Just wondering what opinions are. One of our sources of oil was heavily contaminated with water, setting back our first production run until next week. There are bags on ebay that you supposedly drop in the settelling (sp) tank to absorb H2O before the oil goes into the processor. Anyone use these? thanks

 

I heat the oil to evaporate the water, I get that a lot. Let it sit for a few days in plastic jugs and you can see the water settle.

 

i agree. that is the only real way to do it.

 

Heat and settle is the way to go. Filtering oil before making biodiesel is a waste of time and money.

 

Over on Info-Pop, Quick and Dri has been getting excellent reviews. I have no experience with it, but those who have tried it have seen noticable improvement in their fuel.

I don't have the info-pop link handy, but here's the link to the product: COORGA INTERNATIONAL TRADING LTD. .::. Welcome to our website!

 

i just boght one of the bags that is 20" round and sits on the bottom of the drum. Just put it in yesterday. Hopping it cuts down on my water block filter usage. Ill let you know how it works.

 

Just heat the oil, it'll evaporate and then you don't have to worry about it.

 

I have had great success pre-treating my oil with the glycerin from the previous batch at about 20% of my wvo. It really cleans the oil, lowers the titration, and removes the water. I let my wvo settle, pull it off the top, heat to ~120F, add 20% glycerin, mix a couple of hours, drain the glycerin and it makes great fuel with very little if any soap.

 

How do you mix it (pump or paddle) and how long do you let it settle before draining off the glycerin.
Does the glycerin your adding still have methanol in it or has it been recovered before mixing with the WVO.

 

I mix it 2-3 hours using a Harbor Freight 1" pump. I usually let it settle over night, or until I am ready to run it. But I would have no qualms about draining it after 3-4 hours if I was in a hurry. I don't have the time or set up to recover the methanol, so the cool thing abour this process is that it does use the methanol that was in the glycerin. It also recovers the biodiesel that drains into the glycerin when you drain the normal reaction. This was posted on Biodiesel Infopop by Girl Mark:

I did actually run Karl Fischer coulometer (looks for both free and dissolved water) tests on what this technique does to water.

I got unheard-of low water content in the resulting oil (70 ppm versus the 2000 we get here from heated settling or the 500 that the European pure plantoil SVO spec supposedly calls for)- this technique gets a LOT of water out of the oil.

 

20% of the recovered glycerine still containing methanol right? will give it a try, some of the oil we got from Sturgis titrated rather high.