How to reuse waste cooking oil
With the price of diesel fuel increasing, reusing waste cooking oil is an increasingly attractive alternative fuel for powering cars and light trucks. The used oil can sometimes be acquired free of charge or at a nominal cost. Compared with petroleum-based diesel fuel and gasoline, cooking oil burns cleaner, with fewer toxic exhaust emissions. With some modifications, any newer diesel engine can run on discarded waste cooking oil. Anyone with mechanical skills can convert their car to run on the oils.
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Things You'll Need
- Cooking oil containers
- Paper filters
- Cooking oil conversion kit
- Fuel tank
- Fuel lines
- Fuel filter
- Fuel heating system
- Auxiliary pump
- Bio-diesel making instructions
- Lye
- Methanol
Instructions
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Locate sources for getting used animal fat-based or vegetable oil for free. Look for canola, also called rapeseed, peanut oil, corn or soy oil. Ask around at your local fast food restaurants to see if they will give away their waste cooking oil. Check schools or any high-volume eating establishment serving deep fried food. Find out the schedules for changing the oil and arrive on that day with enough containers to haul away the oil.
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Let the oil sit for a few days or up to a week to allow the sediments and food particles to sink to the bottom. Pour off the top oil and store it in a clean container. Use a coffee filter or similar paper filter to strain the sediments. Filter the clean oil if it's cloudy or still has small suspended sediment particles.
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Modify your diesel-powered vehicle to run on waste cooking oil. Buy a kit, or if you're a good mechanic, build the conversion from scratch. Install a separate fuel tank for the oil. Bolt it into the car's trunk or the bed of a small truck. Heat the tank with diverted engine coolant running through a copper coil to prevent coagulated oil. Run the non-rubber fuel lines from the second tank inside the heater hose, bringing in the hot coolant. Put in an auxiliary pump to circulate the coolant.
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Put in a separate fuel filter for the oil. Heat the filter with a copper coil circulating hot engine coolant. Install an electronic fuel-selector switch, so that you can start and run the vehicle on regular diesel until the cooking oil warms up enough to flow through the injector pump and fuel injectors. Switch back and run the vehicle on regular diesel to clear the fuel lines and injectors of the oil before shutting off the engine.
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Make your own bio-diesel from waste oils if you have the chemistry skills and don't want to modify your vehicle. Research the processes thoroughly and be prepared to handle dangerous chemicals if you choose this route. Get an exact recipe and formula. Follow them closely. Chemically alter cooking waste cooking oils with lye and methanol to convert it to bio-diesel. Transesterify, or remove the fatty acids from animal-based oil to make it into bio-diesel.
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Tips & Warnings
Use waste cooking oil as fuel only when the temperature is above 25 degrees Fahrenheit.
Don't run waste cooking oil in older engines with rubber hoses, O-rings or gaskets.
References
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