Heating my large shop with veggie oil!

For the last 18 months I've been heating my new shop with waste motor oil in a waste oil burner. Most of my "fuel" has come from area farms, but with the new farm programs, the Gov is requiring farms to recycle their WMO with an "approved" company. My WMO sources are slowly drying up, so I had to do SOMETHING...

My solution? Burn veggie oil! I've tried it before, but never had much luck.......

What I did was set up a little "test" project. It works GREAT!

I set up a 10 gallon insulated tank with a range top element under the tank. It has a thermostat that keeps the oil at 120 deg to avoid "gelling" of the WVO.

The system works better than I hoped. The burner runs much cleaner, and supplies the same amount of heat with less oil. With WMO I was using 5 gal/day. With the WVO I'm only using 4 gal/day.

I've included a couple of pics of my test set-up. Next on the list is to enclose the whole heated tank assembly in a galvanized enclosure.

Next spring after we don't need the heat anymore till next winter, we'll install a 150 gallon tank in my air compressor shed outside and run a heating coil from the waste oil burner to the new "main" tank. This will keep enough hot oil in it for more than a month at a time.

 

cool and warm don and get all bugs worked out. thats great.

 

Hey Don
Nice to see you are still at it. Hope you are well. We have been out of contact for some time. Anything new I should know about your BD processor? I haven't heard if you finished building your latest "new and improved" I'm still plugging along banging out the same product. I wanted to build a new processor but never found the time and this still works good.
Keep in touch
Tom

 

Tom! Great to hear from you! Haven't had much chance to type at ya since the bio forum has been so dead...

As you can see, I've got a full plate, nothing new there.....lol
I've had some encouraging results with my bio experiments, and I'm working on a chemical way to convert the glycerol by-product to Methanol.

Whenever ya want to "catch" me, check out our daily BS thread here: https://www.ford-trucks.com/forums/1...l#post12772037

Lot's of great people on there, and I'm on several hours/day.

 

DOH! I thought this was a different thread.......

Check out this thread Tom, if ya want to see what I've gotten myself into.........lol

https://www.ford-trucks.com/forums/1...ieve-this.html

 

WOW Don
I only have 10 rentals but thankfully I have never run into this. I always find an excuse to visit my tenants at least until I learn their living habits.
I did buy a condo where the lady had died and they didn't discover her body for a week. That was interesting.
Good luck with all of that. You are certainly a glutton for punishment.
I have been very busy so haven't kept in touch. Will try to do better in the future.
Tom

 

Evening Tom. This place is just one of the problems with the old management team. Harley and Melody and I have now taken over the management of the whole radar base, including the housing units. We will be making sweeping changes, and this won't happen again....

Keep in touch buddy!