Month: March 2008

Are there foxes native to the Pacific Northwest?

I ask because I’m pretty sure what I saw this morning was a fox.

Our family dog, a Welsh Corgi named “Major” was behaving a tad odd this morning when I went out to the barn. He usually greets me at the fence and after a bit of petting wanders back to his usual spot under the deck. Instead he followed me around, looking nervous. I didn’t think much of it. I did some normal weekend chores out there and occasionally heard him barking, which is also unusual as he’s a pretty quiet dog. I pulled the pickup truck out of the barn and brought it around to the back of the house for some other weekend chores and I saw what I thought was Major at the back corner of our property. There are some horses that live in the pasture back there and occasionally he makes some odd Corgi attempt at herding them despite the fence in the way. But this animal was obviously not Major on second glance. First of all it had a big bushy tail, something our Corgi lacks! Its nose was very pointy as well. It looked back at me as I got out of the pickup, easily 60 yards away and went into a panic. Major was standing near the house and barking at the animal. It raced back and forth along the fence, like … well a trapped animal. As I looked at it my mind tried to comprehend it. Too short and with a far too bushy coat to be a Coyote. I see and hear plenty of Coyotes around here and this was certainly not one of those, unless perhaps it was a pup? Its coat was a dark, dusky grey, not the dirty blonde/mixed grey/brown you usually associate with Coyotes. It glanced back at me a couple of times and the nose and ears had a distinct Fox look. It was much larger than the red-colored Foxes I’ve seen in the UK, or in the North Woods of the Midwest.

I gathered up the dog and got him out of the backyard. The animal, whatever it is, vanished into our pastures on the east side of the property.

I went inside, grabbed my camera, and let Sue know what was going on. I opened the gate on the west side of our property along the wooded side of the driveway. I then looped around the house to the north and east and entered the fenced area around the barn. I planned to flush it out of the pastures and towards the gate so it could be free of the fenced part and into the woods. I never did see it again, but found a place where it dug its way under the fence along the southwest fence line.

Any Naturalists or Zoologists out there care to inform me as to what species of animal I saw?

Homebrew BioDiesel. Step One: WVO Collection, filtering, settling.

WVO Settling Tanks

The first step in making BioDiesel is collecting your “feedstock”… that is the vegetable oil used to make it. I use Waste Vegetable Oil (WVO) from restaurant deep fryers. It is darn near impossible to get it from around home, as there is a commercial BioDiesel producer within 10 miles of my house who has locked up all the local sources. Instead I collect it closer to work. Right now I have two sources, which are part of a small cooperative really. My friend John, who I met when he replied to a job I posted on Craigslist many, many years ago, and a new source Mike, who I met via the Northwest BioDiesel discussion mailing list. Both of them supply me with waste oil, and in return I supply them with finished BioDiesel.

John first turned me onto the idea of running the car on veggie oil. At first I did straight veggie oil in the car, mixed with petroleum Diesel. I built a two-barrel WVO filter setup that was completely gravity operated. For a year or two I just filtered the oil down to 1 micron (which took a lot of time BTW) and poured it in my tank at anywhere from 10% to 50% mixture based on ambient temperatures. This worked OK for a while, but did eventually clog one of my injectors. This, and the rising price of oil, is what prompted me to go 100% BioDiesel.

So step one is still filtering and settling. However unlike the old days, I don’t have to be so anal in my filtering (that still happens, just later.) Now I collect the oil, which comes to me in 5 gallon buckets, and pour it into these two tanks you see above. I can filter/settle close to 100 gallons of WVO at a time here. Time & Gravity are my main tools. The oil goes into the top via funnels. Attached to the funnels are coarse filters which remove the larger food bits (whole fries, potato bits, etc) from the oil. I use paint strainers, old panty hose, socks, whatever. Panty hose is actually the best. The filter media eventually clog with sludgy gunk, but we’ll worry about that later. Once inside the barrels the oil sits for at least a week, preferably two weeks. As it sits the water that was in suspension falls to the bottom of the tank. Suspended food particles also sink.

You will note that the barrels are upside-down, with the dual-bung tops now on the bottom. Into these bungs I have plumbed two NPT-threaded 3/4″ pipes with ballvalves on the end. One has an extension that sticks up into the oil to the level of the line you see drawn on the front of the tank. The other is flush with the tank’s bottom. When I draw off oil I use the higher of the two pipes. This means I draw oil from the area above the sediment. I can drain off the water and sediment using the bottom/flush pipe. This stuff is unusable and is discarded. The oil goes from the settling tanks straight into the BioDiesel reactor.

WVO Settling Tank plumbing

Up until last week I used a removable hose to drain the oil from these tanks. The hose screwed onto the ball valves you see on the end of the pipes. Last week I finally installed some plumbing to make this operation a lot cleaner. Now I’m not dripping WVO as much. I can just open some valves and flick on the reactor’s pump. Oil just flows into the reactor vessel without getting my hands dirty! (There are still some hoses to connect, but these are further downstream.)

So the key here, and the key overall to this whole process, is time. The longer the WVO sits, the better and cleaner the oil becomes. I alternate which tank I use every weekend, allowing the other to sit another full week to settle. I come close to filling each one every week, so the supply is consistent.

The next steps in the are testing & reaction, also known as “Better living through chemistry!”
Stay tuned for that.

Documenting my home BioDiesel equipment and process.

What would you think leads most people to this website?
Guessing games about oddball old cars? Nope.
Stories about vintage car rallies? Nope.
Commiserating about unscrupulous mechanics? Nope.

When I look at my website stats the #1 search term month after month is “WVO Filtering”… pretty odd stat for a site mostly about my noodling about with a gasoline-powered vintage car eh? I guess people are more interested in my mundane daily habits than my occasional sunny-day passion. Oh well. So I’ve decided to give the people what they want.

I’ve been slowly building and trying to perfect a small BioDiesel processing system out in my barn, and while I’ve mentioned it a couple of times before here I promise over the next few weeks to lay out what is involved, and what components are used. Unlike my “beauty shots” of old cars that usually grace this website, I’m going to be honest with you, this stuff is ugly. Making BioDiesel from waste vegetable oil is a filthy, dirty job. As a result, the area where I do this dirty job is not very pretty.

Let me remind everyone of one important point: I’m not doing this to save the planet. I do this to save my wallet. You can call it enlightened self-interest, but really it is just an expression of independence. I’ve driven Diesel cars for a long time; half the cars I’ve owned in life have been powered by Diesel engines. I’ve done this because they are efficient and frugal… sort of like me. 😉 This process is no different in nature.

I’ve always been curious about things mechanical, and so embarking on this particular journey seemed natural, though it has been a slow process. I’ve had help from other people along the way, and I’ll try to mention them here. I am by no means finished, and I know as things evolve they’ll improve, so don’t view this as a definitive series on homebrewing.

Stay tuned as I explain it all starting from the beginning.
BioDiesel

How many geeks does it take…

…to move a 6800lb (~3000kg) UPS?

Thanks to the amazing Hilman Rollers, only four and a half.

This is our new UPS at digital.forest. It is an MGE EPS 7000, which is a very cool unit. As purchased it is a 300 kVA system, but as we grow we can scale it up to 500 kVA. The battery cabinets arrive tomorrow. You can read about the UPS arrival on my blog at work.