More about Making Bio Diesel

What is Bio Diesel?

Bio Diesel is basically slightly refined vegetable oil that can run in ANY diesel vehicle with little to no modifications.  The vegetable oil used can be virgin, but it is generally recycled from fryers at restaurants.  Yes, the exhaust smells like whatever was fried in it.

Bio-diesel fuel is produced by combining newly extracted or used vegetable oils or fats with an alcohol and a catalyst.  The rather simple chemical process is called “transesterification.  ” The oils or fats are combined with methanol and a chemical catalyst, usually potassium hydroxide (KOH), to produce two end products: 1) mono alkyl esters (known as fatty acid methyl esters) and 2) glycerol (see Figure 1).  Mono alkyl ester is just a fancy word for saying Bio-diesel.

What Oils Can You Use?

Palm oil, coconut oil, tallow and lard are also summer fuels, with high melting points: they start to gel and set at quite high temperatures.  Biodiesel usually has a lower melting point (or "cloud point") than the oil it's made from, but if your weather is cool, avoid these oils and fats, at least for your first test batches.

Olive oil, peanut oil, palm oil, tallow, lard, can all contain more acids than the standard amount for refined edible oils (less than 0.  1%), and extra acid interferes with the biodiesel process.  For your first test batches you need oil with the standard acid content, so avoid these oils too.

Vegetable oil is much more viscous (thicker) than either petro-diesel or biodiesel.  The purpose of mixing or blending straight vegetable oil (SVO) with other fuels and solvents is to lower the viscosity to make it thinner, so that it flows more freely through the fuel system into the combustion chamber.

BIo Diesel Kits

The main aim of bio diesel kits is that they can convert the waste cooking oil into clean bio diesel.  Among many other bio diesel kits available in the market you can select the closed kits for enhanced safety.

Instead of buying bio diesel processing equipment separately, the bio diesel kits are cost effective and some manufacturers are providing 10 % discount also.  The second reason is that before buying the bio diesel kits you can buy the bio diesel starter kits first.  The bio diesel starter kits can produce 4 gallons of clean bio diesel.  If you feel comfortable in producing bio diesel then you can invest more in buying bio diesel kits.