Blue Grass Fuel System

[fx4wannabe]

http://bluegrassfuel.net/page1.php

Anyone have any experience with them? Saw them in Diesel Power and been reading there website. If it really takes all the acids out of the oil like it says then I would say its one up on anything that could be put together at home. What do ya'll think?

 

[Brutis]

I thought it looked pretty cool too, but when I posted about it back in January I got a mostly negative response .

 

[Brutis]

I did ask a Chemistry professor at the college I went to what he thought about those "polymer" absorbers. He said he knew very little about making diesel fuel (which really wasn't my question), but that there was no reason the "polymers" shouldn't work the way its advertised. I got interested after seeing the write up in a past issue of Diesel Tech, and when I saw it in Diesel Power I thought maybe someone else would get interested.

 

[MIDNIGHT RIDER]

http://bluegrassfuel.net/page1.php

Anyone have any experience with them? Saw them in Diesel Power and been reading there website. If it really takes all the acids out of the oil like it says then I would say its one up on anything that could be put together at home. What do ya'll think?

Interesting; that is just 35-miles from the house and I have never heard of them until now.

Edmonton is a little one-light town with nothing but an ancient stock-yard and the Belair; and, if you passed 1st grade geography, anyone knows they definitely aren't in the "bluegrass".

 

[fx4wannabe]

I have been tossing around the idea of running WMO for a while because I have access to an unlimited supply. I have read countless threads and posts on it and was still on the fence. Being that this system removes pretty much everything it sounds pretty safe and I probably wouldn't run over a 50/50 mix anyway. Right now the truck stays in the garage most of the week cause I can't afford a $200 a week fuel bill. They say the small system pays for itself in 3 1/2 months and I did the math on my truck and that's about right but before I dropped $900 I wanted to see if anyone had used it cause I know I can make my own setup for a lot less minus the acid polymer stuff.

 

[WrickM]

looks like just another greasecar, frybrid, goldenfuel, etc. fuel system to me, and not quite as nice to be honest.

 

[Diesel JD]

What do they claim that the end product is? If they can truly treat it to remove all the acids, water and contaminants and of course you effectively filter it then you;re right back to essentially ****** stock motor oil or hydraulic fluid or whatever the main feedstock is. It probably still has all the positives and negatives of WMO such as coking of the injectors and more at low egts. That having been said I'm sure a useable fuel product comes out. I personally would guess, although I have no evidence other than just simple thought experiment, that if you are a person who has a long commute or work your engine hard and you can get clean, non acidic(or super basic) waste oils and get all the water out you'll have a fuel that never gives you much trouble. If you do a lot of in town driving, short trips, and drive a diesel because you like it not because you have to have a big workhorse, well then bad things may happen.

 

[nappy nate]

Seems like an over priced filter set-up to me , but its likely complete. I can't imagine spending a grand or more for a filter unit , all the parts I see in the pictures look like readily available stuff -a sprayer tank from harbor freight,couple of whole house water filter and a transfer pump. I didn't read the part about the acid you mentioned all I see is filtration which is what I do 'filter'.
nate

 

[jim_22]

Don't do it. There are cheaper and better ways. If you have two working tanks on your truck, you can be set up with a $8 filter in your garage and a $100 flat plate heat exchanger on your truck. The key is to find CLEAN oil to begin with and then let it settle really good.

 

[OB_WAN]

is there any way to acquire the polymer filtering media via other means? that's the primary benefit of this system. Everything else can be done fairly cheap. As stated, harbor freight tanks, get some 10 and 1 micron socks for filtration. 12v transfer pump or even a manual pump.

 

[Diesel JD]

I wonder if you could titrate the oil and then neutralize the acids yourself like a lot of us biodieselers and WVO people do. With used motor oil you'd have 3 major possible contaminants 1) particles(metal, silica etc) no worries a good filter catches them. 2) water: you could settle it out or boil it off, if antifreee is a possible contaminant then I'd find another source, that makes the whole batch considered hazardous waste and it might be ahrder to separate from the oil 3) oil too acidic.... here is a problem, the bluegrass system may or may not be your solution, but I have to wonder, is ordinary waste motor oil even acidic enough to worry about? Most gas cars don't produce muh acid, diesesls used to but now we've cleaned up our act thanks to biofuels and ULSD, and in addition most diesel oils have a good amount of bases in them to neutralize the inevitable small amounts of acid produced.

 

[WrickM]

the whole acid thing seems like a sales pitch to me.

 

[MIDNIGHT RIDER]

What I find amusing is how they keep referring to WMO and other petroleum wastes as "bio-fuel".

 

[Diesel JD]

What I find amusing is how they keep referring to WMO and other petroleum wastes as "bio-fuel".

Yeah that's bs and everyone knows it. You could consider it green in a way though, at least you're recycling a waste product and not having to buy fuel at the pump, but bio, it most certainly isn't. Is the acid thing BS/marketing? I have no idea. I have some ideas about how to figure out if acid is even a problem with WMO like it is with veggie. Here's how I'd g about it....this may or may not work since for it to work you'd need a solvent that would dissolve petroleum products. I don't know if Isopropanol can do it but it it can you could take 10Ml of the highest purity Isopropanol you can get at the drug store or the red HEET gas line antifreeze, 1 Ml of warm waste motor oil and dissolve 1 gram of lye(drain cleaner/pure NaOH) into 1L of clean water, bottle or filtered tap would work. Then you need a pH indicator. Tumeric is in most spice abinets, it's cheap and safe and as accurate as phenolpthalein in most cases. Now scoop in as much tumeric as you can fit on a toothpick tip, maybe twice and drop in your base solution, add it drop by drop from an eyedropper(graduated to ML) and wait till the solution turns purple. Now here's where we find out if this time honored lab titration test works with petro based oils.... drop 1 Ml of your room temp or warmer waste motor oil into your test dish. Stir it till it's dissolved. If the oil dissoves this test should work. If it doesn't it won't, let's assume it did work. If there is acid present the indicator solution will turn yellow and you add the NaOH solution until it turns red, that's when you are neutral, most biodieselers push it to a deeper red or purple, or at least what they got on their blank titration. I hve a feeling that IF this test works, you may find it will not turn yellow but a draker shade of pink or purple....the color tumeric indicates in the presence of basic conditions! Now if you are using veggie oils I can tell you with authority the test works, and you will find some acid there, typically 2-8 ml/L of KOH. A rule of thumb is that waste grease has acid as FFA approximately equal to the KOH ttration value/2 expressed as % FFA by weight. I don't again know if this easy test could work with motor oils being as they are petroleum and not fatty acid oils. If it did and you came up with say 2-3 Ml/L NaOH I couldn't interpret that for you other than to say the test just picks up acid, it doesn't care what form or how it got there, but that is not much acid. If it was more like 8-10 NaOH I'd be afraid to put it in my tank!

 

[fx4wannabe]

Good feedback guys.