Diary of a Mad Scientist

I’m climbing out of yet another round of ‘thought I was better and then things went wrong’. But they’re definitely better. More soon.

and… I finally found the password to my long-lost blog.

My West Coast ’season’ is just about up. I’m heading to the Collegiate Biodiesel Conference in PA this weekend and speaking about acid-catalyzed esterification and ethanol-based biodiesel, then starting research for Blue Ridge Biofuels, also on acid-catalyzed esterification and other techniques for dealing with high-FFA oil, after that.

I have a California Advanced Topics class about 3 weeks from now, so the traveling schizophrenia isn’t quite finished, but my work future is looking pretty exciting for the next few months, and it’s on the East Coast. I’m juggling a few future projects and shoveling out my inbox and trying to button up my remaining California odds and ends after almost 3 months out here.

I owe the world a giant update (though my twitter.com/girlmark posts are sort of a long rolling update)- here’s the short version:

-I’m still in San Francisco area

-things are going slowly here due to serious complexity, the economy slowing down me selling off my crap, and me still being somewhat sick with Lyme/babesia

-I’m drowning in my to-do list

-I’m feeling a LOT better lyme-wise, though still not out of the woods yet. Big news is that I’ve stopped being in pain about a week ago, which is convenient.

-I’m trying to find a schoolbus or shuttle bus to purchase, cheap, for various reasons

-I’ll be back in NC in a couple of weeks, and have a bunch of East Coast classes in late Feb-March

-my phone’s dead and I can only text, in case you’re trying to call me for some reason.

I’ll be back in my normal life soon.

I am teaching an Advanced Topics class in Concord, CA (SF Bay Area suburbs) on Sat-Sun April 18-19, with a one-day optional Introduction To Biodiesel Production class the day before on Friday, Apr 17th:
Registration info will be posted at www.girlmark.com/tour shortly

working with high-free-fatty-acid oil

working with high-water feedstocks

acidulating glycerine and wash water for easier disposal and cost savings

testing biodiesel, glycerine, and wash water for soap

producing biodiesel from oils recovered from glycerine

acid-catalyzed esterification options

methanol recovery from biodiesel (GL-1 process) and glycerine.

using glycerine as a solvent in various stages of the process

There will be an extensive hands-on section of the class devoted to techniques for making biodiesel using ethanol instead of methanol, and we will discuss small-scale fuel ethanol production.

We will also discuss water-free soap removal such as the use of the GL-1 process and ion exchange resins.

Registration info will be posted at www.girlmark.com/tour shortly

I’ve been traveling like a madman this month. I started off Jan 1st by flying to Oakland to start dealing with my crosscountry move. I’m halfway through the required organizing and sellings-off and so forth. I had a class in Ohio last weekend, and had a fairly major health crash due to moving, and didn’t get done with the moving hell.

I flew back to RDU, drove home in time to pack for class and sleep, drove a gasoline car to the Ohio class 6 hours away, taught class, explored West Virginia a little on the way home, drove the gasoline car back south to my long-time friends’ house on the NC-Virginia line, spent a couple of days there decompressing with these ‘family’, headed to Pittsboro to unload the class crap, saw my room for all of 20 minutes, got on another Jet-A fossil-fueled plane and headed back across country to Oakland. It was snowing in West Virginia, Ohio, and Pittsboro. It was snow-free in Mt Airy but 10 degrees F, where I was sandwiched between snowy drives.

And I’m now in California again. I’m hoping that maybe, just maybe, my luck will bring me that disposable truck I’m looking for- which would mean that I’ll be driving my shop stuff across country in the middle of early Febuary winter weather. I found myself walking across an overheated Southern California airport on a layover, carrying my winter insulated coveralls and a winter coat shoved into a stuff sack (I’m traveling without checked baggage these days, since this travel is more like going from one home to the next rather than taking a trip that requires bringing anything). I had to bring the gigantic winter gear in case I’m driving an 80’s Ford on a crosscountry winter wonderland adventure next month. More than once in the last two weeks I’ve found myself waking up confused about where I am- especially since my California experience involved a few friends whom I know as New Yorkers, not Californians, and I’ve been to too many places in the last 2.5 months for the state of health I’m in.

I don’t have a return flight yet.

This feels a bit like I’m unnaturally teleporting around the universe, I’ve seen too many regions and weathers in less than one week, and it’s dizzying and disorienting. I mentioned to an online friend in the solar industry that all the travel I’m doing has used up any fossil carbon that my biodiesel students saved through whatever I taught them. He’s in the nonprofit world promoting solar energy, and responded that they call that kind of travel for the cause “offsetting the offset.”

I started off today in Oakland by sleeping in a friend’s dark windowless cave-room till 4:30 pm, which means that by Eastern Standard Time I managed to stay down till 7:30 at night.

The last visit to Oakland was absolutely insane, I was trying to get everything done by the 16th, had the Lyme treatment Herxheimer Reaction from hell, failed miserably to get the move done, and this time around I’m going to take it a bit slower and actually have a social life again. Somewhere in all the remaining moving, buying of my theoretical disposable truck (I hope), selling of things, car repairing and rebuilding, and paid work, I have a bunch of work to do with the last of the gas chromatograph setup. Friends are coming out of the woodwork in response to my Twitter and other posts and my ‘dance card’ is filling up pretty quickly too, I should have slightly better balance to my life next week than I’d had for a few months.

I got a few really nice emails/phone calls/offers of showers/etc after my last post. It really wasn’t so bad- mostly frustrating with an undertone of funny to find that I couldn’t break in to the shop shower room.

Thanks folks!

I’m moving out of my California shop. I hung on to it, first because I was sharing it with Tom, who still lives there, and later because I was in Oakland for most of the spring and thought I might be coming back for school in the fall, and still later, because I was too sick to leave my room in NC and couldn’t deal with travel there.

It’s been a few days of forklifting things off the racks and palletizing them for transport (at some point). It’s a welding shop so everything is covered in years’ worth of fossilized grinding dust. For the last 2 days I just locked myself in and slept on the couch- I’m excruciatingly sick and have few functional hours in the day, so the loading is taking forever.

The clean ‘residents’ bathroom (as opposed to the minimalist day users’ bathroom) at the shop, which I helped build, is the only one with a shower, and it’s locked and inaccessible to non-resident users. Last night I was filthier than you can imagine, coated in carcinogenic who knows what, and in pain, and cold, and miserable, and I tried to break in to the locked shower room to no avail. I shivered myself to sleep on the couch.

Babesiosis is a malaria-like illness (though it seems to reside mostly in bone marrow rather than red blood cells themselves as far as I know???). One of it’s hallmark traits is chills and fevers, just like malaria. I haven’t had night sweats/fevers in quite a few weeks, since I’ve been treating it with anti-malarial drugs, butbefore that, there was a pretty regular 4:30 am microbial party in my bone marrow, or whatever it is that the evil bastidges do to cause drenching fevers.

This week of course I was beating myself up way beyond my capacity, and some of my other symptoms that I hadn’t seen in months have been coming back. So, at the ‘regularly scheduled’ fever hour of 5 am, I got a drenching malaria-like sweat episode, soaking my clothes and blankets all the way through- all while still covered in my thick layer of black, nasty grinding dust. This disease misery stuff is starting to push me over the edge.

Once upon a time, in a biodiesel group that could be just any biodiesel group and is not me…

-Someone had a methoxide mixer

-Someone’s methoxide mixer used a pump to mix methanol and lye

-Someone’s methoxide mixer was a cone-bottom tank that mixed from bottom to top, which I think leads to the following scenario quite often:

-Someone’s methoxide mixer in the cone-bottom tank that mixed with a pump from bottom to top clogged horribly

-Someone’s methoxide mixer in the cone-bottom tank that mixed with a pump from bottom to top clogged horribly like bottom-to-top methoxide mixers based on cone-bottom plastic tanks tend to do

-Someone’s methoxide mixer in the cone-bottom tank that mixed with a pump from bottom to top clogged horribly, like bottom-to-top methoxide mixers based on cone-bottom plastic tanks tend to do- even though people tend to try to insert ‘baskets’ into the cone-bottom plastic tanks thinking that they’ll somehow stay put and keep the KOH from clumping up

-Someone’s methoxide mixer in the cone-bottom tank that mixed with a pump from bottom to top clogged horribly, like bottom-to-top methoxide mixers based on cone-bottom plastic tanks tend to do- even though people tend to try to insert ‘baskets’ into the cone-bottom plastic tanks thinking that they’ll somehow stay put and keep the KOH from clumping up. This theory doesn’t tend to work because with plastic cone-bottom tanks most connections other than the top lid and bottom plumbing just aren’t very secure and very few things can be modified about their configuration

-Said someone Who Shall Not Be Named had a very large, solid clog in what I assume is the bottom of their methoxide mixer based on a cone-bottom tank et al

- Someone Who Shall Not Be Named has this happen relatively regularly. I once saw a certain member of the Someone Who Shall Not Be Named group, sitting amongst clogged methoxide mixer plumbing parts with his arm up the mixer up to his elbow. I thought of large-animal veterinary procedures involving the nasty end of the animal. They make gloves for that, you know.

-This year’s iteration of ‘how to unclog the methoxide mixer crystalline rock of poison’ scenario apparently included sulfuric acid. That Someone had around from years past, in case they ever got around to doing acid-base biodiesel.

-Someone Who Shall Not Be Named apparently used GALLONS of sulfuric acid, of the 95% concentration, to unclog their KOH-carbonated KOH rock.

Terrifying. I’m so glad no one lost an eye, or a face.

Sulfuric acid is one of the nastiest, scariest dangerous chemicals we work with. It’s essential in acid-catalyzed esterification- other acids and other catalysts can be used, with drawbacks- so H2SO4 it is. I’m madly in love with acid-catalyzed esterification. I actually got jealous of Greg one day a few months ago when he started messing around with it. Tom used to say at one point that in our relationship, biodiesel was ‘the other woman’ that he took a second seat to- and I did in fact leave that relationship due partially to the call of ‘the other woman’. With Greg, it was more of a feeling like he’d touched my Other Woman. It was pretty funny.

Anyway, I do worry, greatly, about all the people who are messing around with sulfuric acid because of my proselytizing.

I do think that the worst problem we’ll experience in homebrew ing isn’t someone burning themselves, but that someone will get KOH in their eyes and will be blinded. That’s one of the things I lay in bed worrying aobut.

Sulfuric acid is probably the second worst hazard- second only because fewer people are using it. I’m worried that we teach people some really rudimentary chemistry, and some of them are going to take the relatively simple and relatively safe procedures of transesterification and apply them to things involving sulfuric acid, HCl, or other concentrated acids. Acid-base reactions can cause quite a bit of heat, splashing, fumes, etc- and I don’t think people are quite prepared for it.

-

I’m in California for a few more days, feeling like I’m juggling a bunch of money and potential purchases.

This is known as the ‘picking up where I left off when my health fell apart’ maneuver. Yuck. I was supposed to be in a much more interesting place by now.

I never “completed” my complicated move to the East Coast- partially because I wasn’t sure where I was going to ultimately end up, and partially because I own a ton of shop stuff and it’s a huge load to haul, so this is what I’m here, working on, as part of a multi-trip complicatedness.

At this point I’m moving out of my shop finally. I’m hoping to not move into a storage container, but into a trailer (to put into cheap storage) instead. I basically don’t have the time or quite enough money to do a cross country drive with the trailer this month- have a class coming up the weekend after next- so I"m trying to get an enclosed trailer, put my crap in there, come back in a couple of months when it’s warmer, with enough cash to buy a ‘disposable’ truck, do the one-way drive East, and sell the disposable truck. Yes, it makes more sense than getting a moving van, especially because I am probably moving to Asheville in a couple of months from Raleigh, and it makes no sense to unload everything twice. Lots of ‘probablies’ in chronic illness, by the way. Few certainties.

Currently I’m juggling:

-getting the moving trailer. I need one anyway- the future of the ‘class teaching trailer’ is a weird hybrid enclosed-flatbed system I’ve wanted for several years. I found the grumpiest seller EVER on Craigslist, who’s got a really good price on one, but was such an ass that I wanted to ask him if he actually wanted the money or what. I’ll be looking at this tomorrow.

-getting half a tote of fuel processed into biodiesel for this future drive crosscountry in warmer weather. Methanol is insanely pricey right now- GRRR- but getting a head start on this would mean that I’d get a much easier time with soap removal- ie , long settling time before I actually use the stuff= no washing or any other work.

