Top 5 Reasons to NOT MAKE BIODIESEL

all right today we're going to talk about reasons why you should not make biodiesel i'm going to talk about five reasons why you shouldn't do it don't make biodiesel not a good idea so i think what we're going to do is we're going to do the five reasons uh why you shouldn't make biodiesel and then i'm going to upload a follow-up video a part two of this video and we're actually going to make some biodiesel we're going to do a 100 liter batch of biodiesel production right from source canola oil we're going to process it all the way through to a finished product that we'll we'll put in the car and burn it so i'm going to show that so this will be a two-part video you'll want to subscribe like comment subscribe all that stuff youtube people say and uh and you'll get a notification that way hit the bell and you'll get a notification when the follow-up video about making the 100 liter batch goes live there are some other videos i've done that you might want to look at you can see those in my channel take a look but with fuel prices doing what they're doing right now there's a lot of interest in in biodiesel production and i thought i'd do a follow-up video so first uh five reasons why you shouldn't do it let's start with that let's start with why not to do it um the first reason is you're going to make a big mess right this can be a very messy process if one of these valves gets accidentally knocked or left open or god forbid something fails one of the seals or one of these fittings cracks or something you could have 100 liters of biodiesel or vegetable oil or whatever all over your shop floor now this is an epoxy floor here not a big deal to clean up relatively but you could imagine you know you could imagine if it went on a concrete floor and start soaking into the concrete you're gonna make a big mess and it will happen at some point you will spill oil even if you just knock one of these over or don't have a bucket lined up correctly underneath that one of the drains if you're trying to process some oil you're gonna make a mess so don't make biodiesel because you're going to make a mess of your garage second reason would be so reason number two not to make biodiesel [Music] it's difficult sometimes to get the materials that you need not just the oil which if you're going to make bio diesel you're not going to use new oil because it's very expensive you're going to go to a restaurant maybe a local restaurant i've in the past got oil in these big jugs used oil from a pub that's near the near my house it's a pub that changes their oil quite frequently and the and the oil is quite high quality it's not dirty if you can convince a local restaurant to put their used oil back in the containers it came with and set it out for you that might be the the way to go so you'll have to have a relationship with somebody local who will do that for you but you know getting the oil is hard enough but it's not just the oil you need things like catalyst like this is potassium hydroxide flake right this is a i think it's 91 or 93 pure potassium hydroxide flake and you can get that it might be tough to get it you can i bought this at a chemical company but depending on what state you're in or what province or where you are in the world you might not be able to buy this there might be different rules you might have to have a license you might who knows materials are sometimes hard to get methanol as well you can buy methanol or methyl alcohol down at the hardware store at home depot or whatever but it's expensive it's really the only economic way to buy it is in big like 55 gallon drums from a chemical supplier but again a lot of chemical suppliers won't sell those to a retail customer you know you might have to have a company or something like that so so just getting the materials that you need to do this is difficult sometimes so that's reason number two why you shouldn't make biodiesel it's tough to get the stuff to make it not impossible but it's it's tough uh the third reason would be uh you might make the government mad right you're supposed to pay road taxes on fuel that you purchase at the um at the gas station and if you're making your own you're kind of going around that road tax system so there may be rules different state federal rules where you are um but be aware that if you're running biodiesel you may make the government mad so take that for what it's worth uh the fourth reason would be fire this stuff's flammable like methanol and even you know vegetable oil if it if it lights finished biodiesel it's not as flammable as gasoline but but methanol is you know so there's a real chance that if you start processing this stuff and adding heat to methanol and things like this that you know you could you could cause a fire so that's maybe one of the biggest reasons and probably your local fire codes don't allow you to make it i don't know about everywhere but there's uh there's a real fire risk so that's the fourth reason why you shouldn't make biodiesel don't do it fifth reason is you might wreck your car right especially as the older diesels that seem to run well on biodiesel like i run biodiesel in a 2003 volkswagen jetta and i'll put a picture of it up with a fairly modern diesel still but still an old-school you know not uh not a common rail diesel not a high pressure diesel it still is quite forgiving and it runs really well on biodiesel and i usually blend it with petroleum diesel anyway i usually do about a 50 50 mix which i think reduces the risk of if you had a bad batch of biodiesel or something if it's blended 50 50 with petroleum diesel the car is probably not going to mind you'll probably get through the tank without without too much trouble but on a newer vehicle common rail diesels or um you know these high pressure diesels uh you probably don't want to use biodiesel and you're probably going to void warranties if it's still under warranty etc i know there are some vehicles like i think ford's uh powers their 6.7 power stroke it says b20 you know a nice little green symbol on the side of the truck saying you can use up to 20 blend of biodiesel i don't know how sensitive those things are to to fuel quality whether it has to be like a commercially produced um biodiesel and whether something like what i'm making with that whether that would be good enough or whatever but be aware if you're making your own fuel and putting it in your car tank especially as vehicles get more sophisticated um you might wreck your car so that's the fifth reason why you shouldn't ever use biodiesel okay that's the five reasons um that's the first part of this video like i said subscribe and uh hit the bell and you'll get a notification when i upload the follow-up video which is the pro one you probably really want to watch which is where we actually go through the process of turning whoa i changed sorry that video got cut off i was saying that we'll go through the process in the next video which you'll see because you're going to subscribe where we take use canola oil in this case this stuff looks pretty clean then we've got some dirtier stuff here we're going to take some used canola oil and we're actually going to process it through the whole process into finished biodiesel which in theory one could put into a appropriate diesel car and run it so we're gonna go through that whole process we're gonna make a 100 liter batch so watch for that video it will be coming up i promise and we'll see in that video thanks

Channel: Greg's Garage

Views: 37,480

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Id: Wx0sgO7RdkY

Length: 8min 3sec (483 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 14 2022