Old bong water?
I was directed to this thread last night. I'm just in the dreaming stage of getting into diesel, the possibilities are almost endless. I have tons of questions, mostly incredibly newbie style questions.
One for now would be...how does bio or wvo compare to pump fuel as far as cetane goes...can the same compression rations be run or...higher or lower?
The methanol used in the conversion process, can it be reclaimed in any useful form? It seems a shame to throw all that away when it could potentially be re-used in a water/methanol injection system.
At the end of the process, what becomes of the lye? Is it converted to some inert compound. is it still toxic/caustic if so, how is it disposed of?
What kind of numbers are we talking about here...out of, say 100 gallons of waste oil...how much waste lye, methanol, glycerin is there to store or dispose of?
Some of those links have all the answers to those questions.
1) I believe the reason bio or wvo works is because it has a very similar compression ratio to diesel. I could be way off, but I believe it is somewhere around 18:1?
2) Some of the methanol can be reused. In one of the links, there are instructions available for purchase to build your own biodiesel mixer out of an old water heater. Those instructions include a setup for methanol reclamation.
3) Through the conversion process, there is no left over lye, to my understanding. The only waste substance is the glycerin. You can use it as fertilizer, soap, and you can simply throw it away
![Thumbs Up :thumbs:](https://board.marlincrawler.com/Smileys/marlin/thumbs.gif)
just set it out, let it dry, and toss it. Not always the best option, but you can do it (from my understanding) You can also check with landscape companies, I've heard of many of them being more than happy to take your glycerin (even buy it from you) and use it.
4) I don't know
![Gap :gap:](https://board.marlincrawler.com/Smileys/marlin/gap.gif)