In other news, Andrew Morris helped make an arrangement whereby I can get use of a large processor of some friends of his, and do it all in one batch. In other other news, he spent a day or two making his own ‘large batch’, which apparently included recovering from the fact that they’d left a lot of water in the processor (???) and he didn’t check before pumping his nice perfect oil into it. Add that to the safety checklist- if using someone else’s processor, assume nothing, check everything.

-getting the gas chromatograph last bits and pieces and chemicals ordered. Long story, I’m very excited.

-looking at trucks and buses. I really want to get a shortbus to use as a mobile shop or a lab, and this is one option for the ‘disposable truck’ scenario. I don’t quite have enough cash to do this AND the trailer, though, and it makes more sense to wait on the truck on this trip, and get “the perfect vehicle” later, with more money, I hope. I just missed the perfect setup- airport shuttle with a lift in the rear. It’ll come. Anyone have a bus in California that they need taken off their hands?

-juggling social life with a pile of people I havne’t seen in months. It’s sooo nice.

-working on the VW. Lots of things fell apart in my absence, and it’ll be nice to have it back to ‘good condition’ finally. I still can’t decide if it’s worth selling , as it’s so insanely convenient to have a car while I’m here, and I’m planning on being here a lot more if I stay healthier. I’ve been borrowing a friend’s friend’s professional mechanic shop, which is such a nice scenario. I (heart) hydraulic lifts.

Dumb Maneuver #200: filling the VW with smelly petrodiesel RIGHT before working on the fuel system…

Totally improbably, I’m getting really good response to my Fayetteville TN class and it might even fill up (unless this is the wave of ‘early and dedicated’ people and it’ll die down later?).

Most people with a biodiesel homebrew business are having a really hard time right now due to low gas prices and economic downturn issues. Of course, I had to postpone the Mississippi class due to the exact opposite situation- few people signing up- but most of the others are getting good response.

Thank you, people.

Really, really, really, really, really looking forward to the return of my interesting life after the New Year.

I’m getting better just in time, which is nice- I am still having some sporadic problems with breathing, pain, heartbeat issues, and fatigue, and I haven’t tried any physical work in a while, but my concentration and word-finding and other cognitive and ‘energy’ stuff is far better just in the last 10 days or so.

I can read again, which was a big issue for several months. Greg and I ordered older editions of a chemistry textbook for $4 each, and are going to wade through some of the online free MIT ‘opencourseware’ chemistry courses. I am grateful for the modern world and it’s conveniences, let me tell you.

The improvement is coming just in the nick of time (I did raise my medication dosage), just two-three weeks ago I was really starting to wonder if it was ever going to get better and starting to have serious logistical problems that required me to have real money again (like paying for the next immensely expensive round of medical testing, finding myself unable to afford my current lifesaving medication some weeks, moving my crap crosscountry finally, etc). I feel lucky that many people helped- people I know, and Greg, and people whom I don’t know at all, all came out of the woodwork and took care of enough of my needs that I didn’t flounder completely. I’m tearing up just thinking about the support I’ve received and the kindness of a couple of strangers.

I feel really lucky that I came out of this disabling state- and there was work, without my having to go looking for it. It’s exciting and interesting work, exactly what I want to be doing, I have a 2-year plan involving a proposed international project, and a 10-year plan involving something entirely unrelated, and I’m looking forward to life again.

My really exciting new research project job is starting to take shape, I’m headed to California tomorrow to deal with projects that were orphaned at the beginning of this illness in May, and everything is just fabulous. Sometime this winter I should be moving to Asheville to go work on process optimization for Blue Ridge Biofuels, exactly what I want to do for a job at the moment, I’ve got awesome research projects lined up for a couple of clients, I’ll be picking up my gas chromatograph in California, which is all set up and ready to go for ASTM 6584 (I was on the 3-year plan for that- started putting it together this time 3 years ago!),.

I just immersed myself in 48 hours of reading some industrial chemistry relevant to what I’m trying to research, and life is just plain good. About the only thing I still hope for is that with my work and project schedules, I get to be here in Pittsboro long enough to enjoy it again- I spent 4 whole months barely able to leave the house and it’s been really isolating. I’m not in a hurry to leave now that I have perfect roommates and friends in town and am actuallly mobile again.

Considering how indescribably horrible the last few months have been- in September and October I was so sick that I thought there was a distinct possibility that the disease would kill me, and the remaining months haven’t been much better- I think I am long overdue for things being fabulous.

Happy new year everyone..

http://southwestfarmpress.com/energy/energy-independence-1223/

Biofuels and energy independence in uncertain times

Dec 23, 2008 8:14 AM, By David Bennett
Farm Press Editorial Staff

Thirty-five years ago this month, President Richard Nixon declared the country would be energy independent in a mere seven years. Obviously, that didn’t work out, but economist Joe Outlaw says it wasn’t a bad idea then and still isn’t.

“It’s easy for people to be cynical — ‘Energy independent? We can’t do that’ — but my point is every little bit helps as long as the economics and a business model support it,” said the co-director of the Texas-based Agricultural and Food Policy Center at the recent American Society of Farm Managers and Rural Appraisers annual meeting in San Antonio.

The “whole complex” of biofuels is “tremendous. Lots of people say I’m a biofuels apologist. What I am is a realist. I don’t care what anyone says, we’re going to have biofuels in this country. The politicians want it. For the most part, consumers want it.”

What really matters is the economics.

“At the end of the day, I’m an economist. Economics matter, but I’m not going to try and convert the rest of you. It doesn’t matter if I like ethanol or biodiesel or the people producing it. If they can’t make money doing it, they won’t be in (the business) for long.”

When the economics turn south, as they did with biodiesel recently, “people say, ‘Well, this is fine, but I’m not going to lose money on every gallon I make.’ They’ll sit back for a while and come back when the price moves back in their favor.”

Even in such an environment don’t be dissuaded, cautioned the economist. Biofuels, in some form, are here to stay.

Back to the 1980s?

Since 1960, domestically manufactured liquid fuel supply has remained relatively steady. Consumption, however, has remained on a steady track northwards. Referencing a chart showing a large gap in domestic supply and demand, Outlaw said, “Sure, this is last year’s chart and won’t show that prices got so high this year we used less, but it still shows the trend. Frankly, it tells all you need to know: we need more fuels and we probably don’t need to be so picky about where they come from.”

Many are comparing the current situation with ethanol to the early 1980s. At that time, “we had over 100 ethanol plants and then we went to 12. Well, a lot of people think we’ll go back there. I can tell you that the circumstances are completely different.”

For one thing, the United States is “more motivated to produce our own fuels for a number of reasons — 9/11 and other things. But the main difference is when (Congress passed) an RFS (Renewable Fuel Standard) that says ‘We’ll blend this much of these types of fuels.’ That’s a game-changer in this arena. It makes everything different.”

Outlaw said while he doesn’t agree with everything the Department of Energy does, he does believe when it comes to funding research “they have a good approach, saying, ‘We don’t know what technology — cellulosic production and other stuff — going forward will be the winner. So we’ll fund a whole lot of different things.’”

Food prices rise

Earlier this year, a debate raged across the country on the cause of food price increases. After releasing a study titled “The Effects of Ethanol on Texas Food and Feed,” the AFPC found itself in much demand. Outlaw was even called to speak before the Senate Energy Committee for the first time. Why? “Because we came out with some results that showed you can’t blame ethanol solely for what’s happened with food prices.”

Unfortunately, biofuel proponents and news stories then cited the report as saying ethanol was blameless. However, that isn’t what the authors stated. Ethanol was one of “many other factors that needed to be talked about.”

Among the things the report actually said were impacting food prices:

• Strong global economic growth.

• Weak dollar relative to many foreign currencies. “I don’t think anybody would tell me I’m wrong. When you had a weak dollar it made our very expensive corn very cheap and we were exporting more last year at all-time high prices then ever before. You knew the value of the dollar was encouraging that.”

• Recent crop problems (like wheat).

• Increased volume of trading in commodities by funds.

• Biofuels.

• Higher energy prices.

The timing of the report’s release coincided with the Texas governor asking for a Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) waiver. “So, it looked like the state’s major agriculture institution was coming out against his waiver request. That isn’t right — there were things in the report that supported the waiver and things that didn’t. We tried to be balanced.”

Policies

Outlaw then showed a long list of government policies and statements regarding biofuels since the 1970s.

“Most people forget that the blender’s credit was put in place in the 1970s. It’s been around for 30 years and no one really cared that much because we didn’t produce that much. Now that we’re producing something like 9 billion gallons times 51 cents, that’s a chunk of change and people” are paying attention.

The “big thing” that pushed biofuel production was the Energy Policy Act of 2005 which installed a Renewable Fuel Standard. Even at lower levels that weren’t binding “that started the trend where we’re at now. It also didn’t hurt that (President Bush) talked about ethanol in the 2006 State of the Union.”

In 2007, with the second energy bill — the Energy Independence and Security Act — the RFS “were extended way up and talked about other types of fuel.”

The 2005 act “basically capped corn-based ethanol. It only went to 2012, but it was going to stay flat. Now, we’ll jump up to about 15 billion gallons (out of a 36 billion gallon total) by 2022 and cap it there.”

A “big chunk” of the 36 billion gallons, “will come from advanced fuels. Some will be cellulosic biofuels or biomass diesel; however you want to get there.”

No link

A surprise to some, there isn’t strong linkage between the prices of crude oil, ethanol and biodiesel. Why is that? “Because when you have a fuel like ethanol that is used by oil companies when they feel like it, when it’s in their favor to use it, it isn’t a one-for-one price link.

“What’s happened in the last year, or so, is crude oil (prices) have gone up and down and biodiesel has been all over the place. Ethanol has been relatively flat. All have been going down recently.”

Looking at contract highs for the current year, “we’re well over $7 lower on beans and wheat. Looking at the corn crop, the USDA says it won’t be much different than the one they said we’d have when the price was $8. So there’s a whole lot of speculation in this deal.”

Livestock

When the AFPC’s report on food prices came out, Outlaw’s “biggest task” was “explaining it to our livestock industry. They said, ‘Joe, we can’t pay $6.50 for corn and make any money.”

When the report was released, “we called all the commodity organizations in the state and said we’d get a room in Austin and tell them about the study so they didn’t hear about it secondhand.”

There was much agreement when “we pointed out that feed costs were killing our feeding industry — $172 per head expected losses in Texas feed yards. The cattle feeders were nodding. But when we said you couldn’t blame ethanol for all this, the same people said, and this is a quote, ‘I can’t believe that someone that’s so right about (the $172) could be so stupid about’” ethanol’s lack of blame.

“People’s emotions were running high on the issue. We did a lot of work looking at actual production costs. Everyone was blaming the farmer for these high prices, saying they were getting too much for their commodities.

“But in fact, they hadn’t even harvested those crops yet. And they couldn’t use the futures market when elevators wouldn’t give forward contracts.”

The media talked about high commodity prices, “but no one was ever able to capture those. We even had high cotton prices for a couple of weeks. No one got them because no one could afford the risk exposure on margin calls. So, we had to do a lot of explaining.”

During the report’s fallout, the only call Outlaw “really enjoyed” was from a reporter in Dallas “who asked if ethanol was driving up the bread price. I said, ‘What do you think we make bread out of?’ ‘Corn!’ ‘No, you need to fix your story. It’s actually wheat. We do have cornbread, but that’s a different thing.’”

One of the things Outlaw pointed out is while distiller’s grains are a great feed “with inclusion rates, you just can’t replace it one-for-one with corn. There are certain feeding percentages that must be used. And it’s all where the ethanol is and cattle don’t tend to be there. There’s a geographic distribution problem.”

However, the bigger issue with the distiller’s grains is the price, which was expected to remain cheap. In fact, the price followed corn. While it may have been more readily available in some areas than corn, “it wasn’t as cheap as it was made out to be.”

The future

While he admits a lack of knowledge regarding biofuel manufacturing processes, Outlaw is certain there are “really smart people who will soon crack the (cellulosic) code, whether enzymatically, using gasification or chemical processes. It will happen.”

Outlaw actually bought stock in a company claiming a process that derived fuel from wood. The claims proved overblown. “If anyone wants to give me a quarter, they can have these shares of stock I purchased. I’d be money ahead based on what they’re worth now.”

Even so, “someone will do it. But I don’t know how soon. The chemical part is only one part of the problem.”

