From 2GreenEnergy Contributor Brian McGowan: Celebrating Energy Independence with Waste Heat Exchangers

Yesterday, I attended the Energy Independence Day festival at Waste Oil Recyclers location.  It was very nice and well attended with food and music. I was there to give information about the various waste heat exchangers I offer to reduce energy usage. About a half dozen people immediately understood the value of these items. Still, as much as people understand the value of these products, I will probably not hear from them for reasons I do not understand.

A coworker showed up with his very bright daughter. He runs his car on vegetable oil. I will probably buy this car soon. Anyway, we got the grand tour from my friend, one of the original owners, and it was quite the operation. When they started they were going around in a pickup truck with 55 gallon drums in the back. Now they have a fleet of eight septic system pumping trucks so they can just suck the oil out of the containers which is a much cleaner method of collecting the oil. They collect and process into fuel grade oil some 2.75 million gallons of waste vegetable oil per year–so much that the tanker truck traffic was becoming a problem as well as the fact that over the road trucking is affected by every conceivable delay from traffic to weather.

To solve this they had a railroad siding installed so they could ship their product to the biodiesel manufacturer in Erie, PA much more easily. Since they are working out of an old foundry immediately adjacent to the Lukens Steel facility in Coatesville, PA, this railroad siding was very easy to install and they have service from the same railroad that services the Lukens facility.

It is quite an operation. They retrieve the oil, filter it for large particulates, heat it and allow the water and smaller particulates to fall to the bottom while the clean oil rises to the top.  Then they run the clean oil through yet another set of filters to clean it up to fuel grade and then move it into the rail tanker cars. They also allow other collectors in the area to move their oil through the rail cars so all in all 3-4 rail cars a week leave that facility for the processing plant in Erie. Clearly these guys have managed to make a living at this.

In other personal news, I have completed building and programming and have installed my PV system controller. I designed it to do the things that currently available equipment does not do because the manufacturers are not interested in doing it. They have their eyes focused on their tiny little piece of the puzzle and have no interest in making a controller that will cohesively control the entire system instead of just their little part. For them, when the battery is charged, they see the best solution to protect the battery from becoming over charged as choking down the panels so they make less power. Thus the system is not producing as much power as it could. I was constantly coming home and finding the charge controller had been doing this for 2-5 hours a day sometimes.

The most useful part of this is my controller’s ability to determine when the battery is fully charged and then turn on my power inverter and connect it to my house circuit so the power actually gets used while I am not home to do that manually. Of course all of this is programmable so I could choose to do any number of things with this power and I have multiple outputs available so I could send power to several things so that if one thing is satisfied and no longer requires power I could send that power to the next thing or several things at once if needed. For off grid people this could be useful for doing tasks such as pumping water into a tank for later use or running a freezer down so battery power doesn’t have to be drawn later to do this.

Anyway, it seems to be working very well so far and I am hopeful to develop this further so others can use it.