Quote:
Originally Posted by latitude500
I've been burning WVO for about 6 years and I really wish someone would have talked me into a Dieselcraft CF when I started up. I'll never use bag filters again. NO WAY. It's a little money to get it up and running, but if your going to stay in this game for the long run it's pennys on the dollar.
I let my oil settle in a 55 gallon drum for a two to three days and then pump off the top in pump it into a larger storage tank. So when I'm ready to make wvo into fuel. I just pump it into the dieselcraft and turn the heater on and then turn the CF on. You don't have to watch it, and if you have something else to do and don't get back to it in 8 hours your fine.
Then I use the same pump that powers the CF to pump the fuel into my truck. EASY, SAFE, and the cleanest oil I've ever tested.
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Since the last post in this thread I've upgraded my filtration and filling system quite a bit. I spent some money at McMaster-Carr and Harbor Freight, but considering how much I've spent on diesel in the last three years plus the time all of these upgrades will save me it's money well spent (this was posted on the infopop forums a while ago):
I had been running WVO for two years (100K miles) with great results, but one thing I never did was really fine tune my filtration system. It was pretty bush league for a while which is fine because it was cheap, but it was never very user friendly, especially in my unheated garage. I did pick up a vent free propane heater new in box for $50, but all that did was make it more bearable to be out there in the cold, it just doesn't have the BTUs to bring cold oil up to a temperature that will allow it to flow freely through a 150 micron filter for rough filtration prior to centrifuging. So I decided to finally splurge and make my system a bit more "professional" and ultimately easy to use. This allows me to process more oil at a faster rate than I had been. Here's the progress so far:
This is the pre-filter barrel. This is where I will pour completely raw oil, bits and all, to be heated for pre-filtering prior to centrifuging. As you can see I'm using the infamous Harbor Freight 1" Clear Water Pump. I had always regarded them as a complete waste of money until I read about a few tweaks (new capacitor, motor starter switch for overload protection, sealing the leaks) you can make for not a lot of money to make them more functional. I bought two on sale for $35.99 each. The new capacitor was $8, and the motor starter was $20, so now I have a decent 10 GPM 1/2 HP pump for a lot less than I could get one for anywhere else. The HF pumps are not self priming, so a foot valve (you can barely see it at end of the pipe) is necessary. The pump has a plug for priming, but it's pretty small so I used a tee at the top with a plug.
In this photo you can see the blatant overkill filter housing which will contain the 150 micron cotton filters that will keep the big stuff out of the centrifuging barrel so as not to clog the jets in the centrifuge. The housing (and the filter) will handle up to 15 GPM, so it was a good match for the HF pump. I'm setting the thermostats on the heating elements (more on those later) to 100 degrees F, which should be plenty warm enough so as not to collapse the filter. The reason I chose a steel filter housing was because I'm also going to wrap the housing in pipe heating cable in order to further protect the filter.
Shown here are the heating elements-the beginning of my version of a heater spear. The elements are 5500W each so at 120V they'll put out about 1375W and will draw 11.4A each. I should add that I'm also re-wiring the garage, which was needed anyway since there's only one outlet currently. I'm adding two 20A circuits specifically for use with the filtration station. The mounts for the heating elements consist of a black 1" flange welded to a black 2" coupling. The missing piece of the puzzle is a 2" to 1" reducer bushing which I had to order since hardware stores don't stock them. I had a machinist friend weld them for me since I don't have access to a welder. Once the reducer bushings are in both heaters will be suspended via lengths of 1" black pipe from a crossbar on top of the barrel. One heater will sit low, almost touching the bottom and one will sit near the top. They'll be independently switched also so I can just use the bottom heater for smaller batches.
As I said before, adding overload protection to the HF pump requires a simple motor starting switch, which is basically a circuit breaker that also functions as an on/off switch. I would have included the new capacitor but its not here yet. The other HF pump I bought will be used as a fill pump. Prior to this rebuild I was using the pump that runs my centrifuge (Haldex Hydraulic pump-0.9 GPM) to fill my tank via a manifold I built to switch between recirculation and filling. With a 60 gallon tank it was pretty brutal. The fill pump will be set up almost identically to the pre-filter pump (foot valve, etc...) with the difference being that it will have some kind of bypass (not sure exactly how yet) so I can use a regular filler nozzle with it. I should also be able to fill my tank in less than 10 minutes now, which will be very nice.