Transportation of biomass is another part of the puzzle. Delivering 2,000 trucks of biomass to a plant daily “will make the road a little busy.” Outlaw has heard from those who seem eager to convert corn-based ethanol plants to cellulosic. Even now, “they have a lot of trucks come in — but not 2,000 trucks a day. It will be a logistical nightmare.”

And too many times people are getting ahead of the available technology.

“At a producer meeting not far from here, a producer stood up and said he was going to stop growing 3,000 acres of cotton and switch to sweet sorghum. He’d heard a guy talk about the potential of sweet sorghum and he was going to get in on the ground floor. But he hadn’t been told it wasn’t ready yet — there’s no market, no seed.”

Outlaw was the one “to break the news that (the producer) wasn’t going to be the first rich guy in the county. I’ll do that but I don’t like it much.”

Portfolio of opportunities

In Outlaw’s opinion, “we’ll have a portfolio of opportunities going forward. I can’t tell you who’s got the answer. But it’s annoying when someone comes up and says, ‘This is what we’re going to do, this is the way it’s going to be, and it’s going to work and you’ve got tell everyone.’ That’s annoying because, at the end of the day, no one (yet) knows” how it will shake out.

“People shouldn’t have their feelings hurt if the (energy source) they’ve put their money in, or the one they think should happen, isn’t the one that turns out to be the long-term winner.”

During his testimony before the Senate Energy Committee, the most valuable question asked of Outlaw was, “So we get cellulosic ethanol. What happens to corn-based ethanol?”

“I said, ‘Well, Senator, assuming the government doesn’t change a lot of the things you do, it’s all going to be driven by economics: the cost of production of corn-based versus the cost of production of these other things. If they’re very close, we’ll have both. If one is a lot higher than the other, we won’t have it. That’s just the way the market works. That doesn’t mean I like it but that’s the way the world works.’”

email: dbennett@farmpress.com

Well I’m deeply excited about what’s next. In some ways, i’m right back where I left off back in August when I got too sick to function, but oh well, nothing I can do about it now. it’s a few lost months, and hopefully I won’t lose any more to this dreadful disease. I still don’t know for sure what I had (because I haven’t been able to afford testing), but it responds to babesia/malaria therapy, and presumably babesiosis infection or something else transmitted by a tick bite at the beginning of the summer.

I have to spend a few weeks in California, unfortunately-I’m not quite ready to really travel for that long, and I’ve gotten really thrashed by traveling for the last few jobs that I’ve done and classes that I have taught. But, it’s down to the wire on several things I have been putting off for seven months as a result of this illness, mainly the fact that I have to go back to California and finish moving. I’ve been paying rent on the studio/shop space for a year, not too much money back when I was working, but certainly a bad idea the moment. At some point, I’m going to have to load all that crap onto trailer and drive it cross country, but for the moment, I just go there for three weeks and get it out of the shop. I tried to put off that trip as long as I could.

On the other hand, I’m really, really excited about seeing friends while on the trip, and I’m even more excited about this being the beginning of a new phase. Again, I was supposed to start that new phase months ago - especially a dream job I got in August that I’m now just picking up again- but let me tell you, there’s nothing quite like being dysfunctional for months to make you really appreciate health, energy, and being able to do things.

I’m doing a research proposal dance with several consulting clients at the moment, and should be delving back into high-FFA oil research/esterification research this winter. On the trip to California, I am also picking up my GC, and shipping it back here. I can’t wait. I’ve been a little bit stuck here for lack of a good space to do wintertime R&D in- there’s nothing for rent around here that I can afford, and my shop space here is an unheated tractor shed. I’m having some funny ideas about picking up an old camper trailer-middle of winter, in the middle of a recession, should be a really good time to find a small camper for $500-and turning it into a small lab space and office. We’ll see what happens.

I’m cautiously posting a link to an Infopop biodiesel forum discussion on ethanol and food versus fuel- most of the time these threads devolve into libertarians versus liberals, both spouting ideology rather than real information, but so far, this one is a good compendium of links and articles about the issue:
http://biodiesel.infopop.cc/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/429605551/m/5471091742?r=8491051382

Biodiesel Production Hands-on Classes:

-Beginners: Hands-on Crash Course: Operate Your Own Reactor format
-Advanced Topics: Hands-on Advanced Topics course on ethanol biodiesel, methanol recovery, high-FFA oils, and more

with Maria ‘girl Mark’ Alovert
and guest instructors (Advanced Topics)

********************************
Biodiesel Production Crash Course class schedule:

Marietta, OH
Jan 17-18

Oxford, MS
Feb 21-22

Fayetteville, TN
Feb 28-Mar 1

Mifflinburg, PA
March 12-13

Edmund, OK
Mar 26-27

Bartlett, NH
April 4-5

*****************************

Biodiesel Advanced Topics/Farm Scale biodiesel production class schedule:

Mifflinburg, PA (with Preston Boop of Briar Patch Organic Farms)
March 14-15

Edmund, OK (with Carl Shortt of Okiebiofuel.com)
March 28-29

upcoming: Anchorage, Alaska Crash Course and Advanced topics classes, early June
possible Seattle WA Advanced Topics class, late May

******************************
cost:
$140 regular and $108/$95 early registration (see website for cutoff dates for early registration discounts)

no one turned away for lack of funds

For more information and to register, please see www.girlmark.com/tour
******************************

Biodiesel Production Crash Course:

This is a fast-paced class designed to quickly teach the skills needed for safely making high quality biodiesel, using a unique and truly hands-on format. Students will ‘learn by doing’ by making their own 5-gallon batches of biodiesel from beginning to end. There is also an opportunity to build your own full-size reactor to take home for those who purchase a parts kit in advance.

Students will spend one day learning basic theory, practicing titration, making mini-batches, and learning quality testing. The second day is devoted to solidifying the theory you just learned, by making biodiesel in realistic “Processor Stations’, practicing every step used in a full-size home biodiesel production system. Student teams will operate realistic, tabletop 5-gallon processor systems- a miniature version of the common Appleseed Processor/wash tank/dry tank found around the world- and the tabletop reactor will familiarize them with every valve, tank, pump, switch, and interconnect that would be found in a full-size system. The goal of the class format is to take the hands-on learning experience a big step beyond the ‘1-liter mini-batch’ equipment used in most biodiesel classes. There will also be a full-size reactor system on a trailer at the class, including GL-1 and pot still-type methanol recovery systems.

Background for Crash Course class:

In most biodiesel workshops (including my own Biodiesel Essentials), “hands-on time” usually means a few hours of lab work involving titration and shaking 1-liter soda bottle batches, or, at best, a demonstration by the instructor of some pre-arranged steps in a full-size reactor, performed once, with the students just watching. Neither of these is an ideal learning method for the complexity involved in using a ‘real’ biodiesel reactor on your own for the first time at home. People who are hands-on learners sometimes need more time on “realistic” equipment operation in addition to the 1-liter shaken soda bottle batch method.

Operating your own processors in class would be more realistic than 1-liter glassware batches. Operating a full system can also make it easier to understand equipment choices that face you as you design your own home system after the class, or help decide on one to purchase.

Format:
In the crash course, you will first learn the basic theory using a standard one-day mini-batch class, then spend the next day actually operating (with a team of 5-8) your own ‘realistic’ 5-gallon mini-reactor and processing system. You and your team will make decisions and mistakes, with constant personalized guidance to ensure that you understand why every step is done as well as when.

Equipment Building (Crash Course class):
We can also build some processors at the end of the Crash Course, for those students who wish to purchase a parts kit and water heater tank in advance. This is not mandatory and everyone can help build the systems.

Preparation and reading:

Because this is a fast-paced class, it is highly recommended that you purchase, ahead of time, an inexpensive mini-titration/test batch kit from www.utahbiodieselsupply.com and try to make and wash a soda-bottle test batch, using storebought, new oil, before the class. This is not mandatory but the preparation will enhance your class experience.

To make the class run smoothly and so that you get the most out of it, please read the www.biodieselcommunity.org website before the class, so that you have some idea of the basic process. Copies of Biodiesel Homebrew Guide will also be available for sale fpr $15 at the class: www.localb100.com/book.html , and there will be a short handout with some basic formulas for later reference.

************************************

Advanced Topics Biodiesel Production Hands-on Class:
The advanced class is designed for those who already make biodiesel (full-scale or test batches) or have attended hands-on workshops by teachers such as Jennifer Radtke, John Bush, Steve Fugate, BioLyle Rudensey, Carl Shortt, Piedmont Biofuels, Matt Steiman, Frankie Lind, Kalib Kersch, or others who teach from the http://biodieselcommunity.org techniques (check with me if a class is your only hands-on experience).

I encourage experienced biodiesel producers to bring a presentation or photos of their system and discuss their experiences.

This class is geared to both homebrewers and fleet/farm/small commercial producers.

The class covers a wide range of topics, geared especially towards larger scale ‘home’ production. The class specifically offers heavy hands-on focus on making biodiesel with several major techniques that are useful in your “skillset":

working with high-free-fatty-acid oil

working with high-water feedstocks

acidulating glycerine and wash water for easier disposal and cost savings

testing biodiesel, glycerine, and wash water for soap

producing biodiesel from oils recovered from glycerine

acid-catalyzed esterification options

methanol recovery from biodiesel (GL-1 process) and glycerine.

using glycerine as a solvent in various stages of the process

There will be an extensive hands-on section of the class devoted to techniques for making biodiesel using ethanol instead of methanol, and we will discuss small-scale fuel ethanol production.

We will also discuss water-free soap removal such as the use of the GL-1 process and ion exchange resins.

*************************************

About the instructor:
Maria ‘girl Mark’ Alovert is a biodiesel production technology consultant based in North Carolina. She is the author of The Biodiesel Homebrew Guide, a manual on biodiesel production (http://localb100.com), the founder of the community-written biodiesel homebrewing tutorial site http://biodieselcommunity.org and is the inventor of the Appleseed Processor, an ‘open source’ design now used by thousands of people around the world to produce biodiesel on a ‘homebrew’ scale. She has been involved in home-scale biodiesel technology development since 2000, and is currently researching production techniques for high-FFA oils/acid-catalyzed esterification, and ethanol-based biodiesel. She frequently teaches beginning and advanced biodiesel production classes around the country and is a an active participant in biodiesel production discussion forums such as http://biodiesel.infopop.cc

For more information and to register, please see www.girlmark.com/tour

Ack. Just ran across this journal article about a new strain of the Lyme Disease spirochete (Borrellia anything is a variant on borrelia burgdorferi sensu strictu, the ‘original’ Borrellia species identified as the cause of Lyme Disease, which is also the only one we test for in humans even though many of the related strains cause the same disease in animals and presumably humans).

As an aside, the article mentions that there are 118 separate borrellia species in the South. And we have the ultra-aggressive Lone Star ticks to spread them to humans…

http://jcm.asm.org/cgi/content/abstract/JCM.01183-08v1

For my birthday, I want remission. Please?

I’ll settle for continued improvements. I had about 5-6 days of no pain this week. Major hooray. I still don’t quite feel normal and I feel like I’m on the verge of a health crash, but I have long, long, long periods each day of “normal” for the last few days. Yesterday I worked for 6 hours straight, with productive workflow and reasonably smart decisions. My drug are starting to have effects I can measure, the symptom control is make sense again and I can tell that there’s cause and effect when I take something that should have an effect, which wasn’t the case for the first 6 weeks or so of Mepron, and not for months before then when I wasn’t treating the right things.

I’m sure it’ll all crash again- I seem to be right on schedule for what happens about 8 weeks into babesia treatment, and people go through nasty crashes and relapses- but man I don’t wanna go there, I don’t wanna go there, I want to stay like this and bask in the warmth and light and have a life again.

For my birthday weekend, I spent literally 12 hours today cooking up a storm for tomorrow’s Local Lunch for Piedmont Biofuels Industrial. My friend Jaime and I are making brunch for the dietarily challenged- super low-carb, fancy, vegan, etc. Me and Jaime prepped a whole pallet load of food- it’s in ECO Organics commercial cooler and it currently occupies one full pallet, which means, I think, that we made 2.6 metric assloads of food and may need a forklift or at least some interns to move it back to the kitchen- and Guest Chef Matt came and contributed about 3 gallons of Bad Carbohydrates in the form of eggy potato pancake batter and homemade applesauce, to balance us all out.

I couldn’t have done this last week without a lot more help. I couldn’t have done this four days ago and not felt like crap. And, I’m so beautifully grateful that my interest in cooking is coming back.

