Now that I«ve attained my first objective: effectiveness, I«m moving into the efficiency field. At least, I«m trying. My first goal was to make BD, and now I«ve become more or less familiarized with the process, so I«m checking out ways in which to reduce costs (moneywise and environment wise).
FINDINGS: You can use 96¼ Ethanol! WHY: Well, methanol is usually cheap, but unattainable at home. Ethanol instead can be produced from fermentation and fractional distillation. 96¼ EtOH is hard to get to at home (you need a good still), but there are others more experienced in that field on the group. I used 25% of 96¼ alcohol, and 75% of methanol to make up the ammount I needed to transesterify the WVO (i.e., 100 ml WVO, 50 ml EtOH & 100 ml MeOH). The lye I added freely: I didn«t weigh it (I did this simply because I was testing and I sort of trained my eye to the 0,5 g I needed, but this is not recommended). The rest of the process was same as always. The result was one of the clearest batches of BD after the first setting stage. I figured that if 96¼ Ethanol was mixed in adecuate proportions with a more pure alcohol, as methanol (mine was near 98.8%), the final ammount of water would still be low. In my case: 96% x 0,25 + 98.8% x 0.75 = 98.1% >From what I«ve gathered, less than 2% water usually works OK. If you can make your ethanol by fermenting free stuff like backyard grapes or something, then you could reduce the ammount of methanol required (the first is free, the latter you pay for). Anyhow, maybe the effort doesen«t pay off, but it«s worth a go. Regards, Christian [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> FREE COLLEGE MONEY CLICK HERE to search 600,000 scholarships! http://us.click.yahoo.com/DlIU9C/4m7CAA/Ey.GAA/FGYolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://archive.nnytech.net/ Please do NOT send "unsubscribe" messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
