Is It Feasible To Make Your Own Bio-diesel?

Biodiesel can be made at home using waste vegetable oil, methanol and sodium hydroxide. The reaction removes the glycerol group from the fatty acid, producing long chain hydrocarbons exactly like diesel but typically without the sulfur contaminants.

You will find a recipe, pictures and books about making bio-diesel on the web.

Take special note of the safety precautions involved in using methanol (flammability and toxicity on skin contact) and caustic soda (highly corrosive). You should equip yourself with material safety data sheets for these as well as safety glasses and appropriate disposable gloves (I suggest nitrile type gloves) at a minimum.

The alternative is to use the waste vegetable oil directly without processing it into bio-diesel. This involves a conversion of the diesel engine, fuel tank system and probably your fuel processor.  

Tips on the waste oil that you collect for this purpose are:

Make sure it is a liquid vegetable oil rather than animal fat, hydrogenated oil or palm oil, as these latter will solidify.

Get oil that hasn't been overused, this way it has a higher fatty acid content.

Oil that has been used to cook chicken will not stay liquid in cool weather.

You will need to filter the oil well as suggested by Rob, you can make this a little easier for yourself by sourcing oil from high quality shops that already filter the oil themselves (you'll still need to filter yourself, though). You can use holding tanks that allow pre-settling of particles before you filter it.  

The oil will also be contaminated with water, which you can do some simple tests for. This water must be removed.    

For the information on using waste vegetable oil, I  acknowledge the article "Running on fish shop fuel:how to convert your vehicle", by Marcus Deuchar, published in the Jan 2008 number of The Renew Magazine, by the Alternative Technology Association of Australia.

Lots of people go to the local fried food joint and offer to haul off the fryer grease. It has to be filtered down to 3 microns. Then the Dual tank vehicle has to have heater core tubing run through the vegetable oil tank(it turns solid when cold) then you have to run the engine on desiel until the other tank reaches the optimum temperature for the injectors. When shutting down the vehicle you have to turn off the oil tanks pump wait until the car dies(you cant leave the oil in the lines)


This would be the cheapest way with the least involvement.

That's easy used cooking oil  then you do every thing else the same way with normal oil

There are web sites on this exact thing you mentioned. I personally don't think it would be a good idea to do if you are doing it to save money. It is really a good idea but is just an experiment. The oil to use would be a problem finding also, plus all the time changing it into fuel for the vehicle.