I’m waking up, I think. I’ve been seeing the light, or the beginning of the light, or glimmers of the light in the distance, for about 2 weeks now, but I’ve got solid evidence now that it’s really starting to get better. Knowing what I know about the disease, it’ll probably be it’s a long series of ups and downs again, but I’m at least able to think about making plans and I’m getting so excited about them.

Biodiesel Production Crash Course: Beyond the Dr Pepper Minibatch hands-on class (new format!)

with Maria ‘girl Mark’ Alovert
December 6-7, 2008

Wilmington, NC
sponsored by Cape Fear Biofuels Co-operative
$140 /$108 early registration before Nov 7th

For more information and to register, please see www.girlmark.com/tour

This is a fast-paced class designed to quickly teach the skills needed for safely making high quality biodiesel, using a unique and truly hands-on format. After learning basic theory, practicing titration, making mini-batches, and learning quality testing, students will spend a full day solidifying what they learned by making biodiesel in realistic “Processor Stations’, practicing every step used in a full-size home biodiesel production system. Student teams will operate realistic, tabletop 5-gallon processor systems- a miniature version of the common Appleseed Processor/wash tank/dry tank found around the world- and the tabletop reactor will familiarize them with every valve, tank, pump, switch, and interconnect that would be found in a full-size system. The goal of the class format is to take the hands-on learning experience a big step beyond the ‘1-liter mini-batch’ equipment used in most biodiesel classes. There will also be a full-size reactor system on a trailer at the class, including GL-1 and pot still-type methanol recovery systems.

Background:

In most biodiesel workshops (including my own Biodiesel Essentials), “hands-on time” usually means a few hours of lab work involving titration and shaking 1-liter soda bottle batches, or, at best, a demonstration by the instructor of some pre-arranged steps in a full-size reactor, performed once, with the students just watching. Neither of these is an ideal learning method for the complexity involved in using a ‘real’ biodiesel reactor on your own for the first time at home. People who are hands-on learners sometimes need more time on “realistic” equipment operation in addition to the 1-liter shaken soda bottle batch method.

Operating your own processors in class would be more realistic than 1-liter glassware batches- but is very difficult to arrange as a class for 20 people. Operating a full system can also make it easier to understand equipment choices that face you as you design your own home system after the class, or help decide on one to purchase.

Format:
In the crash course, you will first learn the basic theory using a standard one-day mini-batch class, then spend the next day actually operating (with a team of 5-8) your own ‘realistic’ 5-gallon mini-reactor and processing system. You and your team will make decisions and mistakes, with constant personalized guidance to ensure that you understand why every step is done as well as when. Teams may choose from several variations on the basic process, and we will focus on quality control and equipment/process decisions needed to make high quality biodiesel, safe processing methods, and efficient system design.

Equipment Building:
We can also build some processors at the end of the first day, for those students who wish to purchase a parts kit and water heater tank in advance. This is not mandatory and everyone can help build the systems. We will not use these large reactors in the hands-on class, so they can be transported home without mess. Please purchase your parts kit from the instructor or from www.utahbiodieselsupply.com. Because we are trying to fit a lot into the weekend, we don’t have time to assemble your own ’store-bought’ parts, and can only work from the kit. The kit sold by the instructor is similar to that formerly sold by www.b100supply.com and if they get them in stock again, please feel free to purchase theirs. If you are building a system, you will also need to bring a new or used electric water heater of any size.

Preparation and reading:

Because this is a fast-paced class, it is highly recommended that you purchase an inexpensive test batch kit from www.utahbiodieselsupply.com and try to make and wash a test batch, using storebought, new oil not requiring titration, before the class. This is not mandatory but the preparation will enhance your class experience.

To make the class run smoothly, please read the www.biodieselcommunity.org website before the class, so that you have some idea of the basic process. Copies of Biodiesel Homebrew Guide will also be available for sale fpr $15 at the class: www.localb100.com/book.html , and there will be a short handout with some basic formulas for later reference.

About the instructor:
Maria ‘girl Mark’ Alovert is a biodiesel production technology consultant based in North Carolina. She is the author of The Biodiesel Homebrew Guide, a manual on biodiesel production (http://localb100.com), the founder of the community-written biodiesel homebrewing tutorial site http://biodieselcommunity.org and is the inventor of the Appleseed Processor, an ‘open source’ design now used by thousands of people around the world to produce biodiesel on a ‘homebrew’ scale. She has been involved in home-scale biodiesel technology development since 2000. She frequently teaches beginning and advanced biodiesel production classes around the country and is a an active participant in biodiesel production discussion forums such as http://biodiesel.infopop.cc

I’ve been meaning to write up a long web page about where I’ve been, but I’m stuck in a catch-22: I’ve been so sick it’s been hard to put down focused thoughts in print or to find the energy to do so even when I can focus.

I haven’t written much email in the past month, I go weeks without opening the computer, and so forth. The Twitter feed did keep me from going totally nuts: www.twitter.com/girlmark - I can handle posting 140-character microblogs from my phone.

I’ve been sick since mid-May, I think, and by mid-September it got so bad that I was starting to contemplate an emergency room visit- I was spending most days gasping for air like I had asthma (which I don’t). I’d been on antibiotics since May and if this was just Lyme, I should have seen results by then instead of getting so much worse.

Enough other oddball stuff surfaced to point pretty clearly to a babesia infection. Along with Lyme, it’s on the much-publicized ‘Deadly Dozen’ list- lucky me- and treating it SUCKS. It’s the most common co-infection found along with Lyme in infected animals, and does a serious number on people with both diseases. I guess with the new Deadly Dozen report, I get to feel like a pioneer for contracting it ahead of the rest of y’all.

I don’t know if I’d gotten it as a new infection in May, when I definitely picked up enough of something to cause heavy immune activity- or if I’d had a ’stealth’ asymptomatic babesia infection all along, which would explain why I haven’t fully kicked Lyme yet- but luckily for me, it finally came out of hiding enough for my doctor and I to consider it this summer.

Like all the tick-borne illnesses, the testing for babesia sucks- it’s a malaria-like organism but it only attacks 1% of red blood cells so it’s difficult to find on standard malaria blood smears. DNA-based or antibody testing only looks for one or two species out of suspected multiple strains. I’d never had the “malaria-like” symptoms before, but since May I developed enough of the other weird shit- extreme anorexia, neurological respiratory distress unrelated to any physiological cause, night sweats, nausea unrelated to my antibiotics, and a few others- that we put two and two together. Getting drugs for it was a whole nother ordeal- atavoquone alone costs $1400/month- but I’ve managed so far.

What I didn’t know was that treatment worsens the symptoms so much. So, for the past 6 weeks or so, I’ve felt like a completely dysfunctional, though angry, frustrated, and pain-ridden, blob. Supposedly this shit continues for several months, though I’m starting to see the light a little and some things have gotten better. Ughhh.

More to come…

oh, and, I’m well enough to be in Oklahoma City teaching Biodiesel Essentials next weekend: www.girlmark.com/tour

I’ve FINALLY discovered the point of twitter posts after reading some by a friend who does a good job of it (many people seem to post fairly uninteresting stuff like what they had for dinner and how they liked it). I go through my day sometimes having micro-adventures, and it’s not always enough stuff to write a real blog post about. Plus I can post from my phone easily. I started thinking about this when I started going to a daytime machinist class at a community college, where most of my classmates are straight out of high school and say, let’s just say, “the darnedest things". Rachel Burton said she should have written a book about her similar experiences with very young fellow students in mechanic school.

http://twitter.com/girlmark

I just got the go-ahead to do a Biodiesel Essentials class in Wilmington, sponsored by Cape Fear Biofuels. More info coming shortly.

Biodiesel Production Essentials
Class dates Dec 6-7, 10am-5 pm
$120/$108 earlybird registration discount
www.girlmark.com/tour

Really bad shop fires and deaths keep following me around, none of them related to biodiesel (see blog about Chatham Alignment burning down and the tow company owner dying after dealing with me). I’ll post a longer blog about the ‘fire in between’ that happened this summer- it’s eerie how many of these things there were in a short period right after I was present.

So… my ex-shop NIMBY in Oakland had a fire, which caused a horrible and inevitable eviction process. Tom had just moved ALL of his stuff in there from our other ex-shop. They’d been trying really hard to get me to put my stuff in there in storage and vacate our former space at Xian. If I hadn’t been as sick, I might have gone for it, I was there a lot this spring and really liked a few of the new tenants and the fancy woodworking studio one of them set up.

And, you guessed it, one of the guys near the fire is a mechanic who worked on my van quite a lot.

I have about one mechanic left, and he’s due to work on the VW next week. Uh oh…

**************************************************

First of all, here are some reviews of NIMBY that describe it well- a shop and huge, illegal performance space:
http://www.yelp.com/biz/n-i-m-b-y-space-oakland

And, a couple of dirges:

http://www.nimbyspace.org/

And another writeup right after the fire:

NIMBY CATCHES FIRE
>
>It was a refrigerator-type container, 2nd level, in the back lower
>bay. It’s the one that had the rickety staircase to a 3rd level
>container. Alan and Ryan’s shared box was underneath, though Alan was
>mostly moved out.
>
>The container was rented by a new tenant, just moved in yesterday.
>She apparently did timelapse photography with candles, but the fire
>was most likely started by her space heater, which she left on when
>she went home at 4:30 this morning.
>
>Simon, Gimpy, and Annie attempted to fight the fire when it was
>detected. They broke the window out of the container, and emptied
>about eight dry-chemical extinguishers in there. However, they ran
>out of fire extinguishers and were unable to continue to control it.
>The fire department was called, and they got the fire under control.
>Actual damage includes the container that burned, the empty one on top
>of it, and possibly some of the stuff underneath.
>
>Nobody was seriously hurt. Everyone on the scene has some minor smoke
>inhalation, and Simon burned his hands on the door.
>
>According to Simon, after the fire was out the fire marshall spent
>about 15 minutes walking around the warehouse listing code violations
>into his cellphone. This was without opening any containers.
>Everyone was told to leave the building. It’s now padlocked and
>sealed, and only Snook is allowed to enter. It’ll apparently be like
>this for a few days. The OFD will be doing a detailed inspection of
>the entire premises, and calling in inspectors from other departments
>as well.

Aah, Labor Day at the Piedmont Biofuels Industrial plant, when hardly anyone was around, and Chef Satanica shows up with steaks to throw on the recently-pre-seasoned-with-burnt-pig-flavor gas grill. Dead holidays are some of the few times when the plant resembles an actual ‘normal’ industrial factory at an off hour. The rest of the time the campus there is teeming with life at all hours, sometimes putting the ‘park’ back in Industrial Park, especially when people’s kids come around after school to skate or otherwise play on the paved driveway. This time it was just a few farmers at work, ignoring the holidays since farmers don’t do days off, their dogs lounging around the facility that gave away the fact that this wasn’t just another ‘plant’ setting.

When the cats are away a few mice will… have the run of the place in the blazing heat and use the oily-smelling offices and plant kitchen as an air-conditioned refuge.

But, more importantly- look what’s on the grill: I learned this trick on Infopop from Big Mike- grilled pineapple. It’s the most amazing addition to a cookout. I just about died eating this amazingness

I finally got around to getting a cheap Harbor Freight digital thermometer with a K Thermocouple probe, and measuring the flame temperature of my very simple, not-optimised Turk Burner. The temperature inside the flame hit 2000F before the thermometer maxed out. Strangely, on the Celcius setting, it went higher, to 1150C, where it fluctuated back and forth a few degrees like I’d expect. I don’t know that I trust a HF thermometer, but it’s relatively accurate at lower temps. No, I can’t use an IR thermometer, the cheap ones max out at about 1000F.

This is pretty good news as the temperature is an indication of how complete the combustion is, and it’s been a big subject of speculation in the biodiesel world for a while. If the vegoil/glycerine/whatever didn’t burn close to completely, there are questions about what pollutants the unit would emit.

I was really hoping that the Turk reached at least 1500F. 2000 is much better.

I’d been working for a few hours already and got so excited that I messaged a bunch of nerdy people the news about the flame temp. Then I realized that it was only 7:30 am in California and that I’d probably woken several people up. Oops.

