Motors Making ethanol at home

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/working_lunch/6288920.stm

"Any garden-shed producers who refine less than 2,500 litres of biofuel a year will be exempt from fuel duty, currently 28 pence a litre for biofuels and 48 pence for diesel or petrol. "

and i didn't think distilling alcohol was illegal - after all, you are allowed to brew your own for drinking aren't you?

 

In Montreal, if you are caught making a radioactive bomb, based on the law that was set back in World War II, you will get a fine of 100$ fine and you must give your materials to make such device and the bomb itself to the authorities. Nothing more.

 

and it's horseshit that you can't. I know the government quite loves it's cut of everything, but maybe if the ***** stopped pissing our cash away, we wouldn't be taxed on everything possible, and it wouldn't be taken the usual method - anally.

 

i would look at Brazil's way.... they have been putting ethanol in fuel for some time now...

 

There's a difference between brewing alcohol and distilling it.

Perhaps you should read the 1974 act of alcohols and spirits.

New Zealanders are also allowed to grow their own tobacco.

 

Brazil uses something like e85 to pure ethanol have done for decades, but, and its a huge but, the fuel industry there is hugely subsidised massively unprofitable and the cars there have to be heavily modified to work for more than a few months.

 

Thats awesome. I specialised in Cryptography and AI at Uni, and during one of my crypto courses, we learnt that computer programs or hardware devices that use particular types of heavy encryption are held under the same import / export laws as military grade weaponry and ballistics.

"Now sir, while searching your suitcase, we've come across an item that's prohibited for import into this country."
"Oh... bugger... is it that sidewinder missile I carry just in case of war?"
"No, that's fine. I'm talking about the PGP CD you have in your bag"

 

£1.14-£1.17 around near me. Atleast now that all those gits who said "haha you drive a girls/old peoples car" are now getting "haha you can't afford to drive your car" from me. K12 micra S = win!!

But in terms of the project, I was sure you where allowed to make X amount of fuel/alcohol, if not what are the chance of actually being caught unless theres a lot of stink coming out of your garage.

 

Interestingly the USA over took Brazil as number 1 ethanol consumer in 2006 after it swaped from using MTBE as an oxygenate.

More interesting (though probably obviously) is that Germany is the number one biodiesel consumer by hundreds of thousands of tonnes. >2500 kt versus the next highest at ~900 kt (the USA)

Sorry just had an iea report over my desk they're quite good from a geeky facts and figures point of view.

 

I've always wanted to brew some good ol' moonshine every since i've watched m*a*s*h mainly to get m*a*s*h*e*d, lol only joking but i think it would be great fun to do it yourself and not have to pay the tax which is a government sanctioned ripoff. What i'm trying to say is have fun!

 

Another interesting idea would be to convert it into an electric bike..... dewalt's new nanophosphate power packs are interesting for this application, and if you get a brushless electric motor that can do regenerative braking, then your battery pack will last more...
i think i am going to try to make one this summer, maybe in the form of a light electric bicycle.

 

Back in the days of leaded petrol there was a UK brand containing alcohol. I used to get it for the motorbike in winter, it stopped the carburettor jets freezing up, a known bug with my bike.

 

I know in the U.S. we can only produce up to E85. E100 is illegal to produce here. To produce biodiesel, there is no restriction as to what percent. You could produce B100 here. As for storing, I'm not exactly sure how much you can produce before you need to start paying for tax.

 

Must say i have been tempted on more than one time to go diesel get so i can go home brew on fuel.

I say there isn't anything like a good test, change got as many seals as you can, go buy a cheap bottle of vodka, distile it, 50/50 mix with unleaded and fire her up!

First thought would be a timing issue, if the mixture is more likely to detonate then a little fiddle is in order. Nothing a weekend of tinkering cant solve. Once your manufacturing process is sorted, you'll know the average strenght of your home brew and get your engines tuned.

 

Vodka is only 37.5%, cheap vodka may be less, therefore that's 63.5% minimum that you don't want in your engine.

You could buy a shedload of cheap vodka, boil the alcohol off (it boils at 78*C, just get yourself a thermometer and a hob and you're sorted) and let it condense on a metal plate or something above, drip down off the side into separate container. In theory, you should end up with your 100% ethanol
(Though that might not work out as perfectly as it does in my head).

Then you could give that a shot in your car/bike just to see if it works before you start brewing your own/whatever.

