Bend, Oregon

We met Kevin in Bend, after driving all day on the purchased 7 cubies from Reno, even with the 1 hour plus diversion to Pyramid Lake, we made it just in time before the tank ran empty. He had plenty of oil as well and we compensated him for his efforts and asked for the closest place to wild camp, or dry camp in the area, so we could visit my wife's favourite Mexican restaurant.

He has done a bunch of conversions and has sold some of his cars. He estimated that there are perhaps 15 SVO grease cars in the Bend area, which is a lot, as Bend is a fairly small town, 70.000 people, and there are a bunch of biodiesel folks. They have a Co-op and are making biodiesel for 2.99 a gallon if I recall correctly..

We still torture ourselves and others on this planet, but what about this sunrise (some of these enlarge when you click on them)?

How do YOU respond to your planet that is always there for you regardless of how you treat it?

My wife has been a great help to this temporary incapacitated person now writing. Before heading north, we stopped by the Reno Costco, 11.99 for 4.67 gallons, comes out to about 2.55 a gallon! Compare this to 18 dollars a cubie in the Tri-Cities a bit up north, and that doesn't include tax. Nice soybean oil, not hydrogenated. We poured about 5 cubies in the tank, hopefully this will get us to Bend, Or, where another person has offered to help us with oil. We're camping by Pyramid Lake tonite on the Paiute Indian Reservation. The weather had turned dark, but the resulting views made it all the more spectacular..Even though it is only a 40 minute drive north of Reno, the place was pretty much deserted a bit past the beginning of the lake, we had no company, and the night was completely dark....

One week later, back in Carson City for a hospital visit, wrecked my back so a week of no-doing is required. The injury was re-opened from hiking/bicycling down this very rocky mountain above (camp site is at the lake below), without suspension. A previous back injury has come back in full force but didn't rear it's head until a couple days after the ride.

Reno, NV. Filled up the tank once we got there with spare cubies to get a sense of what it took to get from Oakland, Ca to Reno, over the donner pass, 7000 feet. about 240 miles took almost 4 cubies (4.67 gallons per cubie). This with the doghouse/camper on our backs. So that works out to about 13.5 m/g

Near Fallon, NV

Below are some pics from miscalleneous trips near Fallon, we did some great wild camping there..

Kristina is standing in front of a 600 foot sand dune, it is one of only 3 in the world that makes a musical sound when the sand crystals move. But it is on BLM land, and the sand buggies, and motor cross folks seem to really enjoy going up and down the dune, not sure if there is a time to hear the singing dune. I hope to hear the voice of the dune some day..

The sunset is reflected by wetlands in the west below the desert sky.

Berkely - Oakland

A visit with Duncan who generously donated a bunch of oil in exchange for beer, to get us to Reno and some extra.

After that a nice lunch in (what I believe is the future of food and of survival), a Vegan, organic, live foods restaurant in Berekeley. Again, these folks were great, even the towels were washable, sustainable. "Cafe Gratitude" (I think that is their name) http://www.withthecurrent.com/

I realize to some this is going to far, but is it really? I have a friend, Jim Bell, who simply believes that we are in the process of becoming more conscious, less of a jerk. Conscious of what? Of who we are and our interconnectedness..This is not an easy concept to intellectually although science is really helping explain it, for most people it takes some form of solitute or contemplation to start understanding this at a deeper level.

Real Goods, Hopland, Ca ---

This is one of my favorite places to get inspired about sustainable living, their whole store is practicing what they preach, passive solar heating, they have a large array of solar panels, straw bale construction, composting toilets, edible shade landscaping, biofuels, and lots of books and interesting stuff to buy. During the trip I read one of their books, "The Renewable Energy Handbook", by William H. Kemp. Really enjoying the book, but I will write him about his bias against SVO, I think he has not spend enough time researching this. He touts Biodiesel, but why not tout both..hopefully he will reconsider his bias on this subject and change the next edition.

Above is the pump at Real Goods, their pump was broken at the time, but they were selling B100 for about 3.50 a gallon.
They sell two biodiesel processors, the push button types, just add ingredients and click the start button, and 24 hours later 50 gallons of B100.

Their prices were 5-8 K.

Lake Sonoma -- some beautiful hiking in oaks and grasslands, there are some areas of the lake that have boats with some impressive sound systems, but a bit further up, all you hear is interesting crickets in the oak trees, at least that is what it seemed like. Both sights and sounds were impressive.

