OK,

I've been struggling here. We've been putting our oil in a tote, letting it settle & then pulling off the top for 1-2 years. Recently our batches haven't been fully reacting, & it's gotten much worse very quickly.

I've checked our methanol, lye, heat, circulation, etc. They're all good. Oil has a bit of an odor, & I've found that the titration has been steadily increasing. I strongly suspect that I've got a bacterial growth. When I process, if I let settle for days I'll get about 30% yield. Another 50% is a white cloudy 'stuff', then the glycerin at the bottom.

But in the time it's taken us to get to this point, I've filled up our tote & we've got over 300 gallons of 'bad' oil.

I've read other threads that say to process as normal. That's not my experience. I'm not going to dump this problem in someone else's dumpster nor do I want to dump it down the creek. Ideally I'd like to find a way to make this oil usable.

Anybody else have this experience? Would it be Ok for someone running WVO (they'd filter/dewater)? I think our problem has been that we let water collect in the bottom of the tote & weren't draining it regularly.

We'll be flushing out all of our equipment, that's a given. I've had guys recommend pouring chlorox in there, biocide, boil it, etc. But that will just kill bacteria & still leave it in there to muck up the reaction. Help!

The more I think I'm learning the more I realize I've got so much more to learn!

-tony

There's only a couple chemical changes the oil can go through as it gets older -- it can get rancid (titration goes up) and it can polymerize (like paint drying out).

What is your titration value now?

When you say your batches aren't fully reacting, what do you mean? What are they doing? More soap? That would mean rancidity.

It could just be getting wetter, or your methanol or lye could be getting wetter.
Have you been checking for water before every batch?

Let's try to analyze what's actually changed here...

In my experience all of my rancid smelling oil was related to water. Once I dried the rancid smelling oil the smell went away and it processed as normal. Experiment with a small test batch and see what you get.

Ken

Guys,

Good news, I've figured out a solution.

Now, to answer some of the questions. Our oil is usually in the 2-3 titration range. It was getting worse for a few weeks, & is around 10 now.

I know I had dried some of the oil in previous experiments, but I suspect it wasn't drying enough. I boiled some oil today, & got it up near 300F in the microwave, in short bursts. The oil kept bubbling, even up to that temp. And I had to mix the oil to get all the water boiled out. It was amazing, the oil was stop boiling, but I would put in a metal stick to stir and the oil would start boiling hard for a minute. It was a surprise in multiple ways, but the water really wanted to stay in there & it took some work to get it all out.

Now, I found a few ways that worked, but key to all of them was a through heating & removing water. One method was the baking soda in water, mix, wait 1-2 weeks, then boil off the water. That oil titrated down closer to 5, and my math says that baking soda is meaningfully cheaper the lye.

Another method was to mix glycerin still with methanol in with the oil, let separate, then process (titrated still high around 9). That oil post glycerin processing still had substantial water in it, but boiling it off & processing as normal but it did separate nicely & worked out well enough.

The third method was to simply to boil the oil to extract water. Titration was still high, but it processed well enough.

Note that everything was done as 1/2 liter samples. My plan is to scale this up to the barrel size. Heating a few hundred gallons of oil to 300F would cost a chunk in electricity. So, a simplier method will be to dig a small pit & put some grids over it big enough to hold 3 barrels. Then burn some wood under them (open topped barrels) to boil off the water. Yes, there is a little danger here. Obviously we want to keep the flame away from the oil. But the height of the barrel & limiting the fire size should work.

Anyone else have any other suggestions for how to heat the oil? And I may need to be doing this on a more regular basis.

I suspect a key part of my problem was that the bacteria may be a bonding agent between water & the oil. So water wasn't settling out & there was enough to prevent full reactions.

I hope this helps others...

-tony

I dewater my oil in a solar cooker -- try heating some up to boiling, then leave it in the sun all day in a black metal drum. The water should coalesce and fall to the bottom. Repeat for several days if needed.

If your oil titrates at 10, water is not the only problem. You'll lose a lot as soap and maybe emulsion if you do straight base.

My oil is around 8, and I do acid-base every batch, with good results and high yield.