Today I finally drove on my first batch of biodiesel made from wok juice. It was a big thrill for me, but probably not for anyone else. The final yield from our first batch was only two gallons. I think we can probably get another gallon or two out of the glop which is left over, but at least for today I'm happy that we got anything, and that it runs just fine in my old VW pickup. My daily commute is 42 miles, and my VW gets about 35 MPG on that drive (mostly freeway at 55 MPH), so I have a little less than two days' commute for the original effort.

I only have a few shots of what we did this first time since we were so nervous about making it. But, we did have fun. This first shot shows Sheik Yerbouti and Sheik En-Bay'kh proudly surveying the site of their new desert refinery (click on the photos to enlarge any of them).

(Also see part 1 and part 2.)
Nothing is ever as easy as it sounds at first. We had worked hard for two days making our first batch of biodiesel, and it turned into emulsified glop during the washing stage. So the first thing I would like to say is that if you want to do this, maybe you should get a friend or two involved so you don't get too bummed about making mistakes. When you read the instructions on the Internet, it sounds like it's as easy as making a quick batch of macaroni and cheese, but it's not quite that easy.

To be philosophical about it though, it's a good exercise in seeing how difficult it is to be self-sufficient in our highly compartmentalized and specialized world. I really want to be able to do this so I can make my own fuel if I am forced to. So, the pain of spending the better part of two days making four gallons of glop is worth it. I know we will succeed, and there is a certain amount of pain involved in getting there.

Using all the stuff I had purchased or scavenged, we laid it all out on the patio. This picture shows our chemist, Todj M'Hal, measuring the temperature of the waste vegetable oil as it heats up in the 99 cent frying pan. We put a rag on the bottom of the pan, put the five gallon container (filled to 16 liters with WVO) in on top of it, and then filled the remaining space in the pan up with water. I set the temperature control to 200 degrees F. Then we mixed 112 grams of Red Devil lye up with four liters of methanol. This is an exothermic reaction, and the poly container we used sprung holes after a few minutes. So we had an emergency transfer to a larger poly container. In the future I will be using a big glass jar for this step. There was some lye left in the bottom of the original container, so I just estimated how much had been lost and added this amount to the new container. This is probably the cause of the amount of glop we have - too much lye. Next time I will be doing a titration and the lye will be measured more carefully. My cheap analog pH meter doesn't seem to work on the methanol-lye mix, nor on the oil: it always measures about 7.0.

Once the WVO got up to 140 degrees, we added the methanol-lye mixture. I shook the container for about a minute, which was a bit scary after the other mixing experience. But the container held and it was obviously doing something as it changed color immediately.

We put this container aside to settle, and I put together the PVC parts for the bubble washer. I came back the next day, and we siphoned off the biodiesel from the glycerine in the bottom directly into the 20 gallon bubble wash tank. We made a couple of different bubblers with tygon tubing, but the result was an emulsion. We managed to do two washes, then let the whole mess settle for a week.

When I came back, the emulsion had disappeared. The wash water was cloudy. I'm sure a lot of the product was wasted as soap because of too much lye. Anyway, I opened the Biodiesel valve and got as much of it as I dared (the stuff which looked like cloudy honey) into a clean jug. I poured a sample of this into an old jam jar, poured in some water, and shook it up. After two hours, it had totally separated and the water was clear. So I poured the big jug through a couple of coffee filters into a gas can. I felt the coffee filters, and I could detect a little residue of some sort, but there was nothing visible. The filtering is definitely a bottleneck in the process right now; it took about 40 minute to filter the two gallons, and it was a pain to keep refilling the coffee filter.

But, I just wanted to get this post up so you could see that we're on our way. My time is really limited right now because I'm going to school for the next three weeks, and it's twelve hours per day plus 2-3 hours of homework. I will post pictures of the setup, how to make the bubble wash unit, and what we end up with for filtering. I'm also going to get some litmus paper so we can measure the pH better. Questions and comments are welcome, I'll post answers either in the sequel or when I can.