical units and applications. Pressure is like Volts, flow rates are like Amps and the rest sort of fall into similar comparative equivalents.
Downside is the initial setup can get to be fairly labor and cost intensive (trial and error fine tuning is the hard part) but the long term savings for having near free fuel is what pays for it, if you can use it enough to balance out the financial end.
Where I am at to heat what I do to the comfort levels I like would take 2500 - 3000 gallons of propane a year which at typical winter prices of $1+ a gallon that would get pretty spendy.
That's where my motivations to go with an alternative fuel type heating system was justified.
If you have forced air heating and or cooling like my house does all you need to do is add a heat exchanger in the ducting.
Forget most the systems you see on the net for biogas, they are at best 30-50% efficient.
a 4-5 chamber without microbe cell on should be hitting 80% efficiency for gas conversion, with some work and a tune up you should really be getting ~90% conversion or something is wrong.
As to amounts, 3-4 people and 1/4 acre grass a week should give you around 6 hours of cooking gas a day for a 4 burner gas stove.
Nothing but pee,poo,paper down the toilet!!! If you put a macerater on the toilet then gas will increase ~15%.
And should require little work as most of it can be automated
But when you said you might need 1 million BTU per day average for a winter season ... I don't have a standard to relate that to. Something I'll have to learn pronto.
I recall reading years ago about anyone who went off grid and had to look after batteries, generators etc ... that they were really just taking on a hobby ... coz it was going to be a lot of extra work. Looks like same goes here.
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?
We use cookies and similar technologies for the following purposes:
Do you accept cookies and these technologies?