Emerald Isle Forge
Home Page of Michael Roth
BioDiesel Page
Back in September or so of 2001 I was looking to
build a oil burning forge. In my research for that I came across biodiesel!
Ever since then I've gotten very excited about using used vegetable
oil as a fuel. It is clean burning, MUCH cleaner than dino diesel.
It does not contribute to global warming because there are no net CO2
emissions, everything you release is reabsorbed by oil producing plants for
the next batch of oil! Another very big plus is that used veggie oil
is FREE from local restaurents! A lot of them have to pay companies
to take their used oil away, some get rid of it for free, but even those
will often give it to you if you explain what you are doing with it.
I will post pictures of my progress in this adventure when I can. Currently
I'm in the process of building a 40-50 gallon biodiesel processor. It
is made from a 55 gallon drum with a cone/funnel welded onto the bottom.
It is going to be mixed with a propeller from a small boat atached
to a shaft & turned by a motor & belt. As soon as I can get
a compressor tank or something that can take a vacuum I'm going to make an
enclosed system so I can recover all the excess methanol. With the
open system, I'm going to have to make a separate vessel to recover the methanol
from just the glycerin, where most of it is anyhow.
There are links to a lot of good biodiesel information pages on my links
page, click on the links link on the bottom of this page.
