I haven't had any ethanol-related fuel problems *yet* on either outboard
boat, but I keep running into tales of boaters who have. I'm not doing
anything special to avoid ethanol problems, aside from pouring some
mystery stuff into the tank when I buy gas, but I know lots of guys who
don't do that, either, and aren't having problems.

So...have you had any ethanol-related problems? If so, what? How did you
resolve them?

"HK" wrote in message
news
I haven't had any ethanol-related fuel problems *yet* on either outboard
boat, but I keep running into tales of boaters who have. I'm not doing
anything special to avoid ethanol problems, aside from pouring some mystery
stuff into the tank when I buy gas, but I know lots of guys who don't do
that, either, and aren't having problems.

So...have you had any ethanol-related problems? If so, what? How did you
resolve them?

No problems at all.

I use diesel.

Eisboch

"Eisboch" wrote in
:

No problems at all.

I use diesel.

Eisboch



Me either. Running diesels on free french fry oil mixed with a little
mineral spirits. About 15c/gallon....(c;

Larry
--
I found what I wanted for Christmas at Best Buy,
but she wouldn't stop screaming obscenities while
we were scanning her and forcing her into the bag!

How was I s'posed ta know associate girls weren't
on sale?

"Larry" wrote in message
...
"Eisboch" wrote in
:

No problems at all.

I use diesel.

Eisboch



Me either. Running diesels on free french fry oil mixed with a little
mineral spirits. About 15c/gallon....(c;

Larry

I might be inclined to try that in a land based motor vehicle like your old
Mercedes. I am not sure I am ready to fill up with 550 gallons of french
fry oil in the boat and get underway.

Eisboch

"Eisboch" wrote in
:

I might be inclined to try that in a land based motor vehicle like
your old Mercedes. I am not sure I am ready to fill up with 550
gallons of french fry oil in the boat and get underway.



It's not really practical in a boat....and the marina knows it. You can't
get it down the dock.....

Larry
--
I found what I wanted for Christmas at Best Buy,
but she wouldn't stop screaming obscenities while
we were scanning her and forcing her into the bag!

How was I s'posed ta know associate girls weren't
on sale?

Larry wrote:
"Eisboch" wrote in
:

No problems at all.

I use diesel.

Eisboch



Me either. Running diesels on free french fry oil mixed with a little
mineral spirits. About 15c/gallon....(c;

Larry


A. What do you filter it with, cheesecloth? By hand?

B. Does everything you drive smell like a fast-food restaurant?

C. Which fast-food chain supplies the highest-class used oil?

HK wrote in news:5t9q7pF1cqjq7U1
@mid.individual.net:

A. What do you filter it with, cheesecloth? By hand?

There are 3 of us in the "French Fried Oil Company". One of us has a
large warehouse to store it, one is a mechanic who built the final filter
system and does all the filtering. My part with the stepvan, is pickup
and delivery...for free, it runs on Vegoil, too.

We have the restaurant pour it through a large filter funnel back into
the same containers it came in. That's good for both of us. We don't
have to buy containers and they don't have to pay for their disposal,
reducing their disposal fee costs. We paid for the nice filter funnels
which filter out the big stuff with a fine screen. As they pour it back
in quite warm, its viscosity is quite low...but not hot enough to melt
the plastic liner in the boxes. They soon learn what's "too hot" for the
poly containers...(c;

Each container is dated with a magic marker when it arrives in the
warehouse, where it is stored UNTOUCHED for at least 30 day, most over 60
now that we have so much surplus. The longer the better as more solids
settle out of it. The stories of water in the oil are nonsense. The oil
was 450F when the food was dumped into it. That boils off the water, all
that steam that pours out during the cooking. No water can stand 450F
for long! We've never found any water in the little sediment the filter
funnel misses.

