Freezer compressor fan

Thread Starter

strantor

Joined Oct 3, 2010
6,781
Is that what we call it now, "experiments"? ;)

But seriously, I'm curious what you're up to with ethanol. I worked in the fuel ethanol industry for many year.
Oh awesome! I might have a bunch of questions for you at some point in the near or distant future.

Here's a link to part one of a 5 part series of ethanol experiments I did : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5K65c92oQAA

The goal was to investigate the claims of some people on the internet. They were claiming that they were supplementing anywhere for 50%-100% of their fuel consumption with home made ethanol for "free" , distilling it in stovetop pressure cookers and such. I successfully made 190 proof ethanol and ran a generator from it, but found it to be several times more expensive to make than gasoline is to buy.

Since posting the videos, I have gotten a lot of feedback that I want to follow up on, such as investigating how the cost of the end product changes as the scale of the operation increases. And if its possible to ACTUALLY make it for free, using discarded sugars from restaurants or other industries (think: dumpster diving for donuts)
I have learned a lot about the creation of alcohol since I've been home brewing beer and wine, and it makes we question how my new found knowledge may effect the outcome if I were to do the experiments again.
 

wayneh

Joined Sep 9, 2010
17,495
I suppose we should take this elsewhere, but to make "free" ethanol you would need two things, free carbohydrate for the fermentation and free energy to run the still. Using energy from a stove introduces a very real cost for gas or electricity and, given the inefficiencies of such crude equipment, I'll bet it's a net loss for those folks. Certainly when you factor in their time and exposure to attendant risks. Of course it can be done for fun, but not in an economically attractive way.

I guess if you can actually find free fermentable carbs, and I doubt that you can on a reliable basis, you could run the still off a portion of the ethanol you make from the free carbs. The fermentation actually needs a few other things (soluble nitrogen, for instance) but these are needed at a much lower scale and are not as big a cost factor.

One golden rule about free substrates is that they cease to be free after someone starts using it. Their is only so much spent dough laying around!

The big boys buy a bushel of corn for $7 or so and make close to 3 gallons of EtOH from it. It's denatured (poisoned) on-site so they never have to pay potable alcohol taxes as a booze distiller would. (Some do sell to the spirits industry.) They sell the non-fermented material as animal feed. That's basically everything in the corn except for the starch that was fermented to alcohol. Depending on market forces, the feed value may exceed the alcohol value but generally it goes the other way.

As they say in the biz, "Drink the Best, Burn the Rest".
 
Top