I picked up a dozen 16 litre pails of what I thought was just used fryer oil. This is a new Greek resturant in my area. The pails had used fryer oil along with a lot of food, water and some Tazziki sauce (don't know if I spelled that right)(it's mostly sour cream). This layer of sour cream crap seams to be near the top of the oil. Does anyone know how I can save this oil from going back into the dumpster? I have screened the oil into a drum and it looks like PHO with all that cream in it. I have talked with the resturant owner and they will now only put the fryer oil into my clean pails. All the other stuff will go in the dumpster.

Thanks for all advice.
Todd

The fats in the cream should convert into bio but there may be a bit of water attached.

Try converting a small sample.

quote:

Originally posted by sinbad:
but there may be a bit of water attached.

A BIT????

I would recommend you heat this oil either to dry it or to let it settle out. If you stir this oil up thoroughly and it looks creamy, you are going to loose a lot of yield on your Bio.

In my experience, virtually all oil will clean up to something usable, the question is just how much energy do you have to put into it. If you have the ability, put it all together in a drum, seal it up and come back in summer. the oil will settle and clean up and you can pump the good stuff off the top and then heat up the crap at the bottom and get more oil still once you get the water out.

I would strongly suggest you don't use this until you have either dried or settled it.

Thanks guys. SO you guys think given enough time and settling that you can seperate the crap from the oil? I have a tank that I can put the oil/crap mix into and it has 2 drain valves one at the bottom and the other 1/2 way up the side. This tank also has a 200 watt electric heater element. I can set the heater to cycle on and off to cycle the mixture temperature. This should help to speed up the settling. I can check it and drain any crap off the bottom. Think this will work?

I don't do the biodiesel thing, it's straight WVO in a two tank system. I have read a bit about making biodiesel. I have been thinking about starting to try and make a few small batches.

Thanks
Todd

I have never used heating elements but I think you would have to be very careful about causing convection currents in the drum which would stir things up and put you back to square one.
I read about this but didn't give much weight to the idea until I found it happening in an up flow settling tank I had. It was a lot more powerful that I ever would have thought.

I would get the drum as hot as you could (up to 95oC) and then just let it stand at least a month before drawing off the clean oil from the top and drying it properly. It will NOT pass a hpt unless you dry it by heat, evaporation or both.

The creamy sludge that remains at the bottom can be heated over a fire and the water boiled off and then left to settle the rubbish out again before filtering the oil. If there is a lot, you might be better off just disposing of that as the time and effort to clean it up would be better off spent collecting better oil in the first place.

Other than the sour cream you are describing about all the oil I collect.
I do a water wash on ALL my oil, the food particles absorb the water, become heavier, and drop to the bottom. The water will also wash out most of any other water soluble contaminants such as vinegar or whatever. I stir a cubie of water into a 50 gallon barrel of warm 100 deg oil til it looks like peanut butter and keep the thermostatically controlled heaters on continuously, let it settle for at least a week and the oil will look very clean but still need more filtering to remove the very tiny stuff that is so small and light that it stays suspended in the oil even after it has absorbed water (you unaided eyes can only see particles down to around 40 micron).

For an even more thorough cleaning add a pound of baking soda to the water before you add it to the oil, this will reduce the majority of Free Fatty Acids in the oil, removing these will help lower the cloud and solidification temp of the oil but the soap reaction will bubble for up to a week and you will then need to settle the oil for another week once the bubbles stop. The BS, along with the water, converts the FFA to soap, the soap contains water so will drop to the bottom of the barrel just above the free water and crud. This BS water washing has allowed me to process over 500% more oil through my filtering setup before I need to change the filters, I can clean well over 500 gallons of oil on one set of filters (total oil cleaned, not figuring the circulation). I filter excessively, passing the oil through the nominal rated filters well over 50 times by circulating the oil round-n-round, the output of the four series filters is sprayed back across the warm air at the top of the open filter barrel to help with water removal by evaporation.

I warm-settle the water wash oil for at least a week then pump off the clean oil from the top until I get to the creamy soap layer. I then let the oil settle warm over night in the filtering barrel and draw off any small amount water that settles out using the bottom drain outlet of the filtering barrel, I then start the filter circulation pump and run it for 2-3 days continuous.

The creamy soap and crud layer in the bottom of the settling barrel is soft enough that it can be run through a pump with no problem. Once I pump the barrel empty I turn it over and flush it out using a pressure washer.

More complete description of my cleaning method. This discussion needs updating, I burnt up the temp controller in the FE so am now dewatering using evaporation by spraying the warm oil across the top of the filtering barrel.

Thanks Tim. This sounds great, just the info I was looking for. What I have started to do is pour off any good oil from each pail and put it through my filter set up. The remaining crap I am screening out the big stuff and then into a 300 litre plastic recycle bin. I have installed two valves one at the bottom and one 1/2 way up, also installed a 200 watt heater with thermostat. With this set up I should be able to mimic what you are doing. I read through your write up on your "vegoil cleaning procedure". I think even if I followed your step #3 I could get some good oil out of this crap. I think I will try some small batches with baking soda.

Thanks everyone for all your advice.

Taziki is made with yogurt, not sour cream.

quote:

Originally posted by kirkh:
Taziki is made with yogurt, not sour cream.

YOGURT!!! Yuk I hate yogurt and I'll bet my diesel does too.

Being a water based milk product I would expect this to wash out in a water wash of the oil?