IHDiesel73L
Adventurer
As promised, here is my WVO filtration system. There are many ways to skin this cat and this is just one-look it over, get some ideas, make some improvements (but do me a favor and let me know so I can copy them 
), etc... I'll go over the main points first:
Collecting oil - I prefer to collect my oil in the containers that it's sold in. Basically, I ask my sources to drain the oil from the fryer back into the empty container it came in which is typically a 4.5 gallon plastic jug known as a "cubee." They look like this:
What I like about collecting in the cubees is that I don't have to deal with sucking oil out of a dumpster and they're easy to carry. The main issue with cubees is getting rid of the empties. Luckily my county has a recycling dump where you can take as much recyclable material as you want. So now that you've got oil it needs to be filtered.
Rough filtering - This was always the biggest pain in the rear for me. I filter my oil using a centrifuge (more on that later) and the centrifuge will filter out particles less than 1 micron, but the oil going into it must be filtered to at least 200 micron (about half the size of a grain of sand) to avoid clogging the jets. After straining oil through t-shirts (they clog quickly and don't work well with cold oil), pumping through small whole house water filters (they only work marginally better than the t-shirts), and other ill fated ideas, I settled on a pre-heating barrel (I pour dirty oil into it, bits and all, and heat it using electric hot water heater elements), a low pressure medium volume pump, and a heated industrial filter cartridge housing. The idea here is to always be filtering warm oil. This eliminates the problem of trying pump very thick cold oil through a filter which will usually collapse it, causing crud to get past the filter to places where you don't want it. Here are some pictures of the pre-heating barrel and filter housing:
Here are the heaters which are suspended in the barrel:
The oil is pumped via the blue pump on the left into the filter at about 10 GPM. You'll see later that I wrapped the filter housing with a pipe heating cable (the kind you use to guard against pipes freezing)-this combats a problem I was having filtering in an unheated garage. I would pump warm oil through the filter and then a week later find that the filter was plugged with cold partially hydrogenated oil and fats. With the heat cable I can liquefy the cold oil prior to filtering. Then its into the filtration barrel:
The filtration barrel consists of the barrel, the centrifuge, a heater to bring the oil up to 160 degrees, and a pump to operate it all. Here's a better view of the heater pipe here:
This is a direct copy of SunWizard's famous system which can be found over at the Infopop forums here:
http://biodiesel.infopop.cc/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/159605551/m/2001011761
Basically the idea is that you pump oil into the pipe which has hot water heater elements screwed into both ends via tees. When the oil comes out of the other end it's much hotter than before and then goes into the centrifuge. The oil recirculates, heats up, and gets cleaner with each pass through the centrifuge. The main components of my system are a Dieselcraft 0C-20 centrifuge, a Haldex hydraulic pump to drive it, a 1/2 HP electric motor to drive that, and some braided stainless steel lines to guard against blowouts.
Here's an overview of the whole thing:
The final component is the fill pump. I used to use the centrifuge pump as the fill pump via a manifold, but that got old really fast-the centrifuge pump is high pressure low volume-1 GPM to be exact, so a 60 gallon tank took an hour to fill. Therefore I upgraded to the 10 GPM pump in the picture along with a filler nozzle I picked up at a yardsale. I plumbed a bypass into it so that the nozzle can click off and not overload the pump or burst the hose. I didn't cover everything in this post, so if you have questions, post away...
), etc... I'll go over the main points first:Collecting oil - I prefer to collect my oil in the containers that it's sold in. Basically, I ask my sources to drain the oil from the fryer back into the empty container it came in which is typically a 4.5 gallon plastic jug known as a "cubee." They look like this:
What I like about collecting in the cubees is that I don't have to deal with sucking oil out of a dumpster and they're easy to carry. The main issue with cubees is getting rid of the empties. Luckily my county has a recycling dump where you can take as much recyclable material as you want. So now that you've got oil it needs to be filtered.
Rough filtering - This was always the biggest pain in the rear for me. I filter my oil using a centrifuge (more on that later) and the centrifuge will filter out particles less than 1 micron, but the oil going into it must be filtered to at least 200 micron (about half the size of a grain of sand) to avoid clogging the jets. After straining oil through t-shirts (they clog quickly and don't work well with cold oil), pumping through small whole house water filters (they only work marginally better than the t-shirts), and other ill fated ideas, I settled on a pre-heating barrel (I pour dirty oil into it, bits and all, and heat it using electric hot water heater elements), a low pressure medium volume pump, and a heated industrial filter cartridge housing. The idea here is to always be filtering warm oil. This eliminates the problem of trying pump very thick cold oil through a filter which will usually collapse it, causing crud to get past the filter to places where you don't want it. Here are some pictures of the pre-heating barrel and filter housing:
Here are the heaters which are suspended in the barrel:
The oil is pumped via the blue pump on the left into the filter at about 10 GPM. You'll see later that I wrapped the filter housing with a pipe heating cable (the kind you use to guard against pipes freezing)-this combats a problem I was having filtering in an unheated garage. I would pump warm oil through the filter and then a week later find that the filter was plugged with cold partially hydrogenated oil and fats. With the heat cable I can liquefy the cold oil prior to filtering. Then its into the filtration barrel:
The filtration barrel consists of the barrel, the centrifuge, a heater to bring the oil up to 160 degrees, and a pump to operate it all. Here's a better view of the heater pipe here:
This is a direct copy of SunWizard's famous system which can be found over at the Infopop forums here:
http://biodiesel.infopop.cc/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/159605551/m/2001011761
Basically the idea is that you pump oil into the pipe which has hot water heater elements screwed into both ends via tees. When the oil comes out of the other end it's much hotter than before and then goes into the centrifuge. The oil recirculates, heats up, and gets cleaner with each pass through the centrifuge. The main components of my system are a Dieselcraft 0C-20 centrifuge, a Haldex hydraulic pump to drive it, a 1/2 HP electric motor to drive that, and some braided stainless steel lines to guard against blowouts.
Here's an overview of the whole thing:
The final component is the fill pump. I used to use the centrifuge pump as the fill pump via a manifold, but that got old really fast-the centrifuge pump is high pressure low volume-1 GPM to be exact, so a 60 gallon tank took an hour to fill. Therefore I upgraded to the 10 GPM pump in the picture along with a filler nozzle I picked up at a yardsale. I plumbed a bypass into it so that the nozzle can click off and not overload the pump or burst the hose. I didn't cover everything in this post, so if you have questions, post away...