I was burning washed/dried biodiesel. I also did a batch of FFA/biodiesel mixture from acidulating glycerine, and it hit more or less the same temperatures, assuming I trust my thermometer. The difference is that the washed biodiesel left no ash, which is to be expected, whereas the FFA/biodiesel mix left almost as much ash as I get when I burn unwashed biodiesel. I was actually doing this experiment just to look at ash production- to see if the salts from acidulation stayed in the FFA/biodiesel layer or if they sank to the glycerine/water/water-soluble contaminants layer. I had used HCl to acidulate the glycerine’s soaps, which produces non-precipitating salts in this case. I’m sure that if I used sulfuric acid, which is DANGEROUS to use by the way (boiling acid/glycerine results when you first add it), it would have had fewer salts in the oily layer, as it forms a large ‘cottage cheese’ looking layer of insoluble salts.

The fact that it hits 2000F means a few interesting things:
-that should be a high enough combustion temperature to stop worrying about acrolein emissions. While acrolein isn’t the only pollutant created by combustion, it’s one that gets brought up over and over again as a concern with vegetable oil burning or glycerine burning.

-you can’t of course actually capture all 2000F worth of energy with a heat exchanger as that was just the flame temperature itself, but the air temperature right above the flame was “only” 800C, which is plenty.

-flame color is caused by something other than incomplete combustion. The Turk makes a really bright flame on some fuels (like you need cutting goggles to look at it, which you’d never know by looking at photos of Turk Burners on the Internet, as they all look yellow due to bad photography of bright objects), and a yellower flame on others (however, it doesn’t smoke or smell during the ‘good’ part of the burn cycle, till the levels drop too low and it starts to smolder at the very end of use). I was wondering if the yellow flame was due to poor combustion or due to other colorants in the container I was using, the fuels I’m using, or something else.

-I need a smaller Turk Burner so that I can actually use reasonable heat exchanger that can keep up with the heat. Mine consumes about 1.25 gallons of biodiesel an hour. I’d be wasting most of the BTU’s if I couldn’t get a better heat exchanger.

Photos from last summer (2007) experiments with Turk Burner fuels:

If you haven’t been down to Piedmont Biofuels Co-op, but have always wanted to see what the fuss is about…

Come to Girl Mark’s Spontaneous Intern Housing Repair, Cookout, and Demolition Party, Tuesday, Aug 19th, 5:30 till late… See Tuesday Night Fuelmaking at work, introduce yourself to the production staff and volunteers, and marvel at the hive of activity that erupts every Tuesday nights at the co-op.

Directions to the Co-op:
http://biofuels.coop/coop-directions/
contact for 8/19 work party and materials donation only: alovert@b100.org
contact for directions, and other info:
regular co-op phone line: (919) 642-0172

If you’ve been there before, you won’t recognize the place. The Incubator farm is bustling, the Tami Tank cob building and former Tchotch Shop strawbale building are finally plastered and finished-out, the Grease Warming Zone building is beautifully painted in a Mardi Gras version of the Piedmont colors, and the fuelmaking process is chugging along with dozens of new volunteers every month.

Let’s take it up a notch- come help with construction prep and light demolition on the Yellow House, the home of the interns that make it all run smoothly the rest of the week.

Below’s the spammail I sent to all the local NC/Piedmont lists:

******************************

Hello everybody,

I have been volunteering all summer as intern coordinator at
Piedmont, and helping with facility upgrades at the site. Right now
we’re have a two or three week break between internships, which means
that the yellow modular home that interns Joanna and Marc lived in will
be empty. The house has a couple of problem with kitchen and bathroom
floor rot, and we have to repair it while the house is empty. Once those
repairs are complete it’s going to be a spectacular living space for our
hardworking interns.

I would desperately like some help doing demolition next week. It
will be easy and fun, and we’ll have good food, and you don’t need
construction experience. We can do it during Tuesday night fuel making,
and need a few extra people to come out for that, or I can work with you
at another time early next week. I’m also looking for donations of some
housewares, tools, and building supplies for the next internship.

The demolition will involve an tearing out two small floors made out
of mobile home particleboard, tearing out a counter and moving
appliances, taking out some carpet, and removing a sinking bathtub. We
have tools, but if you have crowbars, flat bars, hammers, sledgehammers,
and sawzalls, please bring them. We have a few respirators for the
dust, and if you have your own, please bring them. I will provide work
gloves. Bring an iPod with demolition-friendly music, I have a stereo
for us.

I will bring a small grill and we can grill up some meat and veggie
burgers. BYOB if you’d like.

If you have not been out to Tuesday night fuel making in a while, the
co-op is looking spectacular, thanks to the efforts of volunteers and
the summers interns in the past 10 weeks. Since we get a lot of our
income through Sunday tours, your work on beautifying and finishing
projects in our physical campus has been extremely valuable in addition
to looking good and improving morale for interns, volunteers, and staff.

Partial list of work that you volunteer worker-members have done
this summer: The co-op main building, the grease warming zone, and
the outbuildings are all freshly painted, limewashed, finished, and
otherwise beautified. The screen porch at the White house/reactor
building is now finally screened in, which means that interns and staff
have been making full use of it during the hot summer. And, fuelmaking
has been working smoothly with many new volunteers getting trained and
learning the ropes.

All of this is really worth seeing in person if you have not been
here for awhile, so come on out the next chance you get. I would like
to keep up the momentum by turning some attention to the Yellow House.
The Yellow House is the intern housing next door, which is owned by
Abundance Foundation and eventually will belong to the co-op. We have
been formalizing the internship program, and that requires providing
quality housing and a good ‘room and board’ plan for interns.

Here are a few things that I would like for next fall’s internship, and
especially for next weeks demolition:

- help this Tuesday night, starting at 5:30 (or earlier- email me). Come
next door to the yellow house that is to the east of the co-op main
building. You can pull into the driveway from the road to get to the
front of the house and park there.
- help with remaining demolition at any other time between Monday
morning and Thursday night, of next week. Email me first- if you have a
day off and would like to come shoot the breeze about biodiesel and
demolish some bad stuff.
- some roofing materials (email me for info on what we need)
- any useful lumber over 5′ long, we have many projects coming up that
need supplies like this
- plywood or floor or roof decking materials
- small roll of floor covering for replacing the kitchen linoleum

I’m also looking for donations of some housewares for future interns
housing/"room and board": We provide furnishings for them, and I would
like to outfit the interns’ kitchen better. Does anyone have, laying
around in an attic somewhere:

- a cast iron pan or two
- a couple of medium and large size cooking pots
- small microwave
- blender (for food, not biodiesel)
- desk lamps
- shelving/utility shelves or bookshelves. Please contact me before
bringing shelving as we have specific needs for that.

Big stuff I’m looking for, for the co-op and internship:

- small refrigerator (we’re looking for two- a small “counter” (like
dorm type) fridge because staff don’t have their own kitchen, and a
narrow kitchen one to replace one that’s failing at the White)
- metal folding chairs for future classes at the co-op- Matt’s teaching
classes in the next few months and we need about 15 more folding chairs
of our own so we can stop borrowing/renting
- For the main building’s yard area: picnic table, functional outdoor
table/lawnchairs set, or “park” bench. We don’t have much outdoor
seating on campus. I’d like to have more workparties/barbeque type
workday events in the future.
- working dishwasher for the lab we’re putting in at the Reactor Room,
for glassware and sample jars
- old InSinkErator type sink garbage disposal, for chopping up food
scraps for a compost project this fall
- hand tools or power tools you’d like to donate to the co-op, that can
be used by the interns (and volunteers) during future semesters. We
especially need a socket set and combination wrenches, copper pipe
soldering gear or other plumbing tools, and a jigsaw.
- while I’m making a (maybe unrealistic) wish list, how about a propane
barbeque (it doesn’t have to work, I can fix it, it’s also for volunteer
event/workparties) or a working electric lawnmower…

Email me if you have anything like this to donate, or would like to work
with me on the demolition at a time other than Tuesday Fuelmaking night.

Thank you in advance for any of this and your help!

girl Mark “formerly a carpenter, now a gimp’ Alovert
Co-op Intern Co-ordinator
alovert@b100.org

Biodiesel Production Classes

Biodiesel Essentials: Sept 18-19, 10-5 pm

Advanced Topics in Biodiesel Production: Sept 20-21, 10-5 pm. (Must have prior experience or attend the Essentials class first)

Riverhead, NY (location will be emailed to registered participants)
early bird registration before 8/16 $108 per class
After 8/16: $120 per class

www.girlmark.com/tour

This class is also offered in Florida and elsewhere this fall. see website for updates.

Biodiesel is a clean-burning diesel alternative made from any natural oil or fat. It can be made easily in a backyard or garage environment. We are offering two classes at a home in Riverhead, LI, covering beginning or advanced topics, on September 18-19 or 21-22.

The Biodiesel Essentials class is a comprehensive, hands-on workshop that teaches you everything you need to know to make high quality biodiesel, use your system more efficiently, and make informed decisions about shortcuts. This class is geared to both beginning and more advanced students and we encourage discussion of questions you may have, as appropriate.

There are extensive hands-on ‘lab’ portions in the class during which you will get individual attention to make sure you understand the process fully and can do the techniques on your own at home. We will run a full-sized system but also do ‘lab’-scale batches so that you really learn the underlying concepts and techniques, and we will make some ‘engineered failures’ so you learn what not to do and what causes it.

The Advanced Topics class covers many more techniques beyond basic production, and will be more discussion-based, with some experienced regional homebrewers and farm-scale biodiesel producers attending, who will share their experience (if you have experience in biodiesel, please bring a short presentation about your system, or photos to share). There will be some hands-on lab work in the Advanced Topics class as well (soap testing and water/glycerine neutralization, ethanol-based biodiesel production techniques, and acid-base two-stage biodiesel will all be done as a lab exercise). Advanced Topics will also cover regulatory issues with small-scale production, composting or boiler fuel use of glycerine and advanced treatment of spent wash water, taxes, and more.

To attend the weekend Advanced Topics class, you must have prior experience making biodiesel, or attend the Thur-Fri Essentials class first.

Location:

We are meeting in a private home a few miles from Riverhead, NY, with many ‘green building’ and recycled building materials technologies on display (photo below is from last winter’s Biodiesel Essentials class). The address will be emailed out to registered participants two weeks before the class. We can help arrange transportation from LIRR in advance.

There is a working, functional homebrewing system on a trailer that we will operate during the Essentials class.

Some topics covered in the Biodiesel Essentials class:
biodiesel/SVO/solvent thinning (ie DSE etc) options and history
biodiesel chemistry
testing oil (titration and water testing)
removing water from oil
making test batches
an overview of equipment
Equipment build- help build a reactor at the end of Sunday’s class
quality control factors
quality testing
mistwashing and other water washing options
breaking emulsion
two-stage base biodiesel
waste water and glycerine treatment and disposal
reuse
waterless soap removal with Amberlite and GL’s process
common pitfalls
hands-on experience recovering from failed batches and emulsion
special considerations for biodiesel made with ethanol instead of methanol
safety

The Advanced Topics class covers topics that include:

Quality control
analysis of real-world problems with offspec biodiesel
“ASTM testing” for those considering commercial production
gas chromatography versus other options for testing for conversion
acid-base biodiesel process
advanced topics in dewatering of oil
using glycerine in your process for various benefits
testing for soap
methanol recovery and equipment design
testing recovered methanol for purity
zeolite and other methods for improving methanol purity
issues to avoid when “waterless washing” with ion exchange resin
acid-base chemistry and safety
testing for residual soap
acidulation of soap in glycerine, special equipment considerations
Recapturing oils or biodiesel trapped in glycerine or wash water
dealing with high-water-content oils
Graham Laming-type vapor control system
spill-proofing your system
regulatory issues
taxes
larger-scale equipment design (for co-ops or small farms)
treating wash water and glycerine for disposal or other uses
commercial tests for wash water- BOD, COD, FOG, etc
real-world test results related to biodegradability/safety of sidestream disposal
burning glycerine safely for energy
hydronic/solar applications for biodiesel and wash water heating
disaster prevention scenarios exercises for larger-scale processor systems
discussion of regulatory topics for non-commercial producers larger than homebrew
solar heating options
very through discussion/demonstration of several different options in washing, including drawbacks and advantages
greywater systems for wash water recycling

About the instructor:

Maria ‘girl Mark’ Alovert is a biodiesel production technology consultant based in North Carolina. She is the author of The Biodiesel Homebrew Guide, a manual on biodiesel production, the founder of the community-written biodiesel homebrewing tutorial site www.biodieselcommunity.org and the inventor of the Appleseed Processor, an ‘open source’ design now used by thousands of people around the world to produce biodiesel on a ‘homebrew’ scale. She has been involved in home-scale biodiesel technology development since 2000. She is currently the internship coordinator at Piedmont Biofuels and a research partner with Blue Ridge Biofuels in North Carolina, where she studies practical techniques for working with high-FFA ‘difficult’ oils for “open-source” publication.

