BIODIESEL, Try it youll like it.

yeh but as your articles show, the heating oil is a mixture with a significant amount of heting oil or kero.
Diesels property is that , as its compressed it self ignites. A home heating oil is aspirated into an open chamber and burned. Even in a normal fuel oil system, carbon and crud builds up so that , if the burner isnt serviced regularly it could become a fire hazard.(enough oil builds up in the chamber that doesnt readily fire and one time a load ignites and the whole house rocks as the stuff ignites in the chamber and the chimney. Even the waste oil burners (I found out yesterday) take a certain amount of gasoline or ether additive to assure ignition.
Does the heavy mix of kero provide the volatility for the mix that contains from 5 to 50% biodiesel.

Im not certain about the properties, maybe Ill look it up further and see whether theres some specs .

If you find anything Farmerman, I'd be interested. I'm not the chemist the family and my husband seemed to be scratching his head about the same thing you are mentioning. We were hoping to find people in our area actually doing the mix so we could see their heating system and discuss problems.

Maybe you found those specs already, but just in case you didn't, Wikipedia's biodiesel article has pointers to their titles. With a bit of luck, you might find them with a web search.

well, good article Thomas. I was curious about the wste cooking oil production in US . Found it to be about 300 million gal/yr, Thats about a gallon for every man woman and child.

I was also amazed at the amount of fatty acids from algae. Looks like the only problems that could occur (according to a link) in home heating use is the initial dissolution of the crud left from the petrofuels.

I'm not sure about America, but in Germany the latest wave in "alternative" fuels for home-heating is wood pellets made of sawdust. I would imagine that drying algae and pressing them into similar pellets might be even easier than processing them chemically. This field sounds fun to work in.

Pellet heaters have a fair market in the US. Here in the Northwoods, a type which burns dried shelled feed corn is pretty common - lots of 'em are used for heating agricultural outbuildings, and lots more are primary or secondary heat sources for dwelling units. Quoted operating cost for a unit capable of up to 40,000 BTU/hr is around a dollar a day.

Heres' A link to one vendor's product - no endorsement implied, just provided as example.


BTW, here at Castle Timber, we have hot water heat; the primary heating plant is a propane-fired furnace down in the basement, and a secondary plant is an outdoor woodburner. The woodburner really impacts the cost of a heating season (which hereabouts is roughly October thru May ).

the Amish use a lot of those outdoor wood furnaces they seem to generate a well worn path through the snow as winter wears along.
Yeh,we too have seen pellet stoves displace wood burning stoves. I bought a huge Jotul stove for my studio at an antique auction. This baby weighed in like a tank and it cost me 15 bucks. Ill bet new it cost about 500$.
The wood pellet industry is making pellets from sawdust. I would imagine that a wood chipper's waste could be pelletized too(maybe youd first have to set your chipper to frappe). The wood pellet stoves have little fans that blow the hot air around and most have damper controls and thermostats. There were some higher tech woodburning stoves that did the same but they had a real "modern" look. I like the old Franklin stove or Atlanta Stovepipe styles.
The secret with woodtove heating or fireplace heating is to have the air in the rooms plenty humid.
This is turning into an alternative energy general thread thats cool.
Has anybody done the numbers for photovoltaic cells to power a house?

another piece of alternative energy trivia has been the geothermal heat. The latest wrinkle is using "closed loop" geothermal wells filled with ethylene glycol. These are installed in 12 inch boreholes and based upon the square footage of the house (it really should be cubic foots but the builders dont tell the geothermal mfrs that they build McMansions with very high ceileings) the number of wells and the heat exchange characteristic can be calculated and specked. Ive been in a number of houses with geothermal hot air and Ive never really been comfortably warm. Theres always a chill in the air. I never asked or got involved enough to see whether it was the way the heating was deliveredor whether it was a design glitch.

Don't you just turn the key and the thing goes brmmmm-brmmmm and you just drive off.I can't see what all this fancy stuff is all about.

Are you saving up?

no, a diesel goes brmmmm clackety clack brrmmmmm.

What the hell am I doin making choo choo noises with
Benny Hill here?

For what it is worth the emergency diesels and numerous diesel powered flight deck tow tractors & power units on azny Navy aircraft carrier all ran quite nicely on JP-5 which is mostly kerosene.

we have a marine diesel in our boat and itll supposedly burn kero too but it needs that oil for the turbo and intercooler (Ive been told, I never actually tried it , Im chicken) However, I would burn biodiesel in it.
I thought the catapults on a carrier were steam?

They are. I was referring to the tow tractors for the aircraft, the portable electrical power units & air compressors - all deisel. (No volitles with flashpoints below 180 deg F are allowed on Navy ships) Carriers also have four emergency deisel generators for backup electrical power - 4MWE each. They also carry 8 -10 deisel powered boata (50' to 80') for transporting the crew ashore. They use Cummings marine deisels.

It is possible that these engines have lube systems that add oil to the fuel - don't know for sure., but I doubt it. (My understanding is that JP-5 was OK in all military deisel engines.) JP-5 is pretty slippery stuff - fuel spills, even small ones can create dangerous slippery spots for taxiing aircraft on a rolling flight deck.

Your project sounds pretty interesting. Hope it works. Ungumming the fuel injectors on a deisel could be expensive: might be smart to experiment with just one truck for a while. Leave the drill rig until you have perfected the recipe.

In the army, we had a viscous, pinkish colored fuel we referred to as "mo-gas" which we put in jeeps and trucks, portable generators, the tent stoves--even our zippos (worked fine in the lighters, but smoked like Hell)--i wonder how that was related to JP-5.

fm wrote-



Lightening up a little I guess.Life's just a cookie.

from my vast resources on Groundwater spills , It says that JP-5 is over 60% by weight paraffin and cycloparaffins. Thatl do for the "slick factor"

georgeob
I would love to have a baxkuo 4MW generator to handle the power needs of the Farmerpeeple up and down the long "cartway"

And now on a lighter note--Clyde Bauman is from the Canajun great plains, and lives in the Mennonite region there. He is known for his "novelty songs," of which the following is one the best. It is sung to the tune of Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire.

We Couldn't Start the Tractor



Lyrics copyright 1999 by Clyde Bauman

Setants -- thanks for the laugh ! Where do you get this stuff??



You know too damn much chemistry. I was always very comfortable with mathematics, mechanics, and thermodynamics, but had to struggle just to cope with chemistry. I had to work hard to just briefly grasp patterns that others seemed to see almost intuitively. Good luck with your experiment.

The 4MWE deisels were formidable machines: the real trick was getting the auto start system (on electrical failure) to work reliably. Large circuit breakers and diesel air start systems are machines from hell.

Agreed - but they're minor demons compared to cartridge-start powerplants