Living with a Greasecar Part 4

Ok, it seems I only do one of these "Living With a Greasecar" installments when something goes wrong. I'm keeping true to the tradition once again. I had a little mishap that could have been quite serious. I'm also turning to you folks for some help trying to MacGyver this thing.

I was filtering oil on Sunday. Since I have sediment in my pre-filter tank from the days when I wasn't screening my oil AT ALL I still get the occasional clog in the first few minutes of filtering. Normally I go out there, shake the barrel a little or something and the clog flows through. After doing that a few times it's great. Eventually all of the sediment will be gone. I know I should just clean the barrel out but there's more silicone on the barrel lid than Pamela Anderson has in her chest.
Anyway, I was filtering Sunday and totally forgot about it. I was wreslting with my kids, doing dishes and other manly things. The valve clogged that feeds the centrifuge so I had no flow. This isn't a big deal becuase the water heater element has a thermostat and I have it set at about 160 or 165. The hot oil flows through a silicone heater hose and into the centrifuge. Well, the thermostat failed on the heater element and the HOT oil melted the silicone heaterhose. The hot oil then dripped onto the lower vinyl hose, melting that and continued to drip into the formica shelf, melting the formica!
I thank all that is holy that if there was a flame (I think there was) it didn't burn the garage down. I called the company that I got the centrifuge from (www.wvodesigns.com) and they are sending a new hose and heating element out. What did I learn? Do not forget that you are filtering oil. Keep a fire extinguisher more handy than it was.
Here's where I need your help. I don't want to rely on the thermostat, I want redundancy. How do I wire in thermocouples? I could either put a thermocouple right in the stream of oil, or on the outside of the housing calibrated to the appropriate temp.

Now, I don't want any body posting "WPWP" so here are some pics:
Overall pic of the setup. This isn't quite current as the containment area isn't there and these hoses are not the reinforced ones.

Here's the upper silicone hose. You can see where it melted and dripped right onto the lower hose.

This pic shows the relationship of the silicone hose and the heater hose. The yellow arrow points to the area where the vinyl hose melted.

Little closer shot of the hoses in question

And the melted formica

Even though I've had two mishaps I can't complain. The car has about 60,000 grease miles on it and the car is doing great. The first mishap was because I didn't use the best hose I could (should) have. This was just a simple failure. I was budgeting $250 a month for diesel (diesel was cheaper back then) and now I only budget about $400 a year. I replace the filter on the car every year for about $12.50 and the electricity to run the filtering still.

Get a "y" inline filter or a dirt leg before the pump, or both! A thermocouple will put out a certain voltage at a certain temperature and you can get a control relay to trip at that voltage / temperature. Hell, you might be able to get a wiring kit from an electric cooling fan for a radiator and instead of turning the fan on it turns off the heating element.

Those hoses don't look like silicone, they look like vinyl.

Silicone should be fine up to about 350 degrees.

Try the folks at McMaster-Carr for some good silicone hose.

Shawn

That top blue one doesn't look like silicone? I thought it was but I could surely be wrong. The thing is though, even if it was just Goodyear rubber it should handle the 160-165 the thermostat was set at. I wonder how hot the oil was when the hose failed.

Wow, the company over-nighted the stuff to me. I e-mailed them yesterday and my wife just called. There's a package waiting for me. Now that's customer service.

Put the thermocouple/temp sender whereever such an overheating would first be detected, but it has to be detected. (An engine with no coolant won't show it's overheating on the temp gauge, for example.) I'd say on the pump, or outlet hose. OR, you could put it on a timer. It runs for an hour or whatever, then shuts off--preventing the overheating. Reset the timer, and pump some more. Might be more of a pain, but it's easy.

The other way is to (I don't know the mechanics) is to have it shut off with a flow detector. No flowing fluid equals power being shut off. No chance of overheating.

BTW Have REALLY enjoyed your tribulations of acutually driving a grease car on a daily basis over time, instead of a one-shot article. Thanks.

that takes up a surprisingly small amount of room... that's all you need to get diesel?

That's WVO (waste veggie oil) as opposed to bio diesel. If I were making bio, I'd need about 3 times that much space, plus the chemicals and other sundry crap I didn't want to deal with. Long story short, if you make bio you need to do what I'm doing here (filtering, dewatering), plus a few other steps and put it in your unmodified car. I just filter it and put it in my car, which has 2 fuel tanks. What you see there is about a 4'X4' square (a little less actually). I decided to go vertical with the setup so I'd keep precious floor space and allow gravity to be my pump. I added a bulk storage barrel next to it

that's another 24" squared.

DrBoost wrote: That top blue one doesn't look like silicone? I thought it was but I could surely be wrong. The thing is though, even if it was just Goodyear rubber it should handle the 160-165 the thermostat was set at. I wonder how hot the oil was when the hose failed.

Sorry, my bad.

The top hose does look like silicone hose, I was looking at the pic of the two reinforced vinyl hoses.

Strange, maybe a faulty hose.

Shawn

A cheap grease canoe!

I thought it was silicone. Yeah, maybe faulty. I wonder how hot the oil can get with a failed thermostat?
Anyone have any idea where to get thermocouples? I could do a google search but I don't even know where to start.

awesome updates man.. I really enjoy them.