Larry brought forth on stone tablets:
Joe wrote in news:1182266139.160045.296860
@n2g2000hse.googlegroups.com:
Has anyone here converted your boats engine over to burn bio-fuels?
The smell of french fry, or duncan doughnuts exhaust fumes sure would
be nicer than diesel.
Here in Houston we have a dealer than will deliver and it's cheaper
than Diesel fuel.
Joe
Not my boat, but my GM V-8 diesel stepvan (1989), two diesel Mercedes
cars ('73 220D and '83 300 TD turbodiesel 5-cyl). Will that do?
We don't buy fuel. Fuel is free for the asking at any Chinese
restaurant! 3 of us have Frybrids (www.frybrid.com) but, since
installing the Frybrid package in the V-8 diesel stepvan, I found it was
totally unnecessary overkill in South Carolina. You need it "up Nawth" in
the freezing cold, but not in the South. The Frybrid was about $1600 and
I paid my mechanic another thousand to install it all. Check the webpage
for its operation, which is very nice.
Both Mercedes cars are running on filtered used veggie oil, like the
truck, but after viewing a TV program of a Volvo diesel sedan running on
homebrew oil, I tried it and it works great with no outlay, other than
buying some mineral spirits cheap from the paint supply wholesaler. In
England, they use mineral spirits because it has no VAT tax ripoff on it.
I was using 20% gasoline and 80% veggie oil, but have cut the Arabs and
Bushes out of my wallet switching to 1 quart of mineral spirits to 20
gallons of veggie oil.
Our veggie oil facility is in George's warehouse. He's in the trucking
business with a Frybrid 300SD long wheelbase Mercedes sedan. Mike is a
car mechanic and owns a Frybrid VW diesel. The three of us call our
endeavour The French Fried Oil Company, a tongue-in-cheek conglomerate.
With my veggie powered truck, I'm in pickup and transportation, George
provides the warehouse space, which gets larger as time goes on, and Mike
provides pipette and filter services to polish the finished product to
our 55 gallon drums with electric pumps in them. Everyone has keys to
the warehouse for 24/7 fuel oil service.
Our method is really simple. Veggie oil comes to the restaurants in 5
gallon "boxes", pasteboard boxes with thin plastic jugs in them. We
provide the restaurants with a large steel filter funnel that has a fine
screen in it to filter out most of the crap as they pour the used oil
back into the containers it came in after it cools. Taking these
containers also reduces the restaurants' disposal costs along with
eliminating their oil disposal service costs. They love us...even feed
me when I pickup a couple of hundred gallons..(c; We save them quite a
bit of money!
I transport the boxes to the warehouse and mark the date on each box.
Boxes must sit, totally unmoved, for 1 month. Typically, they sit 3 to 5
months, now as our consumption cannot match our supply. In a month, or
more, all the remaining solids settle to a very thin layer in the bottom
of the boxes. Mike's suction pipette reaches down to within 3" of the
bottom of each box. An electric oil gear pump pulls a vacuum on two
large commercial truck fuel filter/water separators who draw the oil out
of the boxes, filter it to .5 microns, slowly, and pump the clean oil
into a 55 gallon finished product drum. We have 6 drums he keeps
filling. We pump that straight into the oil tanks on their cars and my
truck. Another drum is marked LARRY and this drum contains the mineral
spirits - veggie oil homebrew biodiesel I pour directly into the tanks on
the Mercedes cars I own, totally unmodified. The mineral spirits thin
the heavier oil so the stock injection system works as good as my
gas/veggie mix I used last winter. I figure it costs about 12 US cents
per US gallon....lots cheaper than a Frybrid.
I recently bought a Chinese 6KVA, single cylinder, 3600 RPM diesel genset
with battery starting in a nice quieting cabinet from Pep Boys for $1599.
The odd-sounding Chinese company I don't have the name of at the moment
is an ISO 9003 certified company and it shows in the genset's quality and
workmanship. It had an initial tank of diesel fuel when I insisted on
hearing it before buying it. I had to prime it myself because the whole
shop full of car mechanics didn't have a clue as to what I was talking
about and I didn't want them to keep cranking and ruin my new
battery/starter trying to initially start it. If you want it done right,
you have to do it yourself! As the tank emptied, I filled it with my
mineral spirits/veggie homebrew and it cranked right up. I now have 6KW
of emergency power that will only cost me some mineral spirits and lube
oil (it holds 2 quarts) that will run as long as I like. My neighbor
bought a longer drop cord so he doesn't have to sit in the dark...(c;
In a boat, the only drawback would be hauling it all the way to the boat
in the drum....not fun. I suppose you COULD reuse the 5 gallon boxes in
a dock cart just fine. We're throwing away an awful lot of boxes every
month.
My new Honda 250cc scooter is gas......dammit....(c;
Larry
Perhaps someone with *marine* veggie oil or biodiesel experience can
allay my fears of starting the world's largest bacterial colony in my
fuel tanks if I fill up with one of these alternatives. For goodness
sakes, the bugs eat the *diesel* if only there is a little water present!
Now, I know in a land vehicle, bacterial growth is likely not to be a
problem because the tanks are so much smaller, and the thruput is a lot
higher. But on my sailboat, if I fill up (350 gallons), that will last
me 2 years or more of cruising and living on the boat. That is a long
time for the bugs to get going...
bob
s/v Eolian
Seattle