WVO Blenders

[6.9F250]

Can any grease burning bretheren out there tell me how they are heating their secondary tank?
I've been blending small amounts of filtered WVO with large amounts of diesel over the winter..but I'm afraid to do too much until I find a way to heat the tank.

I'm looking for a low cost redneck sort of solution.

Thanks in advance for any help.


86 F250 6.9l RC 4x4 4 spd.

Fairfax,Va

 

[Diesel JD]

Well, I have gone teh homebrew biodiesel route instead of the SVO/WVO route. You basically have the Hose on hose or hose in hose options. I have heard of people diverting the engine coolant through a normal sized heater hose and running some sort of a waste veggie oil resistant fuel hose through the middle of the heater hose. I've heard of a copper tubing being used cause it is excellent for fuel transfer. If you want to find a guy who actually has such a system, go to biodiesel.infopop.cc Over there, go to the SVO discussion forums and look for a guy from Callahan FL who goes by the handle "magyver" he's a heavy truck mech and as the handle indicates, a guy who loves to tinker, and he's good at it. he has 3 such systems last i talked to him 2 on 7.3 IDIs and one on a Series 60 Detroit in a Fruitliner. Others here may also know about such a 'redneck' system, but I know he knows what he's doing.

 

[SKimballC]

I put together a few systems using the hose on hose fuel line approach and made copper coils to fit in the tank. On my own late-great-yet-cavitated rig (I have since sold and installed the setup on another dude's truck) I also used a 40 plate heat exchanger. It worked really well. As a former installer of those bullsh!t Greasecar systems I honestly can say it worked about 5 times better than their junk.

 

[DeepRoots]

this is my original system.
http://oilburners.net/forums/showthread.php?t=12791
since than I've added seperate filters, one for biodiesel/diesel and one for WVO

 

[jim_22]

I know this post is a little old-- I am interested in this too. I want to use the existing two tanks and have as few mods as possible. I have a heated racor "prefilter" before the lift pump. I run diesel in the back tank and start and stop on it. I run 50/50 super clean wvo/D2 in the front tank above 50 degrees outside temp and it runs mint. I do not have a solution for cold weather yet. It may be biodiesel for me if I can get a clean cheap source (I am thinking coop).

 

[Double-S-Diesel]

heating it whats that
front tank 50/50,
rear tank straight diesel for start up / shut down.

 

[Compu Doc]

heating it whats that
front tank 50/50,
rear tank straight diesel for start up / shut down.

What percentage can a person run just using the only tank they have of WVO and diesel without heat.

 

[argve]

In the summer I run 95 percent WVO and 5 percent diesel - she chungs a little on start up in the morning but after she runs for about 30 seconds it's all good.

When I change my fuel filter it does not smell like diesel at those percentages. Now the oil that I am getting stays fluid even when the temps drop to like 30 degrees - on the side of the box that the jugs come in it says it has some additive in the oil to keep it flowing at lower temps - It's a veggie oil (canola oil) that I get from the local bar.

 

[hahn_rossman]

"redneck" engineered solutions

I'm a little biased because of my connection to frybrid.com, but I'll weigh in a little on low tech heating ideas for our tanks.
option 1.
only heat the feed and return lines. Hose in hose is really effective at heating the oil and not that hard to cobble together. You can duplicate all the parts of frybrid's or greasecar/whatever at your local home depot. The idea is to use 1/2" pipe "t"s with 3/4" hose barbs, and 3/8" compression fittings ( the only trick is to drill out the stop in the compression fitting so that the 3/8 tubing can go all the way thru the fitting). you can use copper for the inner line (available at the depot as well), but aluminum is better. It's available from mcmaster-carr. instead of running a coolant loop in the tank just couple the "t"s together at the tank. Since the ip cycles a lot more fuel than it uses you will return hot fuel to the tank which will help with cooler running conditions.
option 2.
heat the tank with a coolant loop. The ***** about heating the tank is that once you start down this road, you eventually end up where frybrid is at...welded aluminum tank, all welded connections inside the tank. This is great, since it minimizes things that can leak coolant into your fuel and also uses materials which aren't reactive with WVO. The WVO wants to polymerize the more you heat cycle it, and the hotter you get it. Polymerization sucks...you will clog filters at a rate that will make your head spin and your wallet whine. Copper and steel are both catalysts for polymerizing WVO. I managed to get away with copper lines when I wasn't heating the VO tank, but once I started heating it I realized that I had to do it all the way!
Good luck and remember you can buy a lot of plumbing fittings for the price of a tank of #2.

