Editor's Letter

small scale advantage

By Frankie Abralind

More in the Fall 2009 issue

I just came back from a tour of a huge diesel-powered compost facility in Dickerson, MD. I was tagging along with a horticulture club on a bright summer day, listening to one of the facility's foremen explain how different front-end-loaders used more or less fuel on the same tasks.

"Are you using biodiesel yet?" I asked.

"Oh yeah, B20. But it causes problems. It rusts out our tanks, and we had to replace a $6,000 fuel pump on one of the machines."

Rust? Replace the fuel pump? This from commercially-sourced B20?

I pressed a little more, though this was clearly not one of the mechanics or the fuel buyer.

"Where is it coming from?" I asked.

"You know that white skim that's on the top when a barrel of the biodiesel arrives? That's the chicken fat," said the foreman. "It's definitely made from chicken."

Well, no, but it's definitely crap. As readers of biodieselSMARTER know, there will never be a "white skim" on the surface of any good biodiesel, even from chicken fat.

You or I would never put that in our fuel tank. You don't need a gas chromatograph to find bad fuel quality like that. Soaps, sterols, whatever it was, that skim typifies the advantage homebrewers have over commercial biodiesel consumers when it comes to fuel quality.

We homebrewers know our fuel. We know when it's reacted completely, when the water is all drained off. We personally filter it before we put it in our tanks.

When we see creamy or cloudy or cruddy, we quickly shout a swear-word and shut off the pump. We look at our fuel, we have a relationship with our fuel, and we are less likely to have fuel quality problems because we understand our fuel. This is our fuel quality challenge: spread that understanding and eliminate the scapegoating.