It is strongly recommended that you read this website first: http://www.biodieselcommunity.org to get a background for this subject.

To register for the class:

see www.girlmark.com/tour

Here’s an awesome blog entry written by a recent visitor to one of the Piedmont Industrial tours, with great photos of the amazing eco-industrial park that Piedmont has built at their Industrial facility:

http://blog.lawsonforcongress.com/2008/08/12/a-snapshot-of-sustainability/#comment-4578

(edit as of 8/14: The Biofuels.coop blog aggregator is broken and no one’s blogs are updating. If you’re seeing this post through the aggregator, just click on the title of the blog itself (ie Diary of a Mad Scientist) rather than the post, and it’ll take you to the most recent entry).

I’m doing really badly health-wise, worse and for longer than I’d been sick since last March or so. It’s hit me in several new ways- I can’t breathe- a symptom called ‘air hunger’ that could be a symptom of a coinfection with some other pathogen, or could be caused by other things, and a weird form of anorexia. I’m going around gasping for breath all day long, in addition to all my other nasty symptoms. My appetite disappeared about three months ago and I’m losing a lot of weight because nothing feels edible (and I’ve been off antibiotics for a few weeks, so I don’t think it’s due to antibiotic side effects). So, now I can’t breathe and I can’t eat, I think that means I’m halfway to dead, and I kinda look like death warmed over much of the time. Graydon Blair saw me at the Colorado biodiesel conference and was quite horrified at the change in my appearance in the past two years. Damn.

But- I’m so ecstatic about how everything else is going. It’s a really odd combination- usually if I’m sick, I’m also emotionally miserable. These days everything else is so good that it sort of doesn’t matter that I can’t breathe normally, I can’t exercise, I can’t eat, I don’t care about food (which is REALLY odd for me), I only have 6 hours a day when I can function half-normally, I’m bumping into things and clumsy, my memory is fucked up, I can’t get up in the morning without major help, etc. Yuck.

I just got offered a job doing a research project on high-FFA oils, which is a subject I’ve been pursuing for the last few weeks anyway and did quite a bit of work with in the past. The results of the project are going to be “open-source". Just by coincidence, right before the job offer came, I hit on a couple of new methods for working with high-FFA and high-water oils (I reported at my advanced topics talk at the Colorado conference, and at the recent Advanced Topics class in Pittsboro, about the ‘Base-Ackwards Method’, will soon write up some more about it as i learn more). Trap grease, bite my ass. You are nothing to me. I’m esterifying some ethanol-based biodiesel right now, with OK results as well. I’m thinking of going bioprospecting for algae at the local ponds as I think I may have a solution to some of the algae oil extraction issues as well. Also right before the job offer appeared, I got an email out of the blue that said that the renovation of my gas chromatograph, which was on hold pending a $1500 part that I didn’t want to pay full price for, has been finished by the college that hosted it- someone pulled a $1500 motherboard out of thin air apparently and even installed it for me. So I now have my own GC to do the research with.

It’s just an ecstatic time.

I’m back in Brooksville FL:
www.girlmark.com/tour

Biodiesel Essentials: October 9-10, 2008
Advanced Topics in Biodiesel: October 11-12

Biodiesel Essentials:
(no prior experience required)
Biodiesel fuel can be made in your backyard or garage for under $1/a gallon with common ingredients, using very inexpensive equipment. Relatively little chemistry knowledge is needed to produce quality fuel that will run in any diesel engine, and thousands of people around the country have discovered homebrewing fuel to be an addictive hobby. Come learn what it takes to produce your own clean-burning biodiesel fuel, and to build the equipment to do so.

These classes are hands-on and fast-paced - you’ll be making test batches of fuel, titrating and testing oil, and assessing quality of the finished product throughout the two day class.

Advanced Topics in Biodiesel Production
(must have prior experience making biodiesel, or have attended a class, see www.girlmark.com/tour for more information)

The advanced class is designed for those who already make biodiesel (full-scale or test batches) or have attended hands-on workshops by teachers such as Jennifer Radtke, John Bush, Steve Fugate, BioLyle Rudensey, Piedmont Biofuels, Matt Steiman, Frankie Lind, Kalib Kersch, or others who teach from the http://biodieselcommunity.org techniques (check with me if a class is your only hands-on experience).

Some of the topics covered in the advanced class include:

Quality control in great detail, analysis of real-world problems with offspec biodiesel, acid-base biodiesel process, advanced topics in dewatering, testing for soap,methanol recovery and equipment design, testing recovered methanol for purity, waterless washing with Amberlite and Magnesol, larger-scale equipment design (for co-ops or small farms), treating wash water and glycerine for disposal, testing wash water and glycerine, acidifying wash water and glycerine, esterifying oils recovered from acidified glycerine/wash water, in-depth disposal/sidestreams discussion, burning glycerine safely for energy, hydronic applications for biodiesel and wash water heating, more advanced discussion of safety and disaster prevention scenarios for larger-scale processor systems, discussion of regulatory topics for non-commercial producers larger than homebrew, solar heating options, very through discussion/demonstration of several different options in washing, including drawbacks and advantages, greywater systems for wash water recycling

Biodiesel Production Classes on Long Island, NY!

Riverhead, LI
Biodiesel Essentials: September 18-19
Advanced Topics in Biodiesel: September 20-21

to register: www.girlmark.com/tour

Last year’s classes took place in Kevin Shea’s amazing dome home- here’s a photo from my January 08 class, which barely does justice to the enormous dome this guy lives in (and, tisk tisk, why are you guys all not wearing your safety glasses?):

I am so insanely excited to go back to New York City again when I do this Long Island class. New York City is only 8 hours north of where I am living now and I’ve been just about everywhere on the East Coast in the last few years except there. I spent about 24 hours visiting the city in January, and that’s the only time I’ve been back in 8 years.

New York City is my hometown.

My summer so far:

first of all, I’m sick again. I’m sick of it. I can’t figure out what’s up, except that it seems that every time I get tick bitten, I have some Lyme symptoms about 5 days later. It must have something to do with an immune response to something in tick saliva, or a reaction to some other bacterium or virus, or maybe I was just overdoing it since early May, or… I’ve given up on figuring it out, as it’s just about impossible to do a controlled experiment with my own body to figure this out because changes to my meds, diet, etc, don’t have an immediate effect that’s easy to distinguish from other factors.

I’m taking antibiotics because of the May tick bite and subsequent arthritis/neck pain/tiredness, but also just started some other herbal formulas that tend to knock people out pretty bad. Our end of North Carolina has more ticks this year than ever before- lucky me- and their record numbers have even made the papers. We’re getting covered with them every time anyone walks through the woods. I’ve never regarded my surroundings as being ‘toxic’ before, and it’s really freaky being out on our 80 acres without being able to go for walks in the woods, which I’d spent all winter doing. I’m comparing notes with a couple of other friends with Lyme, and one of them is on the same new herbal stuff as me, and it may be that my new symptoms are a Jarsch-Herxheimer reaction to my antibiotics, some other kind of reaction to the new meds since other people seem to have trouble with them, a reinfection with something (not necessarily Lyme) in May, an autoimmune response, or, or… I don’t know what. It’s driving me a bit nuts. Last week I was doing fine, this weekend’s biodiesel class knocked me out hard, and I’m barely able to function this week. I’m hoping that means that next week will be fine again- who knows.

But, I’m having a blast this summer, since I’ve been mostly well for most of it so far till this week.

Some photos:

interns. I’m running the internship program at the co-op, and I’m having a really good time with it. I’m on-site all the time, I barely see my room anymore, and I’m having an absolute blast.

Now that the first couple of weeks of orientation is over, I’m teaching about 1 1/2 days a week, along with some administrative type crap having to do with the program, and doing some work-days coordination. They’re giving the co-op campus a complete makeover, working on documentation for the equipment at the site so that Piedmont can put more of their technical innovation up on the web, and learning a ton. They have me for a day and a half a week and Bob Armantrout for two hours a week. I go to Bob’s biodiesel business basics class just to heckle him. It’s a blast heckling someone who’s teaching and knows more than me- my damn workshop students do it all the time.

It’s about a month into the program and I think everyone’s got a pretty good idea about biodiesel quality control. I’d looked at my syllabus material this spring and figured out that I have enough material to cover about 10 weeks of lessons pretty intensively, and I’m quite happy this week to see that the interns are just about where I expected them to be. We’ve been playing in the Yellow Garage in the ‘lab’ and with my portable Appleseed equipment- we basically have ‘real’ production at the co-op, where fuel production meets ASTM specs and timelines matter, and then we have my experimental teaching/R&D facility, exactly what I’ve been wanting in California for the past few years.

Next week they get to graduate to the ‘real’ co-op, where making mistakes matters a whole lot more. They have an assignment to get to that level, though- completing a batch in the Appleseed stuff on their own. It was cute watching them spend an hour developing a protocol for what valve they were going to turn when, label everything and name it, etc. Good process to go through.

I love being on-site all the time. I’ve got a hybrid shop/classroom, and it’s staffed with all my small, portable tools, and I’m surprised at how good of an R&D facility it’s become. I’ve been working my butt off on the benefit classes we organized for the last few weeks and haven’t been able to get my head above water since mid-May- there was a four-weekend series that helped fund the internship program. The drawback is the barn/shop/classroom setting is that it’s damn hot here this time of year- we actually overheated a few people in the first two weekend classes (the next one , the Advanced Topics class, should be in air conditioning at least most of the weekend).

System Tricks class designs their theoretical process and equipment:

I decided early on that the internship should include making sure that some basic skills and tool use were covered, whether they’re relevant to biodiesel or not. I got to inflict this on one of the farm interns, too- there are three farm interns living here at the co-op, in addition to the biodiesel ones in my program. Here’s Becca from the farm making herself some printmaking blocks out of a piece of MDF and learning about the different ways to jig a circ saw, and yes, that’s a gigantic load of oil behind her:

These are two of the three biodiesel interns working on the solar cooker project- Susannah, with the red hair, and Joanna, in the red shirt, who are here partially out of an interest in sustainability. This weekend they get to do their first ‘tabling’ session at the Eno River Festival, where the co-op gets to answer stupid questions from random visitors about biodiesel. Today a bunch of us veterans talked to them about what to expect when tabling and gave them some ’sample questions’ to think about (such as ‘I heard that biodiesel takes food away from starving babies, what do you think about that’) .

In the midst of all this, there’s a big re-design of the Piedmont oil handling protocol going on. For the past couple of years, they’ve been settling oil in 275-gallon IBC containers in a poorly functioning passive solar building, which is a really clunky and ineffective way to do things (you can’t heat oil with warm air alone and expect anything significant to settle out of it, which means you have to either throw out 25% of your oil (which they do) or be super-selective about the kinds of oil you can accept (which they also have to do). We’ve finally figured out how to fund a real waste oil burner type of boiler system. One of the interns is starting off his summer by trying to fix up an old waste motor oil furnace we had around, though there’s been an immense amount of thought and meeting time put into ideas for homemade waste oil burners. Of course, I dragged out the Turk again. I’m a huge fan of vaporizing burners rather than atomizing ones, and a couple of weeks ago, one of the locals introduced me to a Sanford former homebrewer who has a really fantastic Turk-burner-based backyard metalcasting furnace. Chuck’s Turk burner does everything that I’d wanted to try next. We had a powerhouse meeting or two over at his place in sanford, geeking out on level control, heat recovery, and more. One of Chuck’s big innovations was basically to add refractory cement to the burn chamber, which I’d thought about last year but never got a chance to try.

I dug out another blower for mine and am just about to move on to the heat exchanger end of things. In the meantime it’s still a fun party trick unit.

Here it is again, the Turk Burner as a ’scientific theory generator’- people can’t stand around this thing without going on and on about what they think it’s doing at various points in it’s burn cycle.

And, last but not least, I’m really proud of the fact that we’re moving ahead on heat problems 6 months before they’re really an issue. That’s major progress around these parts- moving ahead rather than just responding to emergencies.

This year, summer solstice was 8 pm on June 20th. I happen to have spent that exact moment in the best way imaginable- at the end of a long work day, with my new-again boyfriend/co-worker Greg, lazing in the co-op’s front yard hammock in the stifling North Carolina heat, running plans and scenarios for burner and heater options for the co-op. On the longest day of the year, we were trying to imagine what the frozen fingers and short daylight hours and 20F nights were going to be like in December. I’m psyched to have this playground for bouncing these burner ideas off of people.

