OT BioDiesel

Only a thousand rounds? Hell, that's only good for a couple hours of plinking...

Bill has a point. All this stuff looks like waste now, and cheap too. But if people start using it, then the fryolator oil that my neighbor tosses into the trash will be a hundred bucks a gallon, plus the cost to filter it. If you as a private user set up to use it now, you will just be hurt later on, when you can't get the stuff for free any more.

Earle

Yeah, we've perfected it, but only as a weapon... Minor inconveniences occur when it is not "contained"...

Nope, I was talking about *real* fusion, not the snake oil research of 'cold' fusion... If it was easy, we would already have it, right?

Yeah, electrolysis is not efficient, but with a cheap enough electrical energy source available, it might still be acceptable... Maybe more efficient photovoltic array or fusion might give us this though... I'm not holding my breath though... Until then, I'm burning dyno juice...

And maybe bio-diesel in any diesel that I might own...

Unfortuneately we are still probably 100 years from perfecting fusion. Fission reactors are a perfectly acceptable substitute in the interim, if the bleeding heart liberal wacko limp democrats will let us build more. Of course once oil hits $125 a barrel in three years you'll probably get more resistance to nuclear energy from the oil & gas industry lobbyists and the Republicans they're in bed with than the Dems....

A friend of mine heats his hangar with used motor oil. Once he figured out how to service the burner himself, his heating costs went to zero.

Where do you think the oil you pay to 'dispose of" goes? You pay Quickie Lube to take it and then Quickie Lube sells it.

The airport that I based my plane at up in Iowa while I was on a contract up there also used used motor oil for heating... They allowed anyone around the airport to dump their used oil in their container instead of having to dispose of it some other way... I asked the owner about it one day and he said that it didn't provide enough oil for the entire winter, but it came close...

When I was young and foolish, I bought plans for a home sized used motor oil furnace, from the Mother Earth News. My eyes bugged out of my head when I read them. You were supposed to use a manual valve and a home made "nozzle", to control the drip rate of the oil, as it dropped on pieces of fire brick, placed on a burner, made out of a frying pan. You got the fire going with kerosene or barbecue lighter fluid. I am still alive. That means I must not have made the thing.

Earle

Earle Horton did pass the time by typing:

I made an oil burner one time. Used gravity to feed old motor oil through a copper coil wrapped around a can that held a wick. That sucker could put out some serious heat and smoke. Thing is as it got hotter the oil vaporized in the tube and eventually the whole thing melted. :/

Not forgetting Bill that the refining process for standard ULP (or gasoline as you guys refer to it) is also an energy-intensive process.

In case anyone is tempted to build one of these things, they are dangerous and illegal by fire codes, in all countries that have fire codes. The fire can go out, the fuel will still gravity feed onto the hot burner, and the house will then fill up with flammable vapors. The next thing that happens, is usually bad. I put my plans from Mother Earth News on the shelf, and left them there.

Earle