Ukiah Biodiesel, Laytonville

Prairy Creek Beach

Before we got to the beach campground, I noticed a slight lack of power. Since the greasecar filter hasn't changed since the first install, I decided it was time to change this filter with a similar filter from Napa. This is a bit messy, as the filter is filled with vegetable oil, and the new filter has to be filled up with vegetable oil, to minimize air pockets. Since this was the first time and we're still a bit far from Arcata, I hoped we wouldn't get stuck. Decided to get it going before the somewhat treacherous trip through the muddy steep dirt road over some mountains to get to the beach. A bunch of elk were not too interested in the sound of a diesel, so they moved away. The german shepard that is one of our 4 dog passengers in our big driving doghouse also noticed the elk and started barking. When I started on diesel and switched to veg, the engine stalled...oh, oh. Back on diesel, after some starting this worked, and I decided to go fast on the highway, to make it easier to switch to veg. This worked, a bit of sputtering to work out the air, but it got better. Pictures to follow, as this library has a somewhat antiquated computer setup. Sometimes libraries can't be used as they require log-ons to use the internet. But the smaller towns seem to be less sophisticated so those work better.

The Dog House

Luckily we're not into carpeting, as the dogs enjoy the water and Skeeter below has a thing with digging in the mud..

As Bailey the Shepard is rather large for this camper, laying on the ground takes up more space than just sitting in the dinette, so we preferred her sitting in there..

Sixes, Oregon coast

A meeting with some excentric miners. Here they are showing off their newest panning wheel, the gold will end up in the center of this wheel, as it is very heavy. They won't bother looking for more, unless they can find at least 6 flakes in the middle..One of them was heading up to Alaska as that is where he thought you could get the most, although it is more dangerous work up there. He drove a jeep that looked like it was made of gold. Below he is showing the wheel about halfway emerged in a side stream, so that the stream takes away the other debris while this wheel is turning..

The coast was clear and some beautiful arches showed up.

Humbug Mountain is showing it's top, nice hike and great campground next to it, that allowed you to walk through a canyon to a nice beach.

Umpqua, Oregon.

Jacob Huber is our next stop, he has thousands of gallons and is buiding a biodiesel reactor, here is his setup. His tinkering in his shed led to some biodiesel boiling over and catching fire and he had a blackened roof to show the result. But he has learned and is setting up a very clean looking reactor. His place is a ways off the I-5, a river runs through the valley below, nice place Jacob!

Portland, Larry is a neat guy with a dream oil setup. He had a bunch of information from all his experiences and had tinkered a nice system together, with lots of filters, a pump that had no problem reaching our tank. He took a good look at our system and had some great suggestions, like adding a vacuum gage, so you can tell when the filter is getting plugged up. He also helped us put a switch in so we could turn that Vegtherm off. The Vegtherm Mega heats up real fast, and allows us to switch over within a couple of miles from Diesel (in spring weather), so the whole 2800 mile trip required less than half a tank of diesel, not bad huh? We took him out to his favorite mexican food place, and were very grateful for all the info and tips he had. Not to mention his clean oil. He was working on a custom tank that would allow him to drive half the country and back on his own oil. His Duramax would get 17-18 miles to the gallon. He mentioned one bad experience with a person who gave him the bottom of the barrel, and ended up replacing fuel filters every 100 miles, this was a good caution for us. Luckily we only changed filter once the whole trip, and that could have been premature, as some of the air was leaking out of a rear tire, thus giving the feeling of less power.

Start of our first Vegetable Oil Trip, the hope is to do three or four states, and having people share oil on the way, or buy oil from a large retailer.. We're bringing about 65 gallons to get us started. The custom aluminum tank holds 40 gallons, and then as you can see above the tank are tied another 6 cubies in horizontal position with a cardboard over it, to strap it all down.

The two biodiesel collectives in Spokane have now merged and are trying to become an official non-profit.

The website is: http://www.spokanebiodiesel.org/

This is great, more people, more sharing of resources and knowledge. Looking forward to seeing it grow..

Western Washington University to burn waste oil to heat campus:

Truck is going great, it sure helped to have 4 glow plugs replaced. The temp gauge showed 240 degrees yesterday, it is now T'd in between the Vegtherm and the IP. It even got up to scrolling Hi, so it went outside of the reading.

I try to use the vehicle only when I know there has to be errants as well, as I prefer taking the bike to for commuting (it is almost 8 miles each way with hills). On Friday's I telecommute, which is a great way to avoid commuting as well.

