quote:

Thanks Dana for the words, I am sorry if i have been rude to you and John that was not my intention.

No offense taken or intended myself. But on a text based forum it is very easy for a discussion to degenerate if any of the participants percieve that rudeness is intended in anothers post...even when it isn't. I thought it might be helpful to mention this in passing in order to help avoid that in this discussion. I did not intend it to become a major side topic.

Moving on...

quote:

I do think that the water freezing breaks the bond with the oil and helps separate the water out.

Might it be useful to design a simple experiment to determine if this is true? It would not only seem simple to do so using ones refrigerator...it might generate useful info on dewatering that has not yet been presented on this forum or anywhere that I am aware of. This would seem to be a seperate topic so I will start it as a seperate discussion so as to not further derail this one..

quote:

No...but given the stated limitations it is the most practical in several circumstaces

Hi Dana.

I was responding to a statement made by Ron, who was responding to a statement made by Anson. At the time that I mentioned an alternative to a CF that would meet Ansons stated performance goals (55 Gal/15 min.), he had not yet stated the limitations imposed by on-board application.

quote:

I have well over 1/4 of a million miles of vwo driving on oil processed with upflow settling and single pass gravity filtering.

Wow, Ron, that's great!

John -- A question about the amount of clear top oil you have in your winter-settled cubees in the spring, this is just to get a comparison of the quality of oil that you collect compared to what I collect.

How many inches of clear oil do you have in the top of the cubees in the spring during the period where the temps are above freezing but below 50 deg f?

All my oil is used for frying meat as well as fries and onions etc, under my similar over-winter cubee settling I only end up with 3-4 inches of clear oil on the top in the spring, I would have to collect 4-5 times as much oil as I do now if that were all the oil I had available as vehicle fuel. I filter warm but because of this I don't burn any veg in the unheated vehicle once the weather starts dropping below freezing as the high melt fats solidify out of the blend and clog the unheated vehicle filters.

The cleaned and dried mixed meltpoint oil is stored in electrically heatable 275 gallon fueloil tanks, I fill 30 or so 5 gallon jerry cans from these from time to time over the winter, this oil get used for drip heater home heating fuel.

Wood stove fuel from dregs - Do you do any processing of the crud from the bottom of your cubees or do you mix crumbs, fry chunks, and everything else found in the bottom of your cubees with the sawdust, minus any free water, I would assume? I usually have an inch or two of free water on the bottom of my settled cubees.

My oil cleaning process is described here.

Cheers John, thanks for taking the time to post all of this info - it saves newbies (me) a lot of wasted time going through the various options, instead just cut to the chase -

Happy New Year to all,

David

Nice work John.

Is anyone using 275 gallon totes instead of 55 gallon barrels? John any reason why it would not work?

I am from the biodiesel side of things and we currently place the oil directly into a tote and draw from the top. It works ok but only if we have plenty of time to let it settle.

We probably wouldn't even have to worry about filtering the oil since it would be used to make biodiesel.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Reggie,

quote:

Originally posted by john galt:

I'd take the output off the top fitting....

Do you mean remove the input? off the top and move it to the drain?; or am I confused?

If you add oil from the top via a dip tube it helps to direct the flow sideways at the bottom of the dip tube. The bottom gunk is stirred up much less.

quote:

Originally posted by Reggie:
Is anyone using 275 gallon totes instead of 55 gallon barrels? John any reason why it would not work?

I am from the biodiesel side of things and we currently place the oil directly into a tote and draw from the top. It works ok but only if we have plenty of time to let it settle.

We probably wouldn't even have to worry about filtering the oil since it would be used to make biodiesel.

I don't see any reason why a tote wouldn't work for upflow settling. You do want to make sure all the fittings including the top one don't leak since the tank will be always be slightly pressurized.

Since the top fittingis near the front, you will get slightly better settling if you extend a tube about 2/3 of the way across the bottom toward the back of the tank. That way the good oil will make a slightly diaginal path from the bottom to the top which will be a little longer path for a little longer settling.

Evenly heating a tote might be a little more difficult. Probably surrounding it with heated air by building an insulated box around the tote would work well.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Ron Schroeder,

I don't have the luxury of presettling in the cubies for two reasons.

1. My wife would kill me if I had cubies stacked all over the place.

2. I don't want to have to dispose of the fats so heated upflow settling allows the fats to stay clear and liquid during the settling process.