 

[RLDSL]

Check out www.plantdrive.com and http://www.greaseworks.org/ for some nice electric heaters that can save a world of problems. The big stick on electric pad heaters will get your fuel tank roasty, you can even stick a 12 v and a 120 v on the same tank so you can plug in overnight in winter, then switch on the 12 volt once you fire up. the little pad heaters can be rigged into a filter heater like the ones greaseworks sells for he price of a $50 heater and a $3 pipe coupling from a hardware store.the Veg Therm in line heaters are great. One of the big ones right before the injection pump will get you seriously hot veg going into the injection pump.
You really don't need to heat the tank so long as you have good heaters in the lines, you should have a heated filter on the veg lines though. For what you are doing, you could easily just add a heated primary filter on the veg line and a heater before the injection pump and as long as you leave enough purge time when switching tanks back before shutdown .

I'm still gathering goodies for my truck, but I've done a couple of one tank systems on european diesels with great results ( I would not try a one tank setup on these things, the stanadyne pumps are too wimpy to handle cold starting on straight veg for the long term ). Wife.gov's daily driver is a volvo 740 turbo diesel with a single tank setup, no tank heat, coolant heated Davco filter, small coolant fuel heater, electric band heater on the secondary filter and a veg therm right before the pump( about half the system is overkill ) . I get 160 deg fuel to the pump within 30 seconds of startup. Start and run on straight veg 3 seasons, blend in the winter

I ran a few tanks of 50-70% veg last summer when it was good and hot out ( 95-105+ deg out )with no mods on my truck and it ran great


If for some reason, you just have to have coolant heat in the tank, get one of the Arctic Fox tank heaters. No worries about cobbled together parts coming apart in the tank.Those things have been on the market for years for trucks running the great white north. I ran a big truck up there for a while and have never heard of a failure on one.

------Robert

 

[Double-S-Diesel]

What percentage can a person run just using the only tank they have of WVO and diesel without heat.

we have ran it as high as 80% in the 88 idi.
will start fine on it.
biggest concern is without having diesel to clean burn on shut down that it will make a nasty sticky mess in the cylinders, and injectors.
as in mainly we use the diesel to clean the system.
in the dodge we usually run 20-30% with only one tank, and no problems.

 

[Compu Doc]

With the price of fuel going up, gasoline now and I am sure diesel will follow what type of filtering setup should I use to filter the oil. My idea is to filter the oil and then add 4 gallons of diesel to one gallon of oil giving me a 20% mixture and then just dump it in the tank. Will this work?.

 

[subway]

With the price of fuel going up, gasoline now and I am sure diesel will follow what type of filtering setup should I use to filter the oil. My idea is to filter the oil and then add 4 gallons of diesel to one gallon of oil giving me a 20% mixture and then just dump it in the tank. Will this work?.

should work, i use a goldenrod filter to get it down to 10 micron then take it one step farther with a home water filter to get it down to half a micron. i think the typical fuel filter is in the 5-10 micron range so i should be fine. you can get these filters redily at tractor supply.

i plummed the filters to the bottom of a bad expansion tank i found by the side of the road. i pulled the rubber bladder out, cut a hole in the top and cleaned it up. now i can dump up to about 25 gallons at a time and let it gravity filter.

 

[cj hall]

heating of fuel tank

Hello to All

This is what I did in feb of this year,to run veg oil all year long.
I have an arctic fox in tank heater in my 58 gallon titan tank it heats the fuel in the tank to 80 degs this is made for over the road trucks. the temp is set at 80 degs because the engine makers have tested and have found out the diesel fuel makes the most power at eighty degs and falls off fast any higher.

Veg Oil runs better hotter than this if you are running a fass pump they have heater ports in them and that will heat the fuel also,the fuel in my truck runs about 10 degs higher the outside temp in the am to 150 degs after it warms up the engine and tank this takes about 45 mins to to get this hot and the temp is taken 6 inches from the ip pump. this all runs off the cooling system of the truck.
here are a few pictures of the tank

thanks for reading

cj hall

 

[Agnem]

Pretty cool! Where did you mount this beast?