Fueling your Car
Making Your Own Biodiesel
When I came across an article in a magazine about making your own biodiesel, my first reaction was “Yeah, right – get out of here!” However, as I read on, I discovered that it isn’t too hard to do. It looks to be on about the same level of difficulty as making your own beer, soap, jam or toffee. In fact, I think making homebrewed beer and wine might be harder. So I thought that this was such a handy thing to know about that I just had to find out more and pass the knowledge on.
However, before I get onto the recipe, please bear in mind that: (A) I haven’t tried this myself (yet), (B) you need to be really, really careful with all of the ingredients because a lot of them are very corrosive and (C) don’t put straight home-made biodiesel in your engine but mix it with regular stuff from the pump or the result may do something nasty to bits of your engine. Obviously, you need a diesel-powered vehicle!
Although you could do this project in your kitchen, it’s probably best to do it where you’re not going to be interrupted by cats, dogs or small children, or where idiots are going to mistake your project for something edible. Caustic soda is seriously nasty stuff. However, it is used as a drain cleaner and in that horrible spray used for cleaning inside ovens, so it’s not completely incompatible with kitchens. Gloves are an absolute must and I wouldn’t turn down a mask and goggles if they’re available.
First of all, you need a good source of waste vegetable oil. If you do your own deep frying, save the oil. Otherwise, try cafés, restaurants, tuck shops, canteens and takeaway outlets to see if they’ll give or sell you their waste vegetable oil. If you’re not a heavy user of veggie oil, you could try saving all the little dribbles of oil from your breakfast fried eggs but it’s going to take you ages to build up enough to be useful. Saturated fat doesn’t work too well, so skimming the fat off the soup or seeing what you can do with fat from a roast isn’t a smart idea.
Two fish and one scoop of chips for me, and the leftover oil for my car, thanks.
Ingredients:
- 1 litre of filtered vegetable oil plus 1 mL for titration
- 200 mL of methanol (this is the hardest ingredient to get hold of)
- 10 mL isopropyl alcohol (for titration)
- sodium hydroxide (caustic soda – try a hardware store)
- water (for the titration)
First comes the titration. Mix up the caustic soda: 1 gram to 1 litre of water. To work out how much caustic soda solution you need, put 10 mL of isopropyl alcohol and 1 mL of oil in a beaker. Use an eyedropper to add the caustic soda 1 mL at a time. Check the pH using litmus paper or one of those testers you get at swimming pool supply places after every mL of caustic soda. When the pH gets to between 8 and 9, you’ve hit the right spot. Count the number of mL of caustic soda you used and use the following formula to calculate how much you’ll need to make your biodiesel: number of mL + 3.5 = N. N is the number of grams of caustic soda you’ll need for your batch of oil. Use leftover caustic soda solution for cleaning the drains or making soap (and for goodness sake, label the container with a large warning label!)
Put your vegetable oil into one container and your methanol into another. Put N grams of caustic soda in a dish. Now you’re ready to get started. Make sure that the containers you use are a lot bigger than the amount of oil you’re working with in case things foam up when reacting. In the article I read, the people used 3-litre plastic bottles for mixing the oil and caustic soda/methanol solution to avoid problems with fumes, shaking the mixtures gently to stir them. You may or may not need to warm the oil gently – some of the many websites about making biodiesel say you do need to but others don’t.
Step 1 is to stir the caustic soda into the methanol. Stir well but don’t breathe the fumes in. Don’t touch the container, either, as this reaction gives off heat.
Step 2 is to carefully add the oil to the soda/methanol mixture. Stir well again. Be prepared for the mixture to react. (My eyebrows went up when I read this instruction – all the soapmaking recipes I’ve read, which also involve caustic soda and fat, tell you to add the caustic soda solution to the oil).
In Step 3, you leave the mixture to settle. Leaving it overnight is best. When you come back the next morning, you’ll find a layer of glycerine down the bottom and the biodiesel up the top. The longer you leave it, the better.
Step 4 is the tricky bit: separating the glycerine from the biodiesel. Let the glycerine dry out a bit and use it for soap. The biodiesel goes into your fuel tank.