For absolute minimal space, I have in the past eliminated storage compleatly. I ran the output directly from the filter into 5 gallon fuel jugs. Whenever I needed a jug of fuel, I would place an empty jug below the filter outlet and then dump 5 gallons of cruddy oil into the big funnel on top of the settling drum. Since the oil going in forces an equal amount of oil to come out, if I only put in as much waste oil in as my fuel container would hold, nothing would overflow. If I put 5 gallons of waste oil in the top, I could go away and let gravity do it's thin without me watching and the 5 gallon fuel jug would never overflow.

At that time, I was processing 5 gallons a day in a small apartment closset with about 3 minutes of work a day.

Thanks for all the good info.

One concern I have is when we fill the tote with the most recently collected oil. We currently collect oil with a tote using a 3.5 Brigs engine with a Teel pump or we use our a 300 gallon super sucker propane tank on wheels. We use pressure to empty the propane tank and the pump to empty the tote. Both would create much more stirring action than poring cubies into a 55 gallon barrel.

On the other hand it is still probably better than what we are doing now.

so has anyone tried making a restaurant's drum into an upflow setup? potential issue might be if they're adding the oil straight from the fryer the heat could cause some convection... even then still seems like it would be helpful, and it's so easy/cheap to do..

But, you are not removing water. The advantage of upflow and even heat in the finish barrel is removal of water. Chris

quote:

Originally posted by Ron Schroeder:
I don't have the luxury of presettling in the cubies for two reasons.

1. My wife would kill me if I had cubies stacked all over the place.

2. I don't want to have to dispose of the fats so heated upflow settling allows the fats to stay clear and liquid during the settling process.


For absolute minimal space, I have in the past eliminated storage compleatly. I ran the output directly from the filter into 5 gallon fuel jugs. Whenever I needed a jug of fuel, I would place an empty jug below the filter outlet and then dump 5 gallons of cruddy oil into the big funnel on top of the settling drum. Since the oil going in forces an equal amount of oil to come out, if I only put in as much waste oil in as my fuel container would hold, nothing would overflow. If I put 5 gallons of waste oil in the top, I could go away and let gravity do it's thin without me watching and the 5 gallon fuel jug would never overflow.

At that time, I was processing 5 gallons a day in a small apartment closset with about 3 minutes of work a day.

john said he gets clean dry oil off the top of the first barrel. froggo et al says they've had mixed results so they heat it, etc.
at the very least it will help considerably with settling so that when you go to collect from their container you have less settling/filtering to do.
you could also put a band heater on the drum and use their electricity hehe

quote:

Originally posted by anson:
so has anyone tried making a restaurant's drum into an upflow setup? ....

We are on the same wavelength on this one. Had the same thoughts long ago. Would just have to (easier said than done) make the unit for them. Hard part though would be figuring out a way to safely (you got to make it easy and safe for the employee's)As in... how do you make it easy for them to get the oil UP to the top container that gravity feeds down into the upflow container below. maybe if your upflow tank was a low fat tank instead of a tall drum would be best. Drum on it's side? That way you could keep your gravity feeder lower to the ground and easier for the employee to pour the oil in. Short fat tank may not be as good of an upflow vessle but you do end up with a lower liabilty situation.

below is an drawing of
. bucket the employe takes outside full of oil and sets on a stand.*
. Plug hose and valve attached to bucket to hose from sideways 30gal drum and tighten clamp.
. Open valve to drain bucket into upflow tank.

* I should have drawn the stand to sit the bucket on OVER the top of the lower sideways drum. More compact unit that way.

Upflow_collect.bmp (88 Kb, 69 downloads)

quote:

Originally posted by Windsolar:
But, you are not removing water. The advantage of upflow and even heat in the finish barrel is removal of water.

Put the up flow settling system to the test. It removes free water but not dissolved water.

Freezing, heating or presettling may be removing dissolved water but upflow settling itself does not.
Test it for yourself and see.

quote:

Originally posted by john galt:

quote:

has anyone tried making a restaurant's drum into an upflow setup?

Perhaps something like this but with 1/3 of a 55 gal drum for the upper one.

I added a pic to my post above simular to yours. Just used a sideways 30 gal drum for upflow so employee does not have to climb up something to pour in the oil.

I imagine you could make a semi-upflow system in a grease dumpster. Put a baffle in the middle of the tank, that extends from the floor of the tank to 3/4 full. Then force the "input" to run down the front of the dumpster to keep disturbance to a minimum...the front half will settle until it gets high enough to overflow into the back half of the dumpster, then you collect from the rear half of the dumpster.

Sorta like a fiberglass septic tank.