Experiences from the first weekend on WVO:

Saturday was rainy and in the thirties, it took at least 15 minutes to get the temp in the heated fuel filter to show above the scrolling low.. to in the 70's. But once it has run, and then sits for a while the temp goes up quite a bit. We'll now have the temp sender tee'd into the hose that comes out of the Vegtherm Mega and goes into the injectors. That way we'll know for sure when a good time to switch over is.

Once the engine is warm though, even if you let it sit for 1 or 2 hours, it can be pretty much instantly be switched over to Veg. So Sunday I insulated the hoses, the coolant hoses and fuel hoses. Then put some cardboard before the heated filter, to reduce the air blowing onto it. I think this added an immediate improvement. Also got some insulation for the tank itself

I would like to do audio tests to see how the exhaust sounds differently from Veg to Diesel, there seems to be a more gurgly sound to the Veg. It runs just as smooth and seems to have no effect on power. We'll have to check mileage as well at some point.

One more thing, adding the bumper sticker. We will have a group pic with pizza next week to acknowledge these fine folks.

These guys did an awesome job!!!

Time to pour in some used vegetable oil!

We test drove the Truck Monday, and it drove great! The first oil was vegetable oil from Costco, and it smelled great. The temp on the gauge that is inserted in the heated oil filter didn't go higher than 126 degrees, but the VegTherm is mounted after that and that now is heated up high. I'll start insulating some of it this weekend.

The first big batch was pumped over into a storage barrel, and I really felt the difference with hand pumping oil at below room temp oil, versus heating it up to around 90 degrees. When the oil is warm it just flows through the 5 micron filter at a quart every three turns, which makes it a breeze to pump out 30-40 gallons. Again, I make sure to test the oil for cracking or popping or small bubbles, as I don't know whether heating it up stirs up possible water content in the bottom. This seems to not be a problem. Here is a pic of some filtered and de-watered oil:

The filter is working correctly now, it took a while to get the kink out of the hose, heating it with a propane camp stove helped make the hose flexible. I'll put a new valve in the bottom of the drum, as the old one was leaking a little.


Walt's students got the temperature gauge installed, it will be hooked into the heated oil filter for now.


You can see the hole where the temp gauge will dip into.

Also, below you can see the bottom part of the heated fuel filter, where they put a rubber cushion under the actual filter, so that it sits smug in the heated copper coil housing.

The filtering setup:

My wife and I spent about 4 evenings sowing these jeans into filtering socks. The process involves a pair of old jeans, cut the pant legs off, then sew the bottom shut and put a plastic tubing ring in the top and sew that together. See below. This will filter the oil down to 5 microns. There are two of these socks and they will hang vertically into the barrel through a couple holes that were cut in these boards.
The filtering setup below shows the pump sticking into the 55 gallon steel barrel. A used planting pot is used for a pre-filter before the sock filters, this filter was just taped to a planting pot that has the bottom removed. The filter does 100 micron filtering, so it will catch the bigger pieces of junk.

Above you can see the top opening of the sock filter, and the planting pot. It is about 30 degrees, so the oil is gelling up a bit quicker.

In the above picture you can see that the drum is a bit above the ground and has a drain (left) at the bottom with a valve. The hole was drilled into the barrel, and an air tool was used to widen the hole.

Above you can see one of the jean filters hanging into the barrel, and also the pump is sticking into the barrel. About 6 gallons of filtered oil is sitting in the barrel. I think I'll start with a 30 gallon batch and put a fish tank heater in there to heat the oil, so it can allow the water and other particles to separate to the bottom of the barrel. After a few days of this I'll do the crackle test to see if the water is out of the oil. Below is a holding barrel, for oil that needs storing.

The previous week and this week, the kids have been working on the electrical and the VegTherm. Below you can see where the red coolant hoses go down below the cab to the tank in the truck bed. The hose in the foreground is going from the right, out of the heated oil filter, to the left into the Mega Vegthem. The Vegtherm supposedly draws 30 Amps when fully operational.

Electrical wiring to the switch and fuel gauge. A temperature gauge will also be added next week.

And The tank now has electrical to measure the fuel level.

Walt explains solenoid A and Solenoid B, and shows how they mounted the Vegtherm on a custom piece of metal pointing towards the injectors. You can see the red and black wires sticking out of the Vegtherm. By the time it gets out of the Vegtherm, the oil should be 160 degrees.