Monday, June 28, 2010

The Hobby of Greasing




I'd like to focus on cheap, safe, environmentally friendly, and easy ways to have fun with this hobby. The goal is to have the free grease pay the equipment off that you're using, and you can't do that after you've spent a thousand bucks on a kit only to spend another thousand on a centrifuge or the most efficient filtering system on the market. The car I'm running right now cost me $400 and the Greasecar Kit I'm using I already had on my previous vehicle. The kit has pretty much paid for itself after 10-15,000 miles on grease.

I do not use heat to pre-filter my oil. In the summer I don't think there is a need to anyway. If you're patient enough, your oil will settle naturally enough on it's own. I have run into problems in the past of running oil that was not settled or filtered well. It will clog your onboard filter and you'll find sludge in your tank. Not good.

Anyway, my system now is pretty good. I collect my oil either from restaurants or craigslist ads and dump it from the cubies into 55 gallon drums that were a waste product I got for free. I let the oil sit in a mostly shady spot for 2-3 weeks. The water/hydrogenated crap settles at the bottom and I can pump liquid gold off the top (I use a handpump I got for free). The liquid gold goes through 3 bag filters that sit inside one another in the sequence of 25 micron, 5 micron, and 1 micron. These bag filters are pretty cheap and can be bought from several places online (greasecar.com, dudadiesel.com, etc.). They will last over 100 gallons because the oil is so clean that goes through them. After that I soak them in baking soda, vinegar and water for 12 hours and use them again. I'm not sure how this affects the micron ratings though, so I'm only going to do that a few times before I get more filters. I also clean cubies out in the baking soda/vinegar/water to be used for clean oil that I can transport in my trunk for longer trips. Before the oil is dumped into my Greasecar tank I put a little on the stove at medium to high heat and check for bubbles. This "hot pan test" tells me how much water is in my oil. I am looking for a very small amount of bubbles to none.

My current vehicle is a 1980 Mercedes 300D. It was sold to me as a parts car and it runs like a champ. It takes to grease very well and the engine quiets down a bit when I switch over. I just parted with my two VW Golfs that have their own problems unrelated to grease.

The biggest enjoyment I get out of running waste vegetable oil in my car is the feeling of fuel independence. I can fly by gas stations knowing I'm burning a cheap and renewable resource that often ends up in sewers.