i have been poking around for a while now trying to absorb as much info as possible. i feel i now have a strong basic understanding and i am at a point where i can ask some specific questions.

background info
i live in truckee located in the sierra nevada mountains (approximately 6000 ft). i am interested in brewing and burning bd to heat the house, i currently burn red. i have a becketts afg burner. my storage tank is 550 gallons and is located outside. at the location of the tank, the roof sheds snow and it is a shaded part of the house. it is common in the winter for the tank to be almost buried. it does have a roof over it and i keep one side of the tank cleared of snow for access. the ambient temp in the winter can be down in the teens and possibly lower at times. currently, i do not have to do anything with the red. i have no problems with ignition or burning, no matter the outside temp.

from my reading, it seems this burner is a good candidate with some slight mods. my concern is the storage location of the fuel. can i expect the fuel to gel at these low temps? will i require a pre-heating system of some sort?

before i go to solicit wvo, i want to have all my bases covered and be ready to start collecting should i hit the jackpot.

It always seems that the winter weather report has Truckee as the coldest place in CA so my guess is you will have trouble with gelling. We tried some bd in a friends tank in Arnold and it jelled. His tank was inside a unheated shed.

Perhaps a pex wrap and a insulation blanket and a circulation pump from your hot water heater would work.

possible change of course. for some reason, i did not even think about burning wvo. i have been poking around the svo forum and guys/gals are burning wvo in place of hho.

this truly sparks my interest as i can save time/effort/$ of bd processing.

i am going to do more research on this topic.

Perhaps the way to go is a barrel at a time inside the house. This would probably not be any more labor involved on an on-going basis, since you will probably be batch processing the biodiesel or wvo anyway.

Good luck!

you lost me wvoalaska, please elaborate.

thanks.

What I'm saying is that you probably will not be dealing with 550 gallons of veg oil at a time. More likely, you will be dealing with smaller batches that you process (perhaps 30 or 50 gallons at a time). This would depend on what kind of filtration system you have set up, what source you have for vegetable oil, whether or not you choose to make biodiesel, how much work you want to do at a time, etc. My suggestion is that you probably will be better off having a smaller (55 gallon barrel, perhaps, or maybe an 80 gallon junk hot water heater tank) vegetable oil or biodiesel tank in your house where it will stay warm. You could even keep your exterior tank partly full as a backup for when/if you have troubles with your veg oil setup. This assumes you have space for a small tank somewhere in your house.

got it. that is an iteresting suggestion.

what i figured is that throughout the year i would be collecting oil, processing and then adding to the storage tank. as we typically do not use the furnace from about june until september, i figured this time period would give me a head start on collecting and processing.