Use for used cooking oil

Make biodiesel?

Just filter and run 50-50 with diesel in summer?

My wife works at the local nursing home where they "ask" her to take all the used cooking oil from the kitchen. She brings home about 5 gallon every 10 days or so. I have been using some of it to start fires in my wood furnace that I heat my house with. It burns "ok" but not like I thought it would. It tends to run down into the ashes and doesn't burn up completely. It is canola oil. Is there a way to process this to make it more user friendly as a fuel source? I"d like to maybe use it for a heat source for a small outside greenhouse. How can this be done? The best use of it seems to be for dust control in the bedding of the chicken house. It works fantastic for this. 'Totally eliminates the dust and odor as well.

I somehow replied to your post and ended up posting before it? Space-time continuum issue perhaps???

You could try putting some in a pan of some sort and burning it there. The problem is getting it hot enough to combust.

Christopher

We use used cooking oil as part of feeding diet for a lot of our horses. Hels them keep the weight on.

My next door neighbor has some kind of refining setup and that is all that he uses in his Ford deisel pickups. And it is Ford as he retired after around 40 years from the Ford engine plantas an electricitan there.

I seen a set up where they piped a line in the top of the stove and once the fire was burning good they let the oil drip on the hot coals and it burnt real well. They were using motor oil in a shop.

Bob

Thats what I do....

Did you notice any type of refusal when you first started feeding it? How do you feed it?

As long as any rubber parts are replaced with viton so the oil will not make them brittle, I`ve seen up to 2/3 oil to diesel run with good results. Run it through a dual filter setup when you pump it into the tank, and it will run quite well as long as the weather is warm, no need to refine it.

If the nursing home wants to get rid of the oil, and your wife doesn't want to take the messy, smelly stuff home anymore, there are grease collection companies springing up all over who would probably drive to the nursing home and take the grease for free. These companies will refine it into biodiesel fuel. Lots of school buses run on it, and when there's a herd of buses idling in front of a school, the smell of french fries is in the air. Then the schoolkids all want to go to McDonalds.

There are individuals who filter the grease and add it to their diesel fuel. I've heard that this works, buy the key is filtering. You have to get ALL the debris and residue out of the grease. You'd be surprised at all the junk that accumulates in the oil of a deep fat fryer.

I work in a large commercial kitchen and we have a large, 300-400 gallon collection tank that we dump all of our fryer grease into. In the South, fried food consumption is very high. Then a truck comes and pumps it, and it eventually fuels the local buses. Before the biodiesel rage came along, a grease processing company used to come and pump the grease and take it to a rendering plant where it became an ingredient in ladies makeup such as mascara, eye shadow, and other things that I don't have much experience with. The FDA inspector came by one day, and older gentleman, and he explained to me the whole process. He asked me if I was married, and I said yes (I was at the time). He told be to buy the wife a couple of pork chops for Valentine's Day. I asked him why. He said that when she puts on makeup, she can instead just rub the pork chops on her face because it's not much different than applying mascara, and it's a lot cheaper, and then you can fry the pork chops and eat them. He was hilarious.

Five gallons is quite a bit, but I've burnt probably a gallon or so by letting it soak into newspapers and afterwards rolling them up before throwing into the fire. Burns really hot so use caution. With that much oil I probably would get a large plastic or rubber pan having tall sides for the soaking. Would be great if you could find discarded rolls of paper towels. Throw them in the oil, hang over to drip dry and then burn.

No refusal at all, they love it (smells and tastes good)... we just mix it in with their feed so it becomes oily. Hadn't got around to feeding it to any cattle yet, but I'm sure the results would be similar.

I use it for chain oil.Stays on-the dogs love it!Apply it with a squirt bottle-works lots better than anything I've ever used.

There was a piece in the paper about restaurants in St Louis loosing money, because people are stealing their used cooking oil.

I burn used oil and vegetable oil in my wood stove in my shop. I like it in the mornings because it heats the shop up fast and then I switch to wood. The oil cannot have even the slightest bit of water in it. I just take a pan and put some paper or cardboard in it and the pour some oil over the cardboard and set it in the stove and set it on fire. I also have a gallon can hanging above the stove with a pipe that goes in the side of the stove and drips into the pan if I want to burn oil all day. You can't do this if you have close neighbors. ha I brazed a nut onto a brass fitting that connects to the copper pipe and brazed the whole thing on the bottom of the gallon can. Then I took a long bolt and cut a slot in the end and that screws into the nut and that turns off and on the oil, and adjusts the flow. I works well except for you have to run a wire in the tubing every day, because carbon builds up and plugs it up.

One of my brothers has a '93 Dodge cummins that he burns used vegetable oil in, in the summer he burns straight veggie oil, while in the winter I don't think he burns it at all. He has built some tanks that he runs the oil through to remove water & fat, plus fuel filters to remove very small contaminates. He also built a fuel tank for his truck specifically for the oil with pipes running through it for circulating engine coolant to heat the oil. He also has rigged up electric selector valves in his fuel lines so that he can switch from diesel to veggie oil by flipping a switch in the cab.

I have a friend in upstate NY who just strains it then runs it in an old Mercedes. He has a separate tank in the trunk with a switch over valve. I don't think that he runs it in winter.

You need to burn the oil differently.

Just pouring it into the fire is the least efficient way to burn it. Oil furnaces and waste oil heaters spray the oil into the flame as a fine mist.

Nothing you can do to the oil will make it okay to just dump it in the stove.