Great pics! I like what you did with the relief valve. Thanks for the link! I process emusified oil all the time after I mist wash oil that just looks too nasty for the CF. I make a distgusting soup of bottom of the barrel junk around my yard, heat it, mist wash it almost 100% volume, let it settle for a couple of days and then I have great oil after the CF takes all the water out of it. The stuff left on the bottem of the mist barrel after draining the water is smelly gray crap. Discovery channel needs to do a dirty jobs special on this.

quote:

Originally posted by Ben Howard RD:
Great pics! I like what you did with the relief valve. Thanks for the link! I process emusified oil all the time after I mist wash oil that just looks too nasty for the CF. I make a distgusting soup of bottom of the barrel junk around my yard, heat it, mist wash it almost 100% volume, let it settle for a couple of days and then I have great oil after the CF takes all the water out of it. The stuff left on the bottem of the mist barrel after draining the water is smelly gray crap. Discovery channel needs to do a dirty jobs special on this.

Hi Michael,

Maybe this will be useful to you. As I've mentioned within this book, I wash all my oil since I don't trust what might be dumped into it. But, by heating the oil and washing with hot water I don't form any emulsified oil, the hot water and the hot oil remain separated. Generally, I wash at 10-20% volume of oil by pouring or hosing in at a relatively fast rate. After settling I move from the top down. The Blackstone labs report I just received today shows zero water in my oil before I run it through my centrifuge.

Sam

quote:

Originally posted by Sam Crowe:
Maybe this will be useful to you. As I've mentioned within this book, I wash all my oil since I don't trust what might be dumped into it. But, by heating the oil and washing with hot water I don't form any emulsified oil, the hot water and the hot oil remain separated. Generally, I wash at 10-20% volume of oil by pouring or hosing in at a relatively fast rate. After settling I move from the top down. The Blackstone labs report I just received today shows zero water in my oil before I run it through my centrifuge.

Sam

Sam, that's really interesting. Do you mind elaborating a little?

Are you recirculating the oil/water mix while you hose or pour in the hot water?
Otherwise it doesn't seem like the hot water would contact much of the oil to wash it if it's just dumped straight in.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the process.

Finally, when you say 'hot', what sort of temps do you mean? Is the hot water straight from the tap and the oil at 180F, of are they much closer in temp to each other?

Thanks.

Please start a new thread to discuss mistwashing.

My new filter system with the OC20 is functional and working QUITE well.

I opted for a 2 barrel system with 2-30 gallon barrels and the water heater element in a pipe. I decided that I wanted to do a polishing stage in my processing, hence why i'm using 2 barrels.

I don't have any outputs attached to the bottom of my barrels. It just seemed like a point of failure I didn't want to deal with. So, the input side of my pump has a long hose with a weight on the end of it to sink to the bottom of the barrel. This hose is also what I use to suck the oil out of the cubes after I get them from my supplier. They have a lot of gunk in their oil, so I have to let it settle out for a number of days, but this hose lets me go down to just above the gunk line.

I have the OC20 mounted above and between the 2 barrels. I use hydraulic lines to go between the various items in the filtration system.

When ready, I pump the oil into the leftmost barrel using nylons attached to the input hose and the overflow valve hose on the OC20. I start the pump and the heater, let it get up to 120F or so, then turn the valve on the OC20 and bump her up to 90 psi.

I let it cycle like this for about 3 hrs, then i turn off and clean the OC20. Then I move the OC20 over the 2nd barrel and pump all of the oil from the left barrel to the right barrel. The overflow is still in the left barrel, so the only oil that goes into the right barrel has made at LEAST 1 pass thru the OC20.

After I ran this batch, about 22 gallons, I cleaned out the OC20. Then, I did the transfer, took about 20-25 minutes or so. I checked the OC20 again, and there was just a bit more gunk in it. So, the polishing stage was a success!

The whole system (both barrels) and the motor, pump, OC20, takes up a 2'x4' area.

Thanks to EVERYONE on here for all the tips and advice they have given me over the past few months.

Wade

Sounds like you've figured it out, Wade, Congrats .

quote:

Originally posted by Paul Drayton:

I have a 1/2 hp motor, and it does 2 speeds with a clutch (washing machine C-section motor).

Paul, thanks for the links to your web site. In your inventive ideas page you say to find a refrig compressor with four pipes not two. Any idea why?

Paul

quote:

Originally posted by Paulus:
Sounds like you've figured it out, Wade, Congrats .

I figured i'd post some pics of what I got built. I use the input hose to suck the oil out of the cubes with some nylon stocking on the end. It keeps most of the fat and other junk from getting sucked into the system. I also have the big particulate filter inline to get anything that I may miss.