Also, I'm sure a fairly good test of how strong the boiled-off alcohol is would be to smell it/drink it. We use 100% ethanol at college in Chemistry, you can smell it practically across the room.

 

I did say distile it!

 

Home production of alcohol for private use is perfectly legal here http://touchngo.com/lglcntr/akstats/Statutes/Title04/Chapter21/Section015.htm


But making your own ethanol is kinda difficult, and it usually is about a a week to a month turn around time to produce the ethanol.

I would not recommend using random food stuffs, to produce ethanol, you cant just dump a bunch of organic matter in a barrel with water and yeast and expect it to work, because yeast can only break down starches and sugars.

You will need a place to store the fermentation tanks, if you expect to create any appreciable amount of fuel, this would be quite a few 55 gallon drums. You also need to heat each of these drums, to around 20 degrees C in order to keep the fermentation process going, over 27 will kill the yeast, under 15 is too slow. You also need the right kind of yeast, some yeasts stop producing alcohol at around 5% like beer yeast, and others like wine yeast will go up to 10-15%

Then you will need your still, the still usually consists of a burner and a condenser, the burner needs to be able to keep the barrel of fermented products in a precise temperature range, about 78-79 C, any higher you will start to boil the water along with the alcohol, and you wont purify the alcohol any further. Your condenser is generally just a long coil of copper tubing in cold water with collector to collect the alcohol vapors.

You will have to distill the ethanol quite a few times, at least 3-4 probably more. since for you to burn it in your car, running strait alcohol will require, I think 160-170 proof, and if you expect to mix it with gasoline you must distill it to at least 195 proof. (use a hydrometer to test the proof)

The higher proof for the gasoline mix, is because generally gasoline and water do not mix to well, while alcohol burns just fine with a higher water content.

Expect about 1-3 gallons of ethanol per bushel of what ever grain your distilling, or about 20-40 gallons per ton of grain processed. These numbers of course all depend on what you are fermenting. If I remember correctly I believe whey has the highest ethanol turnaround rate, much higher than corn.

I am not sure of my numbers anymore since it has been a while since I checked up of this, but I am pretty sure I'm in the ball park.

So if you have a good sized back yard, and plenty of spare time, go for it.


On the matter of converting your car, definitely lean the car out, since the fuel-air ratio is higher in ethanol than gasoline, and I would recommend replacing your rubber/plastic fuel lines with metal ones, since ethanol is more corrosive than gasoline is. Other than that your good to go.


So if your still interested, look around for some good books on ethanol production, they will at least get you started.

 

I did a methanol distillation with this:
http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/3558/cimg1092.jpg
This is called a reflux setup which will allow you to reach greater concentrations in a single batch, though it is possible to daisy-chain a bouple of these to reach maximum concentrations in a single batch.
Reflux still
In this setup you have to worry about the temperature at the top.
My experiment:In a 10%(by mass) solution the product was roughly 10%(by mass) more pure. This pattern continued up to ~25% then only 5%(avg.) each time.
You can get vertical pipes (fractionating column) with much more surface area that will allow you to make higher 1st time concentrations.

Ethanol/water mixtures are azeotrope so if you really want 100% ethanol you will have to have a pressurized still.
Azeotrope

I would start out by destilling a fermented mixture of tap water and sugar, to see what the ideal outcome would be. Log all data and calculate the price on the ideal product.
Then you could quickly see if it was liable.

Cool project, GL & HF!

 

I'd be pretty sure that drinking pure alcohol is going to kill you as well, so if you do decide to go for this, don't drink the fruits of your labour

I'm not sure about the legality of it, but if you can get fined for running red diesel in a car in this country (Not me, we ran it in tractors when we had a farm, nothing more...) then I'm pretty sure you can't run home made fuel that isn't biodiesel in anything without informing Mr. Brown. You'll still get taxed for it, and I'm thinking that it will probably cost as much (taking time into consideration) to produce as you would spend buying it from the pump.

Are you really putting that much petrol through your bikes that it's breaking you? What you got and how hard are you riding them? If it's anything like the bike that passed me on the motorway a couple of weeks ago then you're burning quite a bit... I was doing close to 90 and he passed me like a bullet with his head behind the bubble and was out of sight in less than 10 seconds Crazy. If the cops had caught him they'd have taken his license off him on the spot :s