After the settling period, the oldest dated boxes are dipped, UNMOVED, in
place with a pipette of copper we built on the suction hose of the filter
system. The oil pump is a positive displacement, self-priming gear pump
we bought from Harbor Freight made in China of cast iron. It's driven by
an old washing machine motor I wired up to run at the appropriate speed
by adding and removing poles. The SLOW suction sucks up the oil from
about 3" off the bottom of the container, hopefully not disturbing the
bottom sediment and clogging our two large truck diesel filters 2um and
..5um in series. Each filter has a suction guage on them and the housing
came free to us from a wrecked tractor trailer. We've yet to need a new
filter because of the settling regime. Once the pipette sucks air, it's
removed and the bottom sediment and oil is dumped into yet another
container. When that container is full, it is left to settle a couple of
months and more oil is extracted reducing our disposal problem even more.
(We burn the sediment in a barrel out behind the warehouse, legally, as
it's in the county. The oil makes the containers burn very hotly we
dispose of, too. Our only output is some ash to the dumpster.

The oil has passed through the two big truck fuel filters/water
separators, the gear pump and is put in clean 55 gallon plastic barrels,
ready for vehicles. Two of the 8 barrels are marked LARRY'S SPECIAL
BLEND and those are the ones I add mineral spirits to to make thinner oil
to run in my unmodified Mercedes cars and Chinese diesel genset. All the
other boys have Frybrids in their cars (Mercedes and Volkswagen Rabbit
Diesels). (www.frybrid.com). Frybrid, I found, is unnecessary in my
climate in the South, especially as it rarely gets cold any more that
would thicken the mineral spirit-thinned oil beyond where I could crank
it at 22:1 in the Benz cars that have glowplugs.

There's about 1800 gallons in the warehouse, today. Where would you like
to go? How much mileage do you get? Who cares with 1800 gallons piled
up! Drive it like you STOLE IT!


B. Does everything you drive smell like a fast-food restaurant?

No, not at all. Sometimes I smell the faint odor of fresh fish, oddly
enough, standing right over the exhaust, as lots of this oil is used for
seafood cooking. But, what IS lacking over diesel is that burning
sulphur smell of normal diesel oil. Vegoil isn't low sulphur...it's NO
SULPHUR. The smell out the back is MUCH more pleasant and green than
dinodiesel. There's also NO BLACK SMOKE no matter how hard you drive it.

You don't get as much power from veg as dino oil. Vegoil is thicker,
even with mineral spirits, and burns slower, so instead of that hard
hammering sounds of dinodiesel, the engine knock is much reduced. It
doesn't, however, burn so slow it's still burning when the exhaust valve
opens that I can tell, even over 4000 RPM pushed to the floor. There's
no popping or damage to the mufflers, so far.


C. Which fast-food chain supplies the highest-class used oil?


We don't use any fast food chain oil so I can't tell you. We use oil
from 4 Chinese Restaurants that are family owned, locally, more as a
present to another small businessman. Giving McDonald's a break on its
costs doesn't really appeal to me when I can give a small businessman
just like me a break in his costs. The Chinese guys are VERY cooperative
seeing as how we're saving them about $300/mo on oil and container
disposal, their estimate not mine. The oil is a mixture of mostly Canola
oil and peanut oil. We fooled around with different kinds of new oil to
see how well each ran. We bought it from the food wholesaler in 6 gallon
containers through one of the restaurants. I can't really see any
difference in how it runs on various vegoils. You'll see these super
chemists making some exotic blends with acids and alkalis over on YouTube
but I think that's just bull****. As long as the pump and injectors
doesn't wear of clog, it'll burn fine. So far, the only thing I've
noticed is my FAR less expensive credit card bills....(c; If it's
damaging the engines every X miles, I figure I have a few thousand saved
dollars to fix that in such a crapshoot. So far, the only thing noticed
is the borescope into the cylinder head hole the injectors came out of
shows the cylinders are CLEANER on vegoil as it seems to burn cleaner
with less deposits from dissolved sulphur, etc., in dino.

Diesels were initially designed for vegoil, not dino. They switched to
dino because it was cheap....which it no longer is.


Larry
--
I found what I wanted for Christmas at Best Buy,
but she wouldn't stop screaming obscenities while
we were scanning her and forcing her into the bag!

