Free Micro Home Heating With Used Vegetable Oil

Free Micro Home Heating With Used Vegetable Oil

In previous blog I mentioned that we are going to build our first solar heated micro home and it will be totally off the power grid. A solar heated home has to have a back up system and I have been putting a lot of thought into it lately. We already build fuel system components and kits used in converting diesel engines to burn SVO (straight vegetable oil) so it was an easy leap to go from diesel fuel to heating fuel utilizing vegetable oil. There is plenty of free vegetable oil around, and it makes sense to use it while we can get it. So I researched a lot of articles written about burning waste motor oil and even found a couple of guys that have already built SVO powered heaters.
I decided to make some experiments this morning in an attempt to accomplish my goal in a more simple fashion than the semi high tech solutions I found on the Internet. I am quite pleased with my results for the morning. My low-tech solution was to take a very large cast iron frying pan with six ounces of vegetable oil in it, and set it nice and level in the bottom of my new back up wood stove we have in the cellar. Then I stuck a large ball of newspaper right down in the middle of the oil pressing down so it could soak some up. I lit the paper very easily and within less than five minutes we had a great little fire going and it was perfectly under control. I have been watching it on and off for three hours now and it is still burning. This tells me that when I build the smaller model that we will use in the micro home we will have a great source of heat and hot water, as I plan to use the SVO to make backup hot water too. The nice part is that wood now becomes our backup fuel if we run out of SVO.
I am sure that a lot of people are going to write to me with a great many suggestions on how to get more efficiency. I will carefully read them all and consider them, but I find in many cases that by being overly obsessed with absolute perfection the mission you started out to accomplish never gets finished. We have a micro home design that has now grown to 12 feet long by 8 feet wide by 10feet high to accommodate a sleeping loft, and we can heat it for at least three hours on three coffee cups full of straight vegetable oil in a converted wood stove that is sold on the Internet for $129.00. All we have to do is add the cast iron frying pan. It works for me.
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Thanks,
Walt