Princess Auto Parts List

[Mr. Flibble]

I have a Frantz filter, and I want to start pumping my WVO through it.As I don't live near a Princess Auto, but will be near one briefly over Christmas I would like to get an idea of what I need to pickup to make this all work.

I know I will need a 1 HP pump motor and a gear pump. I am guessing I need some sort of pipe fittings and reducers to make the oil lines that fit the Frantz fit the gear pump... Anything else? Am I at least close? Can anyone recommend anything in particular?

[mararmeisto]

Read this WVO section further - all the re-burners are posting in here.

Is this for a filtration system in the rear of the vehicle or is this for a supply system to the injection pump?

[Mr. Flibble]

Read this WVO section further - all the re-burners are posting in here.

Is this for a filtration system in the rear of the vehicle or is this for a supply system to the injection pump?

Just to pump it through the Frantz into a drum. I will be doing repeated cyclings of the WVO in the drum through repeated filters. Helps to remove the water as well.

[Luna-Sea]

Hey,
You will want to have some kind of heat source,
this will help de-water or at least get the oil flowing nicely.
Maybe an inline one before the pump and and Frantz filter,
but heat in the barrel(metal) will work too.
Some inline pressure gauges and a pressure relief valve too.
A pressure spike will tell you when a clog is happening,bypass
or pressure relief will keep your motor pump ect. from going
kaput on you.

This kinda pump eh?
http://www.princessauto.com/all-seasons ... -gear-pump

Are you decanting your oil at all first?
I still have that diesel-craft style centrifuge if you want.
I think the frantz would clog very very quickly,but would
be a good finish/polish for the oil once its filter down to
in and around 10 microns or so.

I do believe I read somewhere about someone using a Frantz for WVO,
but I can't remember for what stage in filtration.

careful in ol' Princess Auto it's a
tinkerers paradise.

Right ON!

[dpd]

I agree that heat is your friend during filtration. If you want a ready-to-go inline heater solution, rather than heating up all of the oil in a drum, Leon at WVODesigns has an inline heating element that bolts to his centrifuge. I think it is around $200, 1000 watts and is good if you don't want to hunt down pipes and fittings and elements yourself.

I have one for my raw power centrifuge, and I can tell you it will bolt to any surface not just the centrifuge, to provide heat inline in a filter loop. That's how I would do it if I was filtering with media; band heaters and in-drum elements mean a long wait time and lots of radiated heat and wasted electricity.

I am also in favour of gravity-feed, for simplicity. If I didn't have a centrifuge I would use an upflow-settling tank for dewatering first. In my setup I use a $50 'clear water pump' from northern tool, at the first stage to pump oil UP to a barrel that is sideways at head height. These are super cheap centrifugal pumps that are fine pumping oil to that 6 foot head with a few small particles in it, I pour it through nested 300 -> 150 -> 75 micron nylon bucket strainers to keep any fries from seizing the pump. The strainers just get wiped out with shop cloths once every barrel of feedstock or so.

From the gravity feed above, it goes through a flow-adjusting plastic valve and into the inline heater. Adjust the flow until the heater thermostat can be heard cycling on and off, meaning that it is getting the oil in its reservoir up to temp. I used to use 50,25,10,5 micron nested sock filters from here before I got the centrifuge, the gravity feed is a little slower that pressure than a gear pump, but you can be sure that it's not forcing larger particles through. It goes into a 'finished' barrel from there.

And from the finished barrel, through a 1 micron 'whole house' rainfresh woven filter in a housing, out to a holding tank, using another $50 clear water pump. This final filter has never been changed or slowed down, since using the raw power centrifuge, so it is just a peace-of-mind final screen in case something falls in the finished barrel.

The moral of my story is that if you design the filtration to make use of low pressure gravity instead of high pressure pumps, and washable nested media, you can create a system that guarantees the particle size passing through the filters, is cheap and low-risk for blowouts and motor failures, and can do the filtering for you overnight unattended. No disposable media, and the cheap pumps only run while you're doing bulk transfers, not all day. Once in a blue moon you should replace the filter socks, but I only worried about that for the finer ones really.

Just thought I'd share the main points I discovered in my journey. I am glad for the centrifuge as I can now do 1000L batches in 24 hours with minimal work, and the oil is so clean and water-free (tested at a lab for FFA and water with flying colours) but it is a bit expensive and overkill if it's for a single car.

[jessef]

Or if your source oil is clean enough (do pan test), you can gravity filter the oil like delicat/David. Very clean system.