My current batch of biodiesel is my greenest yet because I used homemade, bio-electricity to cook it (instead of Duke Power’s dirty coal-based electricity).

A couple of weeks ago I bought a little 5KW diesel generator at Costco, plus a 10-circuit power switch. Last weekend I wired the generator to the circuits. Now I have 5 single-pole circuits around the house wired for power outages, plus one single-pole and one 2-pole circuit wired in the basement for biodiesel production.

Yesterday I fired up the generator and switched the 2 basement circuits to generator power. Then I filled the reactor with 200 L of oil and heated the oil, and ran the pump and a couple of lights, on biodiesel-produced electricity. That’s a total of well over 4KW continuous load. The generator handled this with no trouble at all.

This is great – it eliminates a pretty significant non-renewable, polluting input from my biodiesel: the electricity Duke Power produces at coal burning plants.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 2nd, 2008 at 10:46 pm and is filed under Biodiesel, Mother Earth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.