Later,
Wade

hey everybody... i was out of town for a while so thats why i haven't been able to get back to you. i still can't get my CF to spinn. i cleaned out the two little holes on the bottom of the rotor (? jets ?) and still nothing. i then took the bolt off, on the opposite side of the imput, and shot some oil through and this little metal piece shot out also. so how do i put this back together? i bet that something is jammed in there somewhere, but what do i do to get at all the pieces to see what could be clogged? thanks for the help!!!

Make sure the arrows are lined up. I also make sure the jets are not clogged by dipping the part with the jets into diesel and then taking a Q-tip and push it in and out of the jet until I see diesel sqirting out the other side. I go through a ton of Q-tips. I have been using the same diesel to do this for over 6 months.

quote:

Originally posted by cambro5:
i then took the bolt off, on the opposite side of the imput, and shot some oil through and this little metal piece shot out also. so how do i put this back together?

Hi Cambro,

Inside that bolt should be a spring and plunger, it is a pressure regulator and can be completely removed (it is not necessary to have that regulator working). Do that and replace the bolt, then try again. The only other thing is that is something between the base and the holes in the stem. But you can figure that out quick by putting the bolt back on, connecting your pump, replace the bell cover with the rotor out, start it up and see if oil comes out the bottom.

Sam

are the jets those two little holes on the bottom of the rotor?

quote:

Originally posted by cambro5:
are the jets those two little holes on the bottom of the rotor?

Yes, little brass bolts with a small hole in it. The bottom and on opposite sides.

Cambro,

Just to be sure, the spring can and should be removed, but be sure to keep the plunger in place to block the small orifice on top.

I haven't read too much into your problem, but did you unscrew the spindle or main shaft up the center and shove a small screwdriver and clean it out.

STOP! Do not attempt to unscrew the center shaft of the centrifuge.

If after hot water and soap/ degreaser/ brake cleaner oil does not pass through the centrifuge. Call Dieselcraft.

quote:

I figured i'd post some pics of what I got built.

Wade, thanks for the pics. A question please - are you also dewatering and if so does the extra piping in the dual ouput arrangement tend to spoil the dewatering action?

I'm using the CF do to my dewatering. I catch the output as I shut down the CF. I'm lucky in that the oil I've been getting is pretty much dry.

Basically, I run 6-8 full cycles of the oil thru in the left barrel and catch the output when I turn off the pump, then I clean the CF. Then I start up the CF again (still using the left barrel) and when it gets up to speed, I open the right valve, then close the left valve.

At this point I'm scrubbing the oil 1 last time. As I empty left barrel, I turn off the CF and catch the output again (waiting until it completely spins down, ususally about 90 seconds for it to completely drain). When I clean out the CF after the scrubbing cycle, I usually have another small layer of crud inside the CF bowl.

I then let the oil in the right barrel cool down overnight. The next day, I start up the pump (sucking from the bottom of the barrel) and immediately capture some oil and do a pan test. So far, using this method, I have had no bubbles.

When I do the pan test, I heat the cast iron pan to about 280-300F, then dump in the oil. No bubbles in any of the batches I've done, except one, where I sucked up a bunch of crud from the bottom of a cube. VERY fatty and I had to resettle and reprocess that whole batch.

The piping itself doesn't retain much of anything because the assembly that I build to hold the centrifuge is all threaded pipe, so when I want to make sure I drain all the lines, I just tilt the whole assembly in the direction that I want to drain everything out (hope that makes sense). In fact, I think the piping makes it easier and less messy to capture all the output.

Wade

Just set up my centrifuge. Have to wait until this weekend to fully test it out.






Got lots of tips from this thread. It has help a lot!! Thanks guys.

Also feel free to make suggestions.

Looks good, nice and clean....mine started like that too...

Where is your pressure regulator, or bypass? I'd be nervous running it without that - blowing a rotor out is fairly easy from what I have heard. I've never had it because I have a pressure relief valve.

Also, I think you'd get better water evaporation if you didn't have that restrictive pvc down pipe, especially if it is going to actually be in the oil.

By the way, those of you with the pressure relief valve from Lowes: It has a little grommet on the part that closes the valve. Eventually it wears out and you'll notice it passes oil at lower and lower pressures.

I took it out and took the grommet off, and it works fine without it. So if your pressures are dropping a bit each week and you don't know why, it could be that.

Mine probably wore out quickly becuase I am using the centrifuge to clean my biodiesel too, but I think the WVO will wear it out eventually too.