How was I s'posed ta know associate girls weren't
on sale?

Larry wrote:
HK wrote in news:5t9q7pF1cqjq7U1
@mid.individual.net:

A. What do you filter it with, cheesecloth? By hand?

There are 3 of us in the "French Fried Oil Company". One of us has a
large warehouse to store it, one is a mechanic who built the final filter
system and does all the filtering. My part with the stepvan, is pickup
and delivery...for free, it runs on Vegoil, too.

We have the restaurant pour it through a large filter funnel back into
the same containers it came in. That's good for both of us. We don't
have to buy containers and they don't have to pay for their disposal,
reducing their disposal fee costs. We paid for the nice filter funnels
which filter out the big stuff with a fine screen. As they pour it back
in quite warm, its viscosity is quite low...but not hot enough to melt
the plastic liner in the boxes. They soon learn what's "too hot" for the
poly containers...(c;

Each container is dated with a magic marker when it arrives in the
warehouse, where it is stored UNTOUCHED for at least 30 day, most over 60
now that we have so much surplus. The longer the better as more solids
settle out of it. The stories of water in the oil are nonsense. The oil
was 450F when the food was dumped into it. That boils off the water, all
that steam that pours out during the cooking. No water can stand 450F
for long! We've never found any water in the little sediment the filter
funnel misses.

After the settling period, the oldest dated boxes are dipped, UNMOVED, in
place with a pipette of copper we built on the suction hose of the filter
system. The oil pump is a positive displacement, self-priming gear pump
we bought from Harbor Freight made in China of cast iron. It's driven by
an old washing machine motor I wired up to run at the appropriate speed
by adding and removing poles. The SLOW suction sucks up the oil from
about 3" off the bottom of the container, hopefully not disturbing the
bottom sediment and clogging our two large truck diesel filters 2um and
.5um in series. Each filter has a suction guage on them and the housing
came free to us from a wrecked tractor trailer. We've yet to need a new
filter because of the settling regime. Once the pipette sucks air, it's
removed and the bottom sediment and oil is dumped into yet another
container. When that container is full, it is left to settle a couple of
months and more oil is extracted reducing our disposal problem even more.
(We burn the sediment in a barrel out behind the warehouse, legally, as
it's in the county. The oil makes the containers burn very hotly we
dispose of, too. Our only output is some ash to the dumpster.

The oil has passed through the two big truck fuel filters/water
separators, the gear pump and is put in clean 55 gallon plastic barrels,
ready for vehicles. Two of the 8 barrels are marked LARRY'S SPECIAL
BLEND and those are the ones I add mineral spirits to to make thinner oil
to run in my unmodified Mercedes cars and Chinese diesel genset. All the
other boys have Frybrids in their cars (Mercedes and Volkswagen Rabbit
Diesels). (www.frybrid.com). Frybrid, I found, is unnecessary in my
climate in the South, especially as it rarely gets cold any more that
would thicken the mineral spirit-thinned oil beyond where I could crank
it at 22:1 in the Benz cars that have glowplugs.

There's about 1800 gallons in the warehouse, today. Where would you like
to go? How much mileage do you get? Who cares with 1800 gallons piled
up! Drive it like you STOLE IT!

B. Does everything you drive smell like a fast-food restaurant?

No, not at all. Sometimes I smell the faint odor of fresh fish, oddly
enough, standing right over the exhaust, as lots of this oil is used for
seafood cooking. But, what IS lacking over diesel is that burning
sulphur smell of normal diesel oil. Vegoil isn't low sulphur...it's NO
SULPHUR. The smell out the back is MUCH more pleasant and green than
dinodiesel. There's also NO BLACK SMOKE no matter how hard you drive it.

You don't get as much power from veg as dino oil. Vegoil is thicker,
even with mineral spirits, and burns slower, so instead of that hard
hammering sounds of dinodiesel, the engine knock is much reduced. It
doesn't, however, burn so slow it's still burning when the exhaust valve
opens that I can tell, even over 4000 RPM pushed to the floor. There's
no popping or damage to the mufflers, so far.

