Quote:
Originally Posted by nerys
"Now a common sense comment for Nerys:"
No worries man totally my bad. I had incorrectly assumed because of the name (I did not know what methanol was) that methanol was the WVO equivalent for gasoline engines (I thought this because of the quantity he wanted)
Now Waste Vegetable Oil is NOT overly dangerous so I had again incorrectly assumed that the same applied to this what I thought was an equivalent for gasoline!!!
My fault for not googling methanol first! I am well aware of how DANGEROUSLY alcohols can be ESPECIALLY because the flame is usually not visible!!
I have not tried to make biodiesel yet so I never got far enough to know methanol was part of the process. :-)
Chris Taylor
http://www.nerys.com/ |
Still lots of misinformation in this thread. Let me clarify a few things:
55gal of Methanol will be used to produce 275 gallons of biodiesel. In the summer I'll use a drum in a month. That's only about 6 good batches for me. Rusting drum from sitting too long is probably not an issue.
Heet (gasline antifreeze) is pure Methanol, Iso-Heet is pure isopropyl alcohol.
Windshield washer fluid is mostly Methanol.
Methanol and ethanol are flammable, like gasoline. Handle them like you would gasoline.
"methanol was the WVO equivalent for gasoline engines" That statement makes no sense whatsoever. WVO and methanol should never be in the same sentence with gasoline engine, we are talking purely about diesel fuel alternatives.
Ethanol is a fuel that will act similarly to gasoline, and will mix with gasoline, but has lower BTU content, so mileage will suffer.
In my mind the biggest risk of methanol is that it's odorless, so you may have fumes present and not know it. Gasoline is very evident when fumes are present.
Drums are very difficult to muscle around alone, even your two-wheeled dolly needs to be a sturdy one.
Unless you can get a proper vehicle or trailer for cheap, my recommendation would be to have the $4 meth delivered. It still puts your per-gallon cost of BD to be $0.80 plus lye, or roughly $0.92 total