Salvage waste motor oil, transmission fluid, old diesel that has water in it, whatever type of fuel that you might be able to have access to, wouldn’t it be great to be able to take that fuel and run it in your vehicles and not throw it away? If or have to recycle it, you can recycle it yourself.
STEP 1 : FILTERING THE WASTE OIL
Well, one of the ways is to filter. But filter material is expensive, and you got to constantly replace it. So I was introduced to this filter. Actually, it’s a centrifuge by USfilterMaxx.This is just our initial test where we’re going to take waste motor oil, and dump it in the top of the centrifuge spinning at about 3000 RPMs or more.
And then we’re going to drain and the result will be waste will be sludge in one bucket and clean motor oil and the other that can be mixed with diesel or run straight.
In some diesel engines be careful on how you do this, you don’t wanna mess up your injectors. But for old diesel engines that are very pretty forgiving, this is a great solution.
So again, this stuff will go in my tractor or my old two-cylinder diesel generator, but I’m just taking waste motor oil, and spinning out everything to make fuel, waste, or motor oil has a ton of BTU’s in it. And mixing it with diesel makes for a very good sustainable solution.
This is just some motor oil, nice and black from a friend of mine is changing oil in his truck. And we’re gonna start with a two and a half-gallon batch and run this through the centrifuge and see what she does with it. So you can see how black it is.
STEP 2 : RUNNING THE CENTRIFUGE
Run the centrifuge to start introducing the waste oil. Okay, we’re starting to get this filtered oil out. We’re just doing a two-and-a-half gallon batch run here. And then we’re going to shut the centrifuge off.
And the only way to really tell if we did anything was to see how much sludge is left in the centrifuge. That doesn’t work until the centrifuge stops spinning because all the sludges are gonna be stuck to the outside wall.
The sludge starts coming out. The centrifuge has stopped spinning, everything moves to the center and that’s where the drain plug is.
This is the guts of the centrifuge. When this is spinning, it takes the oil coming in and pushes it out, and it comes over the dam, the clean stuff comes over here, it looks like it never had oil on it. And then that drops in here to come out the clean tube. When you stop spinning, the internal drain here. That’s where the sludge is coming.
The centrifuge run off a 220 power source. So you will need a generator or grid power to run it, or a pretty good battery bank in an inverter to run it
We’re gonna take our motor oil that we’ve just spun in a centrifuge, and we’re going to put about a gallon and a half of it in this five-gallon jug, and then I’m going to add a gallon and a half of diesel. We’re gonna pour some of our motor oil mix and veggie. I mean motor oil and diesel 50-50 combination first.
STEP 3 : ADDING A HEAT EXCHANGER
We’ve added a few cool features to our centrifuge we added a shell and tube heat exchanger made out of copper. So we can take hot water and heat the oil, the stored oil to a point where the viscosity is, is much lower, and it’ll spin out a lot cleaner. We’ve added a little solar direct drive water pump, throwing off a little 20-watt panel, and moving the hot water through the shell and tube.
We’ve also added a P-trap to make sure any of the vapors from the hot oil do not escape into the clean oil bucket. They stay in the centrifuge and actually are evacuated out of the sludge side.
We use thermo siphoning using a used water heater for the heat.This is easy heat, there are no pumps, just thermo siphoning up to this tank and then using the little solar pump to take the hot water off the top of that tank and run it to our shell and tube.
So pretty much off-the-grid water heating, heating lots of water using a thermal siphoning process.
Image Credits :Engineer775 | Youtube
