I tried something new today and it seems to work great. I took BD that I had washed and dried and ran it through a 5 m carbon or charcoal filter. this proved to be a great clarifing method. the already tranparent dry fuel that was yellow is now crystal clear with hardly any color. will clarifing the BD through a charcoal filter harm or degrade the fuel in any way, I havn't run any of it yet. I was just trying something new.

 

Sounds like you made bio-kerosene!

 

does it burn different ??

 

what kind of filter? where did you get it from? sounds like something to try.


my blend has been looking green. yellow bio and blueish #2, .

 

It won't harm it but is of dubious value.

 

Wonder what this would do to red-dyed #2...?

 

worth a try. Clorox does better.

 

Clorox?!? How would you get that out of the fuel? That would be worse than the red dye...

I'm interested in taking the red out of the fuel - not removing the fuel from my clothes....

 

You guys.....

Buncha damned tinkerers......

(if it ain't broke----fix the damned thing anyway!)

 

Hmmm, sound like it would be very difficult to accomplish.

Not gospel, but from Wikipedia (with links to the dyes used):

"In United States of America, the Environmental Protection Agency mandates use of a red dye to identify high-sulfur fuels for off-road use. Solvent Red 26 is used in the United States as a standard, though it is often replaced with Solvent Red 164, similar to Solvent Red 26 but with longer alkyl chains. The Internal Revenue Service mandates use of the same red dyes, in fivefold concentration, for tax-exempt diesel fuels; their argument for the higher dye content is to allow detection even when diluted with "legal" fuel. Detection of red-dyed fuel in the fuel system of an on-road vehicle will incur substantial penalties.

 

Yeah, thanks for the quote TXHill - 'course I've read that, and we all know taking the red dye out is intentionally difficult. And that running the red-dyed stuff on the road carries "substantial penalties". It was mostly a question out of curiousity. None of us would ever run off-road fuel, or try to take the dye out of it to make it harder to detect if we did

 

Yeah, I posted the quote more for the links to the dyes themselves. After reading the chemical composition, it seems it would take a chemical reaction to "un-dye" the fuel, rather than filtering, since the dye is chemically bonded to the fuel.

 

it doesn't take very much farm diesel to turn a tank of commercial diesel red.

 

Yeah, red dye in any composition is a @#$#.

We bought a bunch of plastic drums (15gal, 30gal and 55gal) for our finished product. They came from restaurant distributors and they previously held the syrups for soft drinks like Dr. Pepper and Big Red. For those of you not from down south, Big Red is a red, strawberry-ish soft drink.

There was about a eighth of an inch of syrup left in the bottom of the 30 gallon Big Red drum, I filled the entire drum up with water to dilute it and wash it out, figuring that 30 gallons of water would make it almost unoticeable when I emptied it out. To set the scene for you, I did this in my driveway, on our cul-de-sac. My neighbor and I dumped the drum over and it looked like something out of a horror movie..."The River Ran Blood" or something like that. Plus as the red river ran down my driveway and around our cul-de-sac to the nearest storm drain, the entire cul-de-sac smelled like Big Red. Took a couple more fillings and rinsings to get it all out, and another hour of hosing down to wash it all away.

 

Most Chlorine compounds (Clorox) will react with the dye's and eliminate the color. It just has to be thoroughly mixed, then settled to remove the water. You can also remove the dye by bubbling Chlorine gas through the fuel. I've done both in my lab..................