While contemplating about making my own vegetable oil using sunflower seeds and a Piteba expeller and then converting it to biodiesel, it came to me that I maybe able to run the diesel engine directly on the vegetable oil. That would not only save having to buy chemicals to produce the biodiesel (methanol and lye) but would also remove the wasteful by-product (glycerin) from producing the biodiesel. After researching this possibility, I found there’s one major problem. Vegetable oil is much to viscous to work in a diesel engine without some modification. The way to fix this is to heat the oil up until it becomes more fluid. But this becomes a problem when starting the engine from a cold start. The major method then to run straight vegetable oil is to, well, not use straight vegetable oil. Standard or biodiesel is used to start the engine until the engine and the vegetable oil is warm enough to be used. And, before shutting down the engine, it is switched back to regular diesel to purge the fuel lines so the engine can start again. The major downfall with this method is the fact that you still need diesel to run the engine. However, Elsbett has created a converter system that will allow the engine to run on the vegetable oil only. From what I understand, the system replaces the fuel injection system to allow for the thicker vegetable oil. I like to see if I could maybe convert a diesel generator using this system which would make a nice backup for an off the grid power system.
I was watching the new Discovery channel called Planet Green today and caught a show called Renovation Nation which is hosted by Steve Thomas from This Old House fame. He was showing a really interesting product, called Airkrete. Airkete is a sprayed cement foam insulation that you can use in replacement of standard fiberglass insulation in your house. The really neat part with this stuff is that it is completely non-toxic. No need to wear special respirators when working with it. Actually, it is so safe you can actually eat a bit of it if you can get past the taste. And, Airkrete is even more efficient than fiberglass.
I just came across a hand operated oil expeller on eBay built by Piteba. An oil expeller is basically a press that will take any high oil content seed like sunflower seeds and extract the oil from the seeds. So, how can this be an extremely green energy solution? Well, lets say you grew a whole patch of black oil seed sunflowers. You can take the tremendous amount of seeds the sunflowers produce, run them through the expeller, and get the oil from the seeds. You can then take the oil, do the minimal refining needed to convert it to biodiesel, and pump it right into your diesel vehicle. Any person who has the ability to do the biodiesel refining can literally grow their own biodiesel on their property. It’s ingenious.
I decided to watch the Discovery Science channel a bit today and saw a show called “Punkin Chunkin.” It was about the pumpkin tossing contest in Delaware showing all the insanely large pumpkin tossing devices including air canons and catapults. I have a few words about this show: I am so building my own punkin chunkin device! And I got a great design concept that will be completely different…world domination will be in my grasp!
This is an interesting concept. Homesteading is basically living off the land that you own. You produce and farm everything you need to live right from your own ground and not buy stuff from a store. Living that kind of life, in my humble opinion, is very noble. Your footprint on this earth would be minimized just to your property and that would be about it. Obviously it would take quite lot of external resources to setup a system like this as you would need ways to generate power and equipment to do the farming. However, after that, you’d be able to be completely self-sufficient until the equipment fails or something else goes wrong that needs external resources. But, I can definitely see that time frame last around a decade or so.
Yes, you read that right. From the same guys that made the solar powered hot water system I mentioned yesterday devised a system that takes only sunlight to melt glass (and do a bunch of other things). Take a look:
He’s using a massive fresnel lens to focus the sunlight to one extremely hot spot which is powerful enough to melt glass. I may just have to get one of those lenses for the fun of it…
Now this is an interesting project. Take a look at this video:
It shows how you can harness the sun to make hot water using just a PVC pipe cut in half and the inside covered with a reflective material. It’s an ingenious yet utterly simple solution. I may just have to try that out later.
Today I decided to finish up the camera dolly project by building the track. The track consists of two aluminum tubes six feet long and four 1″x3″ pieces of wood cut to around 20 inches. I attached the two tubes to the four pieces of wood by first drilling a large hole in the top of the tube to allow the head of a screw and the drill bit to pass into the inside of the tube and then a smaller hole directly opposite of the larger hole to allow the screw to pass into the wood. In between the tubes and the wood planks, there are four washers. Two rubber washers sandwiched between two metal ones to allow further vibration dampening. And since there is only one screw attaching each tube to each plank of wood, the whole track easily collapses allowing easy transport. The final result is quite amazing. It rolls extremely smoothly, and if I needed to, the track can be expanded.
So today I decided to check out the local book store and picked up this book called “Insultingly Stupid Movie Physics.“ I read only the first chapter so far, but I must say it’s a great book. It humorously points out the amazingly bad physics in most blockbuster films with some nice technical detail including real mathematics. I hope to maybe leverage the info in this book to make very realistic films in the long run.
I finally sat down and watched the Michael Moore documentary, Sicko, today. And even though it may have been a bit unbalanced in its portrail of Canada’s, England’s, France’s, and Cuba’s health care system, it really does strike home a very hard point about our failing health care system. It’s really sad to see that Cuba can give better health care than we do if you don’t have insurance. It’s also sad to see the stuff the insurance companies try to pull so they don’t have to pay. I’ve seen it myself. For the years I was in college, I couldn’t get health insurance because I had an extremely common condition that was nowhere near life threatening. Instead of just refusing payment on anything related to this condition, they flat out denied me coverage for everything. Luckily I didn’t get sick during that time, and the condition I had disappeared on its own. It could have been bad. And then, fast forwarding a few years later, I finally do get health insurance. However, the first major thing they had to pay for (a head MRI), they cited some sort of pre-existing condition that was nothing with nothing and refused to pay. After fighting with them, they finally paid out. I personally hope they don’t try to wiggle out of paying for my gallbladder surgery, but then again, I have a $4,000 deductible, so I probably will be ending up paying for the whole thing anyway. Between this and everything else that is wrong with this country, it really makes me wonder if I really want to stay here and pay taxes to this government. Canada seems all the more inviting…