If you use too much caustic soda, you’ll end up with soap, which isn’t a total disaster!
If you try this, let us know how you get on.
Happy driving,
Megan
How Far Can You Go On One Tank?
I don’t know about you, but I’m always trying to go for as long as possible in between trips to the bowser. There are a number of ways of eking out the fuel and minimising your fuel consumption, but how far can you go on just one tank?
According to the Guinness Book of Records for 2014, the furthest you can go on one tank of fuel is 2545.8 km, which was achieved by a pair of Croatian drivers named Marko Tomac and Ivan Cvetković. They were driving a Volkswagen Passat 1.6 TDI Bluemotion which was not modified and had to carry two people plus their luggage. This is the second time that the Volkswagen Passat 1.6 TDI Bluemotion has picked up a world record for hypermilage, as the pair of British drivers who held the record busted by the Croatian team also drove one of these super thrifty little beasts. Drivers watching their petrol pennies take note. Crunching the numbers reveals that this adds up to 32.2 km/litre, which is the equivalent of 3.10 litres/100 km. As the drive was made over a variety of roads in Croatia, we can presume that this is combined fuel economy.
The little Passat also holds the record for the world’s best fuel economy for non-hybrid cars, with a team of two US drivers clocking up 3.10 L/100 km on average as they drove through all 48 of the contiguous states in the USA (i.e. not Alaska or Hawaii), a trip that took six fuel top-ups and 13,071 km. However, for the same drive, the record holder overall (i.e. with hybrid cars included) is a 2006 Honda Insight , which managed 3.16 L/100 km.
Kia Optima hybrid), the rest of us have to be realistic. Little hatchbacks just won’t fit our lifestyles and our families. But we still want to save a few cents at the bowser. What can we do? Well, there are a few things.
- Watch what you’re carrying as luggage. The official records required the cars to carry two people plus luggage to make the comparison fair. This is because every 25 kg increases your fuel consumption by 1%.
- Keep the air-con off. The air-con is powered by your engine. Opening the windows is a thriftier option, until you get up to higher speeds. On the open road, having the windows down creates more drag and reduces aerodynamics, thus making you burn more fuel.
- Drive smoothly and without aggression.
- Pick the right gear to keep the revs at their most efficient.
- If you can select your drive mode, put it on Eco. Most cars with selectable modes have the Eco option.
- Whip off the roof rails if you don’t use them. Obviously, if they come as standard fitted to the car, you can leave them on, as removing them may damage the vehicle and they will have been designed to be aerodynamic. But ski pods and the like shouldn’t live up there full-time.
- Keep your tyres at the right pressure. All tyres leak. If you want to see the difference between fuel consumption with a flat tyre and with a properly pumped tyre, get a bike. Let a bit of air out of the tyres and ride around the block. Now pump the tyres back up and ride the same circuit. You will feel the difference.
Where You Don’t Want To Fill The Tank
So there you are, stopping off at the petrol station to top up the tank of your good old family Toyota . Like most people, you’ll roll your eyes at the amount that whizzes up on the bowser and remember back in the Good Old Days (I must be getting near middle age if I’m starting to use that phrase) when filling up the tank didn’t cost nearly as much as half a week’s groceries… which is only a slight exaggeration.
And it’s certainly a fact that Australia is a pricey part of the world to buy petrol in, especially premium petrol. In the OECD countries, it’s in the top ten most expensive places to fill the tank with premium. At the end of the December 2012 quarter, the countries in the world where you don’t want to fill up were:
- Spain
- The Netherlands (no wonder bikes are so popular over there)
- Hungary
- Luxembourg
- Slovak Republic
- Australia
- Sweden
- Germany
- Ireland
- Canada
(This list doesn’t take taxes and levies into account – these vary from country to country and make true comparisons a bit harder. It just looks at the actual stuff your car burns.)
