Nearly there

I have had a few weeks off in August for holidays etc so progress should have been rather slow. Fortunately, the kids also took a week out to visit their Grandmother.... So progress has sped up!

The two tanks are now connected and the filters are in place too (with their own pump).

The main tank has its heating element fitted just above the start of the cone. Its a simple immersion heater with built in thermostat. The two tanks both have a site tube running down th eside to see how full they are. The same hose type is also used to link the tanks to allow them to breath. Lastly, the breather pipe vents to the outside to prevent fumes building up inside the building.

The second tank is for settling the processed mixture. The mixture of Bio and Glycerin and left over Methoxide will be pumped over and left to settle. Once the glycerin has been drained off, the remaining Bio (with some leftover Glycerin and reactants) is then pumped through the filters. They filter at 20, 10 and 5 microns. The last filter is a 1 Micron absolute filter.

In the foreground yo can see the input filter (Blue and white). This is where the first pump sucks in raw oil. If the oil has been used, it will need filtering, hence the 250 micron filter.

I've mounted the controls for the pumps and heater in this panel here: there's one switch each for the two pumps and the heater. The display on the right is a PID. It monitors a temperature and can turn another device on or off depending on the temperature I set.

PPC - Pollution Prevention Control (Permit)

Forgive me Bloggers, its been a few weeks since my last blog...


Part of the plan to make bioDiesel includes a "is this a business?" aspect. Living in the UK (and therefore the EU) there is a rather a lot of red tape to negotiate, particularly if there's chemical, big business and cars involved!

If we make more than 5 tonnes or about 5000 litres of BD per year, or sell any of it to the public, then I am deemed to be "Commercial" and so need regulating.

I have looked around the web and chat forums for info on the whole regulation thing and read some scare stories about consultants costing 10s of thousands needed to obtain said permits and also of the hoops to jump through if you DIY. By this time I'm getting a bit concerned so I called the Environment agency (who issue the permits) ad spoke to a very helpful chap in the local office. The long and short of it is that there are 2 types of permit, roughly based on if you dispose of by products by land fill/incineration or by other (environmentally friendly) means. His experience suggests most BD producers should be in the second group of "Low impact" permits.

Further, and this is the best bit, he advised they EA expects to offer around 15 hours of his time (he's the one who issues the permit) to assist with the forms/application process etc, free of charge. The only likely consultant costs would be the site survey (a benchmark of current site pollution/status etc).

All you have to do is ask!

A local methanol supplier

I have been posting links to the map of UK bioDiesel suppliers on various bioDiesel forums over the past week and I guess some of those readers have followed the link to this blog too. One of them sent me an email with some info regarding a local (High Wycombe, about 30 mins away) supplier of Methanol. This is good news as most suppliers won't ship the stuff and the only ones I have found so far are in the Manchester area (a couple of hundred miles away!)

Diesel Vs. Hybrid...

When a dirty Diesel is better for the environment than an Eco friendly hybrid.

I stumbled onto the following page in my travels. Part way down the page is a table comparing the CO2 emissions of a VW Jetta and a Toyota Prius. The Jetta's CO2 pound/mile is significantly lower when run on either B80 or B100 (B80=80% BioDiesel, 20% petroDiesel, B100 = 100% BioDiesel). In fact B100 returns CO2 emissions that are over 50% LOWER than the Prius.