Through this all, I feel like I’m at Biodiesel Summer Camp. Appropriately, there’s a summer fling. Greg and I were hanging out earlier this winter, but it’s a lot more fun this time around, especially with the Summer Camp focus- I’m teaching him how to weld, he’s supposed to teach me to use a chainsaw, and we’re throwing around ideas for Turk Burner fun and games for the classroom site and a possible future experimental boiler, and some random Weird Science. I get to run home (he’s also my neighbor) and bounce around the room going on and on about the new acid-base idea I just had. He gets to contribute. It rocks.

It’s been quite a few years since I’ve gotten to work on projects with a partner, which was a source of endless frustration in my last relationship. It’s kind of lame being me, and more or less having to “check the biodiesel stuff at the door” when I came home, since my last partner didn’t really care about it. To some extent, ‘checking the biodiesel at the door’ was my own fault- Tom didn’t require it, but there’s a big difference between basic ‘that’s nice, dear’ tolerance of the biodiesel pursuit and complete obsession with it like happens here in Piedmont-land. I know, what I just described, a bored/uninterested partner- happens to most people who are into biodiesel, and most people’s partners aren’t interested- but I kept feeling that for all the time I’ve invested in the Gods of Biodiesel, I shouldn’t have to end up with one of the heathen unbelievers.

My summer feels like a complete immersion program into oil geekery. It’s nice to head in that direction with another nerd.

We’ve been working on a plywood solar box cooker as a way to teach some of the circular saw/table saw safety skills to some of the interns and other co-op folks who haven’t used those tools or gotten a good introduction to them before. I used to teach a 45-minute circular saw mini-workshop, and I’m ecstatic that Tim, who’s one of my co-workers at Piedmont and is also responsible for getting the interns edumacated, also enjoys teaching the ‘basic skills’ intros. We had a nice, late-into-the-night-with-Tim-drinking-beer session whereby Tim, who’s all of 22 years old, has an education degree in ’shop teacher’, and is trying his damnedest to be a grumpy old man, expounded on the things that his woodworker daddy taught him and passed on measure-once-cut-twice wisdom to one of the enthusiastic interns.

I’m building a plywood version of the Heaven’s Flame Cooker, the Appleseed of solar box cookers. Here’s a link to the cardboard version of the same design that I’m using- from Joe Radabaugh’s article in Backwoods Home Mag a long time ago:

http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles/radabaugh30.html

and a photo of a couple of cardboard ones:
http://solarcooking.org/images/hflame1.jpg

Joe is (was?) a barefoot oldtimey Rainbow Gathering hippie who got obsessed with building and testing cardboard box cookers, and I’ve made a bunch of wooden versions of his cooker over the years. It’s pretty similar to the steel version sold through Real Goods and the like, such as the one at http://www.sunoven.com/. He figured out a bunch of easy construction techniques and has a great book about the units,

These units reach 350-375F pretty easily as a baking oven, or can be used to cook crockpot/soup types of dishes (I personally used my past ones to make beans, soups, rice- things that waste fuel in long simmering. I also tend to not waste time trying to boil water in a box cooker (think of how slow it’d be to bring water to a boil in an oven- that’s the same situation here, and probably the most common mistake that people demonstrating solar cookers make, which may make them appear impractical). I tend to first bring the food to a boil on a stovetop, then put it into the cooker to finish up, which makes my solar cooking happen in the same amount of time as on a stovetop.

The difference between what we’re doing and what Joe has in the cardboard box plans, is that we’ll have a door in the back of the oven so that it’s easier to get food in and out (his version involves taking off the top glass for access), and that we’re using plywood for greater durability. I’ve had one or two of these last a couple of years in the rain, unpainted. You occasionally have to deal with warped reflectors but there’s not too much maintenance involved even with the cheap materials. I’m still using cardboard for insulation, which is cheap, effective, and non-toxic. I’ve never built a double-glass one before, but Joe’s book described an experiment where he reached 400F air temperature and nearly burned down his own cooker by rotating it to keep it in constant focus, empty, at high altitude, double-glazed.

The biggest challenges to solar cooking in the US are social- changing your habits to plan around peak daytime cooking times (such as having a small cooker at work where you use it to heat up your lunch), or putting food in the cooker in the morning so that it’ll get heated during peak hours, and also remembering that you’ve got something in the quiet cookstove going outside while you’re home (it’s actually quite easy to forget, since people aren’t used to cooking outside anymore).

Idealistic people from rich countries tend to think of these as something you inflict on people in third world countries to save ‘them’ from poverty and to save the environment from ‘their’ fuelwood practices (see Sunoven website above for a typical example of this, actually), but they don’t tend to get adopted that way for many social reasons either. A typical example is a development group returning to a project site a year later to find the cooker being used for storing valuables to keep them from mice or rain while the family continues to use the three-stone fire their family recipes are adapted to.

We don’t really see them in use in the US very often, and there are so many of them deployed as ‘demonstration units’ at sustainability campuses similar to Piedmont, sitting unused, that it’s almost a cliche of what goes wrong with appropriate technology idealism- it’s an awesome technology, and no one ever seems to want to use it. We once bucked this trend at the Bat Cave, a 6-person house where I lived in Oakland (that also had the full-on greywater, permaculture garden, vermiculture compost ‘deluxe worm condo’, composting toilet, bees, and bike library going in the backyard), and the sucker got used for a couple of years by several people in the house for beans quite regularly (everyone had spent a lot of time in Mexico and made a lot of bean dishes every single week) and occasionally other dishes.

They work best in situations where you have a kitchen door that faces a south-facing yard, or, even better, a deck off of a kitchen door. We might be able to get this to work at the co-op at the Yellow House. They also work well for reheating of lunches- since there’s no microwave, and a number of employees come and go throughout the day, I’m guessing that’ll be the most common use.

I’ve also thought about building a small monitoring panel to see if that furthers acceptance by US users- something like a remote thermometer in the oven that monitors either oven temperature or food temperature, and a control panel with audio timer/alarm and other info in the kitchen, that reminds you that you’ve got food out there and tells you how long it’s been heating.

There’ve been some attempts at building a self-tracking oven such as the one described at this link: http://www.solarcooking.org/plans/Cookerbo.pdf

(usually you have to rotate the cooker once or twice in the afternoon to get full possible BTU’s. However, during most of the year, you can also just set it in the morning, pointed at the spot where the sun will be during peak hours, and your stuff will cook during those hours, but the cooker won’t reach it’s maximum temperature without periodic rotating) .

In a way, what I was doing with the solar cooker is more like what you’d do with a haybox cooker- so if you don’t have a good solar site, you can still cut down on some of your energy use by adopting the ‘haybox’ concept, either as an old-time, bulky haybox, or a more high-tech vacuum-insulated thermos version. I’ve played around with the haybox idea using a Japanese vacuum thermos that had an exceptionally large mouth- this particular one was used for carrying individual tins of lunch foods to work rather than coffee, and worked well for a cooker. The traditional haybox is exactly that- a box that’s insulated with hay, that your pot fits into. I saw one at CCAT in Arcata, CA (http://www.appropedia.org/CCAT)

I feel like the lack of acceptance of solar cookers in the US is due to the principle ‘the perfect is the enemy of the good’- people trying to do the whole thing ‘low-tech’, which isn’t really necessary. You live in a house, you have electricity, if your photovoltaic panels have a control panel so you can monitor what they’re doing, why not design a solar cooker with a simple and cheap control panel to make use easier, or use a bit of electricity or natural gas to make solar cooking more convenient? Similarly, I think I found them easy to use because my objective at the Bat Cave was just to be a cheapskate, rather than be ‘offgrid’- so rather than trying to be completely electricity-free, I found it much more convenient and still energy-saving to use electricity for 3 minutes to bring my bean water to a boil, and then switch to simmering for the same 60 minutes using just the sun, rather than spending 2 hours bringing water to a boil with 300F air and minimal direct heat in the name of purist off-grid-ness. I think that a hybrid approach to sustainability can get you further than the minimalist approach at times.

The following came from deep in the comments section of Lyle’s blog. John Osterhout is a thoughtful engineer from western Washington who makes small-scale biodiesel, and knows farming, and generally does a good job on research. Here’s a good one for the ethanol naysayers:

JohnO Says:
June 23rd, 2008 at 2:29 pm

When I last checked, 45% of US corn was being grown for cattle feed. That obviously takes food out of the mouths of people. Only 19% of corn was grown for people food (not counting HFCS). Roughly an equal % was then being used for Ethanol, but there’s one important point to understand - unlike other uses, a third of the mass used to make ethanol is returned to the cattle food chain as high-value added high protein food. Another third is sold as CO2 (carbonation). The high market price for corn has finally allowed the Gov’t to reduce the subsidy to the lowest level ever! Less acreage is currently used to grow corn than during the American Civil War! (but yields are higher).

Here’re 5 things you can do to free-up corn from fuel to food:
1) don’t eat beef
2) ask the corn farmer to plant sweet corn (for people) instead of field corn (for cows), and pay him a decent amount for the corn.
3) Don’t drink soda pop (to reduce demand for HFCS and CO2)
4) Don’t sell subsidized corn to Mexico - they grew less corn because it was cheaper to buy ours, except for subsistance farmers, who were wiped out by their drought.
5) Don’t drive a gasoline powered car - Ethanol is used to boost the octane of low-grade gasoline.

There, that was easy now, wasn’t it? It wasn’t?, Hmmm, maybe we need to rethink our lifestyles.

There’s plenty of corn, but there’s a shortage of CHEAP corn. The folks who are starving aren’t able to afford to eat, despite a world market that surrounds us all with plenty of food.

About three weeks ago I got my life back thanks to my new immune system drugs. I’m crossing my fingers that I’m one of the 50% for whom they seem to work for Lyme issues. I’ve had an insanely busy life since then, started a new (unpaid, but 3/4 or full-time time) job last week that makes me insanely happy, went on a mini-tour in May, went to California, taught some more classes, built some more biodiesel system, went through a bit more of the ongoing divorce hell, went to Chicago and did an insane number of hours of welding on a co-op’s system there, ran back to North Carolina in time to teach my ‘benefit’ classes for the internship program.

One of these days I should change the name of ‘diary of a mad scientist’ to ‘van blog’.

The van had performed stellarly (??) on the long trip. I’d got back to NC the night before the class, happy that I’d gotten across West Virginia without having to break down and rent anything (the thought crossed my mind). I ran my supermarket/drinks/ice sorts of errands that morning in Greensboro and set out on 421 for the final 45 minutes to Pittsboro. The van suddenly lurched and the engine died. I got out to see a puddle of diesel dripping from somewhere. I called Greg, who was on his way to a dump run in that direction anyway, to come get me and the class supplies, and made the requisite calls to a tow yard to rescue the van, and was delving deep into leak-finding when they showed up to remove the beast. Class went off OK despite overheating a few people on the first day in the heat wave and barn setting.

The following week was the beginning of the new version of the internship, which we were doing quite differently than the way it’d been run in the previous semesters here. I threw myself into a 35 hour work week, something I hadn’t had the energy to do in months. It was fun, and crazy, and we had several interns show up, look at the Piedmont Biofuels co-op facility, and freak out. we actually lost three of them to this routine- they turned around and ran home. Oops. This lost us our college connection- we have to have a minimum of 5 people to be sponsored by the college- and Bob and I decided on the spot that we’d rather work unpaid than deal with the pressure of having to find people at the last moment to fill their places.

I called the tow yard to talk van. The first guy I got was the owner, whose thick accent informed me that he thought I’d lost ‘the ignition pump’. It’s a long-running joke in diesel circles that the gasoline mechanic ‘can’t find the spark plugs’, which is basically what this guy was telling me. I thanked him for his diagnosis and told him I’d come get it and fix it myself. It’s almost worth an injection pump, if that’s what’s actually wrong, for the priceless comedy of hearing that I have an ‘ignition’ anything on my diesel.

I didn’t have a breather coming till Thursday morning, and tried to arrange a ride for the van so I didn’t have to spend any time going to get it. I called them back to see what they’d charge me themselves to tow me to Moncure- they’re a tow shop, after all- and there was a good low price quoted. A few hours later they called me back to say that the owner was in the hospital and that things were in disarray and that he’d said I should find another service to tow myself to Moncure.