What about regular or non-premium? Things look a little bit different for Australia here, thankfully. In fact, we’re the country with the third biggest gap between the price of regular and premium, with Canada and Mexico having bigger gaps (the smallest gaps between premium and regular are in Germany and New Zealand). A lot of countries don’t have regular petrol, either, and are stuck with premium – and this includes the poor old Spanish and Dutch. The worst places for regular petrol are:
- Denmark
- Germany
- Czech Republic
- Austria
- New Zealand
There’s always diesel, of course. Again considering the plain price of the fuel rather than anything with any taxes or levies shoved onto it, Australia comes out very well indeed. Here’s where you can get the fourth cheapest diesel prices in the OECD – only beaten by New Zealand, the USA and Mexico. The places where diesel was priciest were:
- Turkey
- Norway
- The UK
- Italy
- Sweden
- Ireland
- Finland
- Hungary
- Germany
- Denmark
You might ask where the cheapest places are in the OECD are. Well, the graphs I found with these fascinating figures only had room for 24 countries so they went for the most expensive 24 in each category. However, the following seem to be good places to fill your tank:
Premium petrol: USA, UK, Austria
Regular petrol: Mexico, USA, Canada
Diesel: Mexico, USA, New Zealand (although the Kiwis clap a whopping big tax on diesel).
The moral here seems to be that driving the way they do in American movies is a really bad idea.
And spare a wee thought for our trans-Tasman rivals. At one point this year, their government was considering increasing the per-litre tax clapped on petrol on the grounds that the public had changed their fuel consumption habits (buying cars with smaller engines like Suzuki Swifts or looking out for hybrid vehicles like the Nissan LEAF, etc.) and The Powers That Be weren’t getting enough revenue from petrol tax as a result. Not sure if this bit of lunacy went through or not in the end – lobby groups didn’t half kick up a stink – but here’s hoping that our government won’t get funny ideas as well.
Debunking ADR Fuel Consumption Figures
We’ve all seen the fuel consumption stickers attached to every new car’s windscreen. But how are the figures calculated, and what do they mean in the real-world?
As society shifts towards a green energy future, it was inevitable that the automotive world would be swept up by the ever-building wave of environmental sustainability.
Manufacturers were once boastful of their power and torque figures, with fuel consumption relegated to the fine print- if you could find a reference to it at all.
It was perhaps the energy crisis of the early 1970s which first gave pause for them to consider just how much fossil fuel their products were burning as they supplied mass transportation to the world. Since that time, mechanical carburettors have been surpassed by electronically-controlled fuel injection, a far more efficient and accurate method of supplying fuel to the engine. This process has been refined further, with today’s ‘direct injection’ petrol motors providing excellent engine response and power while also being frugal with fuel. Additionally, diesel engines have found wide-spread acceptance across the globe thanks to their headline fuel consumption figures (though their pollutant levels are another matter).
When shopping for a new vehicle today, the government has ensured that Australians have a set of combined fuel consumption figures which allow us to directly compare rival models. Set under Australian Design Rule 81/02, manufacturers have to provide a windscreen sticker on all new cars which shows ‘urban’, ‘extra-urban’ and ‘combined’ fuel consumption in litres per 100 kilometres.
How are these figures arrived at?
Using a chassis dynamometer in a workshop, a sample vehicle is strapped on to the machine’s rollers and taken for a stationery spin. Each car uses either pump-grade diesel fuel or 95-octane unleaded fuel to ensure there is no fuel advantage. It is then run over 20 minutes, simulating the stop-start conditions of an urban drive, followed with a sustained run up to freeway speeds. The figures garnered are then merged to provide the headline ‘combined fuel use’ figure.
Although these tests are thorough- they use fans to simulate air-flow and the rollers to generate inertia- it is nevertheless very difficult to paint a truly accurate picture of that vehicle’s performance on the road; the external variables are too great.
Think of everyone you’ve ever sat next to as they drove. They all have their own driving habits, and that affects fuel use. Other variables, such as the road surface, gradients, altitude, temperature, fuel quality…the list goes on.
In practice it is our experience that the simulated figures are very difficult to emulate in real-world conditions, particularly with modern smaller-capacity turbocharged cars (not to mention the traditional large-capacity V8s) when you want to use the available performance- which is the point of buying such a car in the first place.
In essence, the ADR combined fuel use offers a valid point of initial reference, but when shopping for a new car should be used as a guide only.
Level 2, 9 Help Street