I had a company interested in doing it with a Dash as a pilot plant. They never ended up ordering despite the engineer being very keen. They were a large recycling company that were interested in recovering petrol and diesel etc from waste tanks.
Define waste oil in diesel. Are you talking about refining diesel? I would think the cost of running your still would cost way more than any benefit you would gain. Refined oil is cheap, your equipment and power is not.
At my old welding shop I set up a simple still to reclaim dirty xylene (a kind of paint thinner used mostly, for us, to clean the oil and grime from mild steel before welding). As the price of xylene escalated and disposal costs increased it made economic sense to reclaim it.
Nasty, muddy looking xylene was transformed into like-new xylene with very little propane because it evaporates so easily.
The remaining nastiness that was left in the simple boiler was incinerated when no-one was looking.
As long as we kept up on it all was OK but if we slacked off it was easy to accumulate 50 gallons of the sludge and that was very, very expensive to dispose of.
Thanks for your comments. We have waste oil that includes ,gear,hydraulic, and engine oil all mixed together. I looked into what could be done with these products. I contacted a few companies that sell pyrolysis machines. The oil is put into a an air tight container heated the gases rises and are condensed, the syn gas is returned to heat the feeding container which eliminates any further heating costs. End product diesel and kero. All sounds so simple, but trying to do this is another thing. Machines are to expensive to buy for the amount we want to do.
@Derry if you can list the machine you were looking at we can research and maybe provide some sort of a hack._
The day you quit learning is the day you start dying!
"I am an incurable gadgeteer, and I like enormously to set up a theory and then track down the consequences" Murray Leinster
youtube.com/watch?v=08e9k-c91E8
Most auto shops around these parts have installed waste oil heaters, which I believe can use all manner of oils (motor oils, transmission fluids, hydraulic, gear oils, fuel oils, etc) in addition running with some % of included diesel. I hear the ROI is astronomical, and the proliferation of them clearly indicates that they are worth the investment. My cousin owns a shop, I dump my oil change oil there occasionally. I remember when he had it installed, I couldn't help but think how brilliant this was. You get paid to do the oil change, and then you get free heat, get paid twice.
In order for this to work you clearly need a steady stream of waste oil, at little to no cost, but if you lived in a moderate climate, it would be easy to save up waste oil through the warmer months in store for the cold. Even as supplemental heating you would see payback.
Otherwise if you don't have the volume to justify the investment, I suspect it's going to be much easier to just sell the waste oil to a recycler.
Interestingly it is a multi-process process which uses vacuum distillation as the final process to obtain different boiling / condensing point fractions. Lots of cleaning and purification along the way.
So would have to agree with Grim that without a lot of investment / experimentation sell it to a recycler or make a waste oil burner to heat the workshop or your still! There are lots of plans out there - especially on the home forge / metal casting sites
Comments
I had a company interested in doing it with a Dash as a pilot plant. They never ended up ordering despite the engineer being very keen. They were a large recycling company that were interested in recovering petrol and diesel etc from waste tanks.
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Define waste oil in diesel. Are you talking about refining diesel? I would think the cost of running your still would cost way more than any benefit you would gain. Refined oil is cheap, your equipment and power is not.
But Im keen to watch someone else experiment:)
At my old welding shop I set up a simple still to reclaim dirty xylene (a kind of paint thinner used mostly, for us, to clean the oil and grime from mild steel before welding). As the price of xylene escalated and disposal costs increased it made economic sense to reclaim it.
Nasty, muddy looking xylene was transformed into like-new xylene with very little propane because it evaporates so easily.
The remaining nastiness that was left in the simple boiler was incinerated when no-one was looking.
As long as we kept up on it all was OK but if we slacked off it was easy to accumulate 50 gallons of the sludge and that was very, very expensive to dispose of.
Thanks for your comments. We have waste oil that includes ,gear,hydraulic, and engine oil all mixed together. I looked into what could be done with these products. I contacted a few companies that sell pyrolysis machines. The oil is put into a an air tight container heated the gases rises and are condensed, the syn gas is returned to heat the feeding container which eliminates any further heating costs. End product diesel and kero. All sounds so simple, but trying to do this is another thing. Machines are to expensive to buy for the amount we want to do.
@Derry if you can list the machine you were looking at we can research and maybe provide some sort of a hack._
The day you quit learning is the day you start dying!
"I am an incurable gadgeteer, and I like enormously to set up a theory and then track down the consequences" Murray Leinster youtube.com/watch?v=08e9k-c91E8
Most auto shops around these parts have installed waste oil heaters, which I believe can use all manner of oils (motor oils, transmission fluids, hydraulic, gear oils, fuel oils, etc) in addition running with some % of included diesel. I hear the ROI is astronomical, and the proliferation of them clearly indicates that they are worth the investment. My cousin owns a shop, I dump my oil change oil there occasionally. I remember when he had it installed, I couldn't help but think how brilliant this was. You get paid to do the oil change, and then you get free heat, get paid twice.
In order for this to work you clearly need a steady stream of waste oil, at little to no cost, but if you lived in a moderate climate, it would be easy to save up waste oil through the warmer months in store for the cold. Even as supplemental heating you would see payback.
Otherwise if you don't have the volume to justify the investment, I suspect it's going to be much easier to just sell the waste oil to a recycler.
@MOCS I fount there is a basic right up of the process at Uses for recycled oil @ AU Gov
Interestingly it is a multi-process process which uses vacuum distillation as the final process to obtain different boiling / condensing point fractions. Lots of cleaning and purification along the way.
So would have to agree with Grim that without a lot of investment / experimentation sell it to a recycler or make a waste oil burner to heat the workshop or your still! There are lots of plans out there - especially on the home forge / metal casting sites