EcoHearth: Come Home to the Earth

Sure, there are some folks living in Hollywood with garages. But I am not one of them. I hope to be someday. Oh, the American Dream: city life with a covered parking place. A place for your car, powered by waste vegetable oil (WVO), to call home. And a place to allow your vegetable-oil containers to settle their collected grease, to store fancy electric-transfer pumps and to filter your most recent finds.

Fortunately, having an outdoor storage space or driveway, though it would make my greaser life much easier, is not necessary to run a car on WVO. This oil filtration thing is a lot simpler than people think. Here’s what you need to know.

A Grassroots Movement
First, let me tell you one of the things I really like about running my car on waste vegetable oil—beyond the environmental benefits and financial savings—is that it is a grassroots movement. Sure, the drawback of a grassroots movement is that no corporation is funding your alternative-fuel technology. On the other hand, you are not waiting for a corporation to fund your alternative-fuel technology. No auto manufacturer has packaged together the one-size-fits-all perfect design. But you are about to tailor-make your system with perks the manufacturer wouldn't have known fit your lifestyle. Just right for you.

Time, Effort and Cleanliness
As mentioned, I don't have a garage, a driveway or even one square foot of land where I can store my collected cubies, filled with free, thrice-used canola oil from the vegan Ethiopian restaurant et al. So I've created a way that I—and any other city dwellers—can filter their oil on the go.

The most important things for on-the-go waste-vegetable-oil filtration are time, effort and cleanliness. Time, because filtering too long in a public place, like a parking lot, can become a nuisance to other shoppers and risk that you may be asked to move on. Effort, because no one wants to hurt their backs lifting heavy equipment, which could deter their filtering oil the next time. Cleanliness, because let's face it, we are dealing with disgusting used cooking oil here. (I am a chick living in the city and I want to be able to go straight from fueling to a hot date, if I need to.) I don't want my car to become covered with dried grease. And I definitely don't want to leave oil stains in the street or in parking lots; I've got a green reputation to protect. I want all of us waste-vegetable-oilers to be asked back.

Tools of the Trade
So first thing first: Cover the inside of your trunk with reused cardboard to keep your car from getting oil stains. You will change these as often as you see the grease saturating the cardboard. (After five years of WVOiling, my VW Jetta is still a nice car!) Carry extra cardboard for throwing onto the asphalt underneath your on-the-go filtration operations. It is far easier to pick up oily cardboard than to sop up spilled grease.

In the back of your car, carry a pair of gloves, a pair of flip-flops and a mechanic’s jumper. At least that is what I do. At first, no matter how clean you think you are being, you will spill the oil on your shoes. So just wear flip-flops. And you will accidentally wipe your hands on your clothes. So put a jumper over whatever else you’re wearing.

Eventually, you will become cleaner and cleaner at your job and will need the flip-flops and jumper less and less. But you will always need the gloves. There is no way to do vegetable oiling without getting your hands dirty, so if you care, some rubber gardening gloves are ideal. It's pretty difficult to wash the smell of the deep fryer off your skin. And we all have dates to make after fueling, so... keep those digits decent!

Rags, rags, rags. I keep five old t-shirts handy for little wipe ups. One never can predict when these will be most valuable. Spare fuel and filtration filters will come in handy, too, which you will learn as you go.

My First Filtration Method
My actual filtration methods have progressed as I've learned about my personal needs as a greaser. At first, all I knew was that I needed to filter my collected grease to at least five microns. And everyone was saying to use a filter sock—a long, white, wind-sock-looking thing. You pour collected oil in the top and gravity pulls the clean, usable oil out the bottom, leaving the deep-fryer particulate and thick gook in the sock.

Little did I know, most people who use filter socks actually have one of those garage things. They set the sock inside some sort of 55-gallon or other large size drum and leave the oil to do its thing while they are gone. So there I was tying this filter sock to a camera tripod in the parking lot of a city health-food store very early Sunday morning (to avoid crowds).

I used an electric pump, wired to run off the 12V outlet in the trunk of my car, to transfer my just-collected oil from the transparent cubies into the top of the filter sock and then... I... waited. And waited. And waited. And while I waited, if a big wind swept by, little drops of oil would atomize and hit my car and my legs and the tripod, drying there and eventually becoming noticeable and impossible to remove.

Then, after more waiting, I would use the electric transfer pump again, this time to transfer the clean fuel from the container under the filter sock to my tank or a clean cubie for storage in the trunk of my car. I'd do 40 gallons or so at a time. It took me about an hour and a half to collect, filter and clean up by these means.

After two years of greasing, I abandoned this method for one that was less time consuming, difficult and dirty. Plus that $300 electric transfer pump fizzled out (dirty grease is thick and hard on these pumps). Ah, the glory of grassroots research and development! You really can tailor your system to exactly what fits your lifestyle!

Next week I will share with you the waste-vegetable-oil filtration system that eventually rocked my no-garage-havin', city-slickin', miniskirt-wearin' urban life. Until then, think about what you would need to actually do this and what your perfect system might be.

Read Part 1: Converting Your Car
Read Part 2: How to Select the Oil
Read Part 4: Better Oil Filtering
Read Part 5: Risks and Rewards

[See a complete list of writing by Tonya Kay on EcoHearth.com or visit her Clean and Green Everyday blog. – Ed.]

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