Just another picture of the filter housing with the pre-filter pump. I used a tee rather than an elbow coming out of the outlet because I figured it would good to have a port there for a pressure gauge, etc...eventually. That's all for now, I'll post more pictures as I progress on this. I'm going to work on setting the old centrifuge back up as well as a control box for everything next.
I finally got some more time to work on the system yesterday and am making some progress. The first order of business was to assemble my homemade heater spears for the pre-filtering barrel:
As you can see the elements in their housings will be suspended from the 2x6 over an open top barrel, one near the bottom and one near the top so as to avoid stratifying cold and warm layers. Here is a closeup of the assembled spear which consists of a 1" flange welded to a 2" coupling, which has a 2"x1" reducer bushing threaded into it, which threads into the 1" pipe which serves as support as well as a conduit for the power wire:
Here the heaters are installed and wired in the barrel. I used 48" bungees from Lowes to secure the snap disc thermostats to the side of the barrel. This barrel will only reach about 100 degrees so they should take the heat just fine. I can also move them easily if I need to. To the left you can see the HFCWP connected to the pre-filter.:
Here is an overview of the whole system:
This is a view of the centrifuge barrel which is mostly composed of parts from the original system (barrel, heater pipe, the centrifuge itself, etc...) with new stainless steel and hydraulic pressure lines, thermostats for the inline heaters, and a thermal protection switch for the pump motor:
Finally here is the fill pump, another HFCWP with a foot valve so as to keep prime. I am experimenting with "deadheading" the pump which I'm not sure is going to work, so I'd be interested in hearing some comments. The tee coming out of outlet of the pump has a 5/8" ID barbed fitting which will connect the fill hose. At the end of the fill hose will be an OPW fill nozzle that I picked up at a yard sale. I know that these don't work particularly well with WVO so I'm not really concerned with trying to get it to shut off automatically, but rather I'd like to be able to grab the nozzle, switch the pump on, and let it bypass or deadhead until I walk the nozzle over to the truck and begin filling. Then of course, I'd like to be able to click the nozzle off, walk back to the pump, hang it up and switch the pump off. If you look at the tee again you'll see a small length of 1/4" fuel line coming off of the other port. I'm hoping that this small bypass will allow enough relief when the fill hose is closed off so that the pump doesn't over heat:
I've zero problems with the system thus far. One surprising thing I noticed was that even very cold oil flows through the new 15 GPM filter cartridges very easily. The same type of oil at the same temperature used to plug and rupture my old 10 GPM filter cartridges, which is why I opted for the pre-heat barrel. The other variable is the HF pump which may have something to do with it too since it's a high volume low pressure pump. Either way, it's been great as I've been using the same cotton string wound filter cartridge for about 6 months now with no sign of any large particles getting through to the CF barrel. One slightly annoying aspect of the pre-heat barrel is the fact that the foot valve for the transfer/rough filter pump will frequently get stuck open because a french fry bit or other crud will get stuck on the mating surface of the valve, keeping it from closing all the way which causes the pump to lose it's prime. Luckily I designed the system so that it's easy to remove the standpipe, clear the clog, and re-prime the pump, but it's still an annoyance and a little messy. The foot valve came with a coarse screen but it quickly got clogged with crud so I had to remove it.
The fill pump works great and always keeps its prime since there are no particles left in the oil large enough to cause a problem. The tank fills in what seems like a blink of an eye compared to before and the bypass works flawlessly. Finally, the upgrade to all stainless steel lines on the pressure side was the best possible thing for piece of mind. The burst pressure on the lines is north of 3500 psi, which makes them the weak link in the system since the schedule 80 steel pipe in the heater system is rated at 6000 psi burst strength. Needless to say, the infamous Dieselcraft blowouts are a thing of the past.
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