C. Which fast-food chain supplies the highest-class used oil?


We don't use any fast food chain oil so I can't tell you. We use oil
from 4 Chinese Restaurants that are family owned, locally, more as a
present to another small businessman. Giving McDonald's a break on its
costs doesn't really appeal to me when I can give a small businessman
just like me a break in his costs. The Chinese guys are VERY cooperative
seeing as how we're saving them about $300/mo on oil and container
disposal, their estimate not mine. The oil is a mixture of mostly Canola
oil and peanut oil. We fooled around with different kinds of new oil to
see how well each ran. We bought it from the food wholesaler in 6 gallon
containers through one of the restaurants. I can't really see any
difference in how it runs on various vegoils. You'll see these super
chemists making some exotic blends with acids and alkalis over on YouTube
but I think that's just bull****. As long as the pump and injectors
doesn't wear of clog, it'll burn fine. So far, the only thing I've
noticed is my FAR less expensive credit card bills....(c; If it's
damaging the engines every X miles, I figure I have a few thousand saved
dollars to fix that in such a crapshoot. So far, the only thing noticed
is the borescope into the cylinder head hole the injectors came out of
shows the cylinders are CLEANER on vegoil as it seems to burn cleaner
with less deposits from dissolved sulphur, etc., in dino.

Diesels were initially designed for vegoil, not dino. They switched to
dino because it was cheap....which it no longer is.


Larry


Damned cool. I wonder if there is a way to make a small business out of
this, keeping it out of the hands of the damned corporate sharks.

On Sun, 23 Dec 2007 18:43:39 -0500, HK wrote:

I haven't had any ethanol-related fuel problems *yet* on either outboard
boat, but I keep running into tales of boaters who have. I'm not doing
anything special to avoid ethanol problems, aside from pouring some
mystery stuff into the tank when I buy gas, but I know lots of guys who
don't do that, either, and aren't having problems.

So...have you had any ethanol-related problems? If so, what? How did you
resolve them?

No problems so far.

The only problems I've seen, witnessed or been told about are usually
older boats with older tanks, in particular steel/fiberglass, fuel
line upgrades to resistant rubber, carbed engines or lack of
stabilizers or E-Zorb. A lot of that is related to crap in the tank.
Usually a good running with one or two filter changes does the trick.
One fellow at my boat/engine dealer went through six filters before he
got it all out.

I do know that there have been problems, supposedly, with phase
separation in the Upper Mid-West, but they have QC problems with their
ethanol levels - sometimes up to 30% ethanol depending on the fuel
load delivery and where it came from. BoatUS is reporting a whole,
forgive me, boat load of ethanol problems, but I'm not sure if this is
hearsay or accurate reporting - I know we're not seeing the same level
of problems that others are seeing. With respect to water absorption
and phase separation, it's not existent in this area.

Finally, I do know one guy at my old marina who was having trouble
with his two E-TECs. Concurrently, some Optimax owners were having
problems and those who were still operating carbed engines were
screaming bloody murder. Finally the head mechanic had a brain fart
and had the fuel tested - it was contaminated and the fuel tested out
at 40% ethanol. Apparently it was a screw up at the distribution
center. Drain the tank, clean it, seal it, new fuel and the problems
went away.

So that's it for what it's worth.

HK wrote:
I haven't had any ethanol-related fuel problems *yet* on either outboard
boat, but I keep running into tales of boaters who have. I'm not doing
anything special to avoid ethanol problems, aside from pouring some
mystery stuff into the tank when I buy gas, but I know lots of guys who
don't do that, either, and aren't having problems.

So...have you had any ethanol-related problems? If so, what? How did you
resolve them?

From BoatU.S.

Do You Have A Fiberglass Tank?

If your boat has a fiberglass tank built before 1991, don't use ethanol.
As reported in the January 2006 edition of BoatU.S. Seaworthy, these
older tanks have clogged fuel as a result of ethanol's effect on
fiberglass, resulting in sludge formed by a chemical reaction the the
material.

Dan