Bio Diesel

Our friend Damian came to stay for a couple of days this week and drove down from Maidstone in his bio diesel fueled Audi A4. In his own words Damian has become a bit of an evangelist for bio diesel cooking it up in his back garden.

With diesel once again reaching £1.20 per litre everything Damian said makes perfect sense and for an outlay of around £700.00 he can make bio diesel at about 40p a litre. You don't need to be a rocket scientist to work out that the investment can be paid back very quickly. If you can get the raw feedstock, Waste Vegetable Oil (WVO), for free then the costs are even lower.

I therefore decided to take the plunge and yesterday approached two cafes in Narberth and have now secured a deal to collect their WVO and have agreed to pay 25p per 20 litres. This will enable us to produce diesel at about 20p per litre. I am also going to talk to a number of other cafes and restaurants in Narberth.

It will be a few months before we can afford to buy the kit, but in the meantime we have to space to store the WVO. The other issue is that whilst I have a diesel car, it is a company car and I imagine I would get in all sorts of trouble fueling it with chip fat if anything went wrong. Kim's car is petrol. We have therefore to consider changing cars at some point which is no bad thing as we really need a 4x4 capable of pulling a trailer.

If you can produce diesel at 20p per litre, it opens up lots of other possibilities. A generator will produce electricity at around 8p/kwh and we could heat a polytunnel (on the shopping list!) either with the diesel or with the WVO. As will become clear if I manage to keep this Blog up, we are looking to be as self sufficient in energy as possible and ideally get 'off-grid'.

More to follow on this.