I recently asked a friend who collects, filters and sells wvo, about the longevity of the stuff. How long can I store wvo before it will go bad? He didn’t have a definitive answer but his response is informative on many levels.

It’s hard for me to give you a good answer on this because I have had similar experiences to yours. I have have had UNFILTERED oil sit for only a few weeks and smell just awful, but I also have never had filtered oil go bad on me. I think that because we are required to render the oil, and then we remove all the particles that a year [of shelf life] can easily be achieved if the container is air tight and it’s not sitting in direct sunlight etc.. If i was going to have oil sit for a while i would buy a diesel biocide (a chemical designed to prevent growth) and add that to the veggie oil. Our oil doesn’t really get a chance to sit for too long, but like i said I’ve never had the filtered stuff go bad. Hope that helps!

We are witnessing a truly historic event and a turning point in what has been a very dark time for our country. For the first time in my political life, I am excited and optimistic about a Presidential candidate. Barack is the real thing.

Check out the first few minutes of his speech in St. Paul Minnesota on Tuesday night.

In a very interesting article in today’s NY Times, the full cost of ownership of various vehicles is compared. The difference in the cost of owning a Ford Focus and a Ford F-250 pickup (over five years) is $60,000! This is equal to the annual pretax income of a typical American family.

The most telling part of the article was this:

The company [General Motors] is also considering selling its Hummer brand, an emblem of the megavehicle. Rick Wagoner, G.M.’s chairman, explained the moves by saying that he thought the shift toward more efficient cars was “by and large, permanent.”

So GM has finally gotten the message loud and clear, about 35 years late.

According to the article, last month the Toyota Corolla and Camry and the Honda Civic and Accord all surpassed the F-Series trucks in new vehicle sales. “It was the first month since December 1992 that a car — not a truck —
was the country’s top-selling vehicle.”

That, plus Barack Obama clinching the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. The times they are a changin’.

I get frequent questions about the best way to filter oil. After three years of filtering oil, I have tried many different set ups and arrived at a pretty simple setup that works well for me. Here is a short video tour of how to set up a do-it-yourself system for filtering waste vegetable oil.

Note: The clicking sounds you hear are from a woodpecker just outside the barn. I’ll try to redo this video to improve the quality.

One popular question I get is how to set up a home fueling station. Here is a short video showing my home filling station for filtered waste vegetable oil. It is powered by solely by gravity.

Note: This is a do-it-yourself project. Vegcar.net doesn’t sell any products at this time, nor do we have plans to do so in the future.

My hosting company ehostpros.com had an explosion (literally) at their Houston server facility. No one was injured but all of their hosted sites were down for a little mover 24 hours. I’m testing the site now to see if we are back online.

The NY Times ran an interesting story today on grease theft. I love this bit:

The suspects in a growing number of grease infractions fall into a range of categories, people interviewed on the matter said, as grease theft is a crime of opportunity. They include do-it-yourself environmentalists worried about their carbon footprints, warring waste management firms trying to beat each other on the sly, and petty thieves who are profiting from the oil’s rising value on the black market.

Doesn’t “do-it-yourself environmentalist” sound disparaging? How dare they try to be environmentalists on their own! How pathetic that they worry over their carbon footprint. And “petty thieves” profiting on the black market! I love that one!

I never felt comfortable taking oil from a container without the permission of the restaurant. The relevant question though seems to be, is discarded fryer oil garbage? “Once you put something in the trash, it’s abandoned property,” said Jon A. Jaworski, a lawyer in Houston who represents accused grease thieves. “A lot of times, it’s not theft.” I am not a lawyer but I wonder about this. I have heard that trash is pretty much free for the taking. Trash has some monetary value. Some items can be salvaged or recycled.And, the container is usually owned by the proprietor, company or municipality hauling away the trash. How is discarded grease any different?

This quote from the article may give us a glimpse of what we might expect in the near future.

At Olympia Pizza and Pasta, Mr. Damianidis [the owner], who now sells his grease for a small monthly fee, finds the problem of stolen fryer oil quite annoying and distracting. And he wants to stop the thefts. He is leaning toward a security camera and hoping for the best.

“I cook food,” Mr. Damianidis said. “I’m not going to stay up until 2 in the morning trying to catch someone stealing a barrel of grease.”

I am reposting this post from July 26, 2006…

For a long time I have wanted to determine definitively how much cleaner svo (straight vegetable oil) burns compared to diesel and compared to gasoline. In a post on the lovecraftbiofuels website forum, Stephen Blackburn posts the results from having his car smogged. Remember, in California diesel vehicles are exempt from smog inspections (brilliant idea, eh?).

The results are impressive and confirm what many of us have believed all along, namely that using vegetable oil as a fuel reduces dangerous emissions significantly, even compared to many late model gasoline powered cars.

Here are the highlights:

1. HC (Hydrocarbons) - 8 ppm (parts per million)
   • new cars are allowed 40 ppm
2. CO% (Carbon Monoxide per gallon of fuel burned): 0.03%
   • new cars are allowed 0.9%
3. CO2% (Carbon Dioxide per gal. fuel burned) 14.3
   • Average is 14-15%. NOTE: the carbon removed from the air while growing the plants is greater than that released when it is burned. Therefore, airborne carbon is reduced with svo as a fuel.

Read the post for more details. One of these days I’ll get my car smogged to see how it rates on these emission measures. If anyone else out there has had their vegcar smogged, please send me the results.

According to the BBC, a UN report cites rising demand for biofuels as a contributor to higher food prices. :

“Biofuels are the largest new source of demand for agriculture and are causing higher prices,” said Merritt Cluff, one of the authors of the report.

“We are very worried particularly about biofuel policy. US government incentives for ethanol producers are distorting the market,” he added.

Unfortunately, the people hardest hit by rising food prices are the poorest people in the world, who spend a larger share of their income on food.

This is the result many of us feared from the increased use of vegetable oils to make biodiesel and ethanol. I hope that we will see a rapid increase in non-petroleum oil production from sources that don’t compete with traditional food crops. The one that first comes to mind is algae.