Tuesday was a great day for biggreentruck. We took off from the home base of www.vegcar.net and headed into Yosemite NP for a great day of skiing at Badger Pass. In the evening we set about filtering that oil from the fancy Fresno restaurant. I devised a 'new' system to keep the bag filter out of the tank and the mess relatively contained (we only had one minor spill). Turn a 1 gal water jug upside down, cut the bottom off, place the bag filter inside, remove the jug's cap and set the thing in the fill hole of the tank. Add oil and listen to it slowly drip into the tank. Keep the cap so you can plug up the bottom of the contraption between filter sessions.
Watched oil never filters so it seemed like a good time to start reading Biodiesel Power by Lyle Estill (available from New Society Publishers www.newsociety.com -- they've just gone carbon neutral). Too bad the book was so good I ended up focusing more on it than on the oil.
Basically, the book chronicals both the biofuels movement and Lyle's own adventures as a backyard brewer of biodiesel. Touching on everything from the science and chemisty of brewing and burning biodiesel to the politics of the National Biodiesel Board to the people powering the movement, Biodiesel Power is a great primer for alternative fuels.
Lyle's discussion of the do-it-yourself vs buy-a-kit mentalities really hit home as I fall somewhere in between the two not wanting things handed to me outright while not feeling the need to reinvent the wheel.
Emissions is something that came up in biggreentruck's recent education appearance. Lyle touches on that too when he talks about the EPA studies on rats living a box of emissions from B100. Seems, unlike the rats who lived in diesel emissions, the B100 rats lived long, healthy lives. I'm curious to know how rats fare in wvo emissions.
I'm anxious to finish the book to find out how Piedmont Biofuels Industrial LLC has fared both as a business venture and in their quest to create a closed energy loop using the waste products from biodiesel production to create more biodiesel, or I guess I could just go their website www.biofuels.coop. Since the book was printed on 100% post-consumer paper, I'll keep reading.