Hmm, not good. I set that up, and on Thursday we were hitching up my friend Scott’s enormous equipment-hauling trailer when I gave the van tow yard another call to see if they could get the van drug out and ready for our rescue attempt.

And it turned out that the tow company owner had passed away the night before.

So, the van still sits in the tow yard.

So far Van Blog has consisted of:

-van gets hit by old Buddhist lady coming out of church who backs into it’s open door while my mechanic friend worked on it. In the process, the old lady narrowly misses killing my friend, who was hanging out of the van working on the fuse box or something at the time it got hit.

Buddhists try to get it fixed using ’someone we know’, which leads to many fiascoes when it comes back with the door all crumpled - they’d just bent it back- rather than actually repaired. Buddhists get the other side of the van heavily dented while taking it to the ’someone we know’ garage. Buddhists eventually get it right with another shop months later that fixes both sides.

-van goes to Chatham Alignment for minor vacuum pump work that I didn’t feel like doing myself. Chatham Alignment burns down, with van narrowly escaping certain death when some passing heroes decided to save ‘the customer with the out of state plates’ instead of Kevin’s expensive wrecker truck.

-van gets towed for fuel leak. Owner of tow truck dies unexpectedly.

I’m starting to worry a bit about what will happen when I start doing my own work on this thing again.

I took the van for a spin after it came back from the burned garage, and everything was fine- the transmission survived the van’s being dragged by my rescuers (I believed Kevin on that point, of course, but had a nagging worry that something would be expensive as a result of the near-loss).

I’d forgotten how many systems are affected when the vacuum pump acts up- that’s what Kevin had just fixed when the fire happened.

It was raining hard yet again, I spun myself down Highway 1 in the dark, stomping on the accelerator and doing all those other evil things we like to excuse in the name of ‘test drive’. I spun the beast up to 90 mph, committing various crimes against future generations’ climate in the process, listening for new noises and trying to re-connect with the sound of this beast before I set off on a mini-tour across the West Virginia mountains, to Ohio and Chicago. I’ve been driving an 81 Rabbit in California most of the spring and hadn’t driven the van much for much of the winter. The van had just gotten updated registration and I felt freedom kicking me in the brain, watching mentally as this big grin started to spread across my face as the exciting reality of the impending trip crept up.

And I got this ice-cold, stirring endorphin shiver when I heard the whistle of the turbocharger kick in. I hadn’t heard the turbo in months as it’s affected by vacuum leaks and I hadn’t been driving. I hadn’t felt that whole-body shiver since the last time I saw an old flame unexpectedly.

I think I’m in love with this thing.

These are a few of my favorite things:

turbochargers

diesels with nothing noticable coming out of the tailpipe

Crosscountry trips in the van in my pajamas. Yep, it’s my bedroom also, and these are my pajamas. Got a problem with that?

Not having to stop at gas stations on crosscountry drives with extra biodiesel on board

(OK, the picture below, from the first trip I did with the van when I brought it back to Calfornia, is a bit excessive- it’s getting a bit ridiculous when I choose to share my bed with a couple of barrels of fuel- but still, you get the point. PS I don’t know what happened to my eyebrows there.)

Camping at a campground during a class weekend instead of being in a hotel. That’s where I am right now, teaching class at a community college diesel program in a small Ohio town by the West Virginia line. Aah, it’s warm enough again to be doing this more sanely than the airport-and-hotel method. Oh, bliss.

I got bit by another tick a couple of weeks ago, and I’m seriously fighting off something or another, probably as a result. I’m back to having exhaustion, sleep problems, brainfog, air hunger, and this absolutely excruciating Lyme-type neck pain that is supposedly a form of meningitis caused by the disease. For me, the neck pain came with my initial Lyme infection, and it still sometimes flares up when I have a relapse or when something mercury-poisoning-related happens, so I’m not sure that it’s a sign that my latest bite is specifically a Lyme reinfection (which I don’t really think is likely based on my other symptoms) or just an infection with something else. My immune system has been absolutely TRASHED all winter- so even if the tick only had staph or something rather than Lyme and it’s common coinfections, I’m sure my system is just stresssed fighting it, and the standard ‘relapse’ symptoms are what I’m feeling. The standard medical cliche is that “ticks are sewers"- they carry a bazillion pathogens from mammal to mammal, and this one was an adult, meaning it had had a few life cycles and previous blood meals in which to pick up various nasty things before getting me.

Right before this happened my doctor suggested putting me on low dose naltrexone, an experimental therapy for immune function sometimes used for AIDS and cancer patients, so I’m hoping to start improving things this summer as I’m sick of fighting off colds and flu and other issues every three weeks. LDN is kind of exciting stuff- I didn’t know there was anything that western medicine really had for generalized immune function- and LDN works by regulating brain hormones that regulate the immune system. I had just spent the winter reading a large number of books about the biochemistry of the brain, so it was quite interesting to learn that there’s actually a practical application of that theory that seems to work some of the time (incidentally, I’ve heard on the internet that it doesn’t help all Lyme patients, but my particular issues seemed to be specifically immune system problems, not active infection)

I found the tick on my hip, just like when I got Lyme the first time, and now have a local skin infection around the bite and swollen lymph nodes just on that side (the doc put me back on antibiotics by the way). I’m starting to think about getting a tick tattooed on my hip- I’ve never wanted to commemorate anything before via tattoos, but this damn disease has been such a defining crisis in my life that I think it’s going to make it onto my skin.

re-posting this because it got buried in my Lyme posts the last few days:

Biodiesel Essentials class in Marietta, OH May 17-18, 10-5 each day
With Maria ‘Mark’ Alovert, author, Biodiesel Homebrew Guide and co-founder of www.biodieselcommunity.org

at Washington State Community College Auto/Diesel Truck Systems department, room 121.
$120, no one turned away for lack of funds

Biodiesel fuel, which runs in any diesel engine and some heating equipment, can be made in your backyard or garage for under $1 a gallon with common ingredients, using very inexpensive equipment. Relatively little chemistry knowledge is needed to produce quality fuel that will run in any diesel engine, and thousands of people around the country have discovered homebrewing fuel to be an addictive hobby. Come learn what it takes to produce your own clean-burning biodiesel fuel, and to build the equipment to do so.

These classes are hands-on and fast-paced - you’ll be making test batches of fuel, titrating and testing oil, and assessing quality of the finished product throughout the two day class. There will be a full-scale home biodiesel reactor and system at the class site, and we will make a batch of fuel in it to demonstrate the process, and will discuss equipment design for larger systems. This class is a good preparation for the Chicago-area advanced ‘farm-scale biodiesel production’ class happening at the end of May (see www.girlmark.com/tour for details).

To register for the class, please go to www.girlmark.com/tour and register online, or simply show up on the morning of the first day.

The class is held at Washington State Community College in Marietta, OH:

here’s a map of campus, you’ll be looking for Auto/Diesel Truck Systems department, room 121:
http://www.wscc.edu/Main/maps.asp

Biodiesel Essentials is a two-day class for either beginners or those who want a refresher on quality control. I also teach a series that includes more advanced topics, for more of those workshops please see www.girlmark.com/tour.

Some topics covered in the Biodiesel Essentials class:

biodiesel/SVO/solvent thinning options and history, biodiesel chemistry, testing oil (titration and water testing), (hands-on), making test batches (hands-on), an overview of equipment, a tour of the full Appleseed-type processor and some more sophisticated wash systems than usually seen in homebrewing, long discussion of quality control factors, quality testing (hands-on), mistwashing and other water washing options, breaking emulsion (hands-on), two-stage base biodiesel (hands-on), waste water and glycerine disposal, glycerine burners for process heat, water reuse and uses for glycerine, common pitfalls, hands-on experience recovering from failed batches, safety

contact: classinformation@girlmark.com

There have been a couple of good articles (and many bad ones) recently about the IDSA/Connecticut Attorney General Blumenthal settlement regarding Lyme treatment guidelines.
Below are two good ones, and some of the comments from the publications:

Medical groups differ on courses of treatment
By Robert Miller Staff Writer

http://www.newstimes.com/ci_9231161
05/12/2008

In the battle over how best to treat Lyme disease, a new settlement between Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and a major medical group might seem to offer at least a little hope of expanded treatment for those with the tick-borne disease.

That, however, would involve a change in the lines of debate over the disease, and it’s not clear there will be any yielding.

The settlement, reached this month between Blumenthal and the Infectious Diseases Society of America, provides for a review of the IDSA’s guidelines for treating Lyme disease – guidelines that a second group of doctors, the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society, say are strict and inflexible to the point of harming some patients.

But the IDSA’s guidelines will remain unchanged until that review ends. And while the review process will include the participation of an ombudsman, the guarantee that opposing voices will get their say, and hearings that will be broadcast on the Internet, they may not yield a single change, said Dr. Eugene Shapiro, a pediatrician, epidemiologist and professor of investigative medicine with the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven.

Asked last week if the IDSA guidelines could remained unchanged after the review, Shapiro said flatly, “Yes.”

“If the scientific data recommends a change, we’ll be happy to change,” Shapiro said. “But we have 25 years of research on Lyme disease. We feel very comfortable the guidelines will stand up to any scientific scrutiny.”

Doctors who are opposed to the IDSA guidelines said they believe there’s at least a chance their position – that infection from the Lyme disease bacteria Borrellia burgdorferi can create a chronic illness that needs long-term treatment with antibiotics – will gain some credence with the review panel.

“I hope it will lead to an improvement to patient care,” said Dr. Steven Phillips of Wilton, who has been one of the doctors opposing the strict guidelines in favor of those in which doctors can tailor treatment to individual patients.

Phillips is a past president of the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society, which believes there is ample scientific evidence to treat people for chronic Lyme disease.

“We’ve looked at the same evidence as IDSA and come up with significantly different conclusions,” said Dr. Daniel Cameron of Mount Kisco, N.Y., the current president of the group.

This isn’t a merely a spat between two opposing medical groups.

In a press release, Blumenthal’s office pointed out that insurance companies now use the IDSA guidelines to restrict care for patients and refuse to pay for long-term antibiotic care.

“It’s a good way to have people denied insurance,” said Maggie Shaw of Newtown, a member of that town’s Lyme Disease Task Force. “It also puts the fear factor in doctors.

“Here are two standards of care, but only one gets recognized,” Shaw said. “It’s because of the stranglehold the IDSA has on this.”

The settlement between Blumenthal and the IDSA came after Blumenthal sued the group – which represents about 8,000 infectious disease specialists in the United States – in 2006 for antitrust violations.

Blumenthal said his investigation discovered many examples of conflicts of interest among the doctors who wrote the IDSA guidelines. He also said they refused to “accept or meaningfully consider” any evidence concerning chronic Lyme disease in writing the 2006 guidelines and blocked the appointments of scientists and physicians who differed with the IDSA view that all Lyme disease can be treated with two to four weeks of antibiotics and that chronic Lyme disease does not exist.

“Our focus has not been on medicine but the process,” Blumenthal said. “There may have been violation of the law and it’s my job to enforce the law.”

Dr. Sam Donta, a Massachusetts-based infectious disease specialist, was on the panel that drew up the IDSA guidelines. Donta said he refused to sign off on the guidelines when the group refused to acknowledge that chronic Lyme disease is a problem.

–The issue should not be whether there’s chronic Lyme disease, but why we’re seeing these patients,” he said

The review process established in the settlement, Blumenthal said, will be “fair, open and free of conflict.” Donta said Friday he hopes to serve on the panel.

But in its own press release on the settlement, the IDSA emphatically denies there was any “significant” conflict of interest on the part of any of the doctors who wrote the 2006 guidelines, or that they excluded conflicting points of view while writing them.

In fact, Shapiro said, having stricter guidelines means doctors who follow the IDSA protocols see patients fewer times and prescribe only short-term regimens of generic antibiotics.

Shapiro said the IDSA agreed to the settlement simply to end any attempt by Blumenthal to take the case to court.

“The alternative was spending a lot of money in an expensive lawsuit,” he said.

Shapiro said all the scientific evidence on long-term treatment of Lyme disease, including five double-blind studies in which some patients got antibiotics and others a placebo, show that long-term antibiotics did not cure the symptoms that people include in the diagnoses of Lyme disease.

“It’s not that data isn’t there. It is,” he said, pointing out that 95 percent of all Lyme cases are successfully treated with only two or three weeks of standard antibiotics.

But Cameron said the double-blind studies, all with a small number of patients, only show that Lyme disease is complicated.

“The evidence is quite mixed,” he said.

And the trials often look at the effect of just one type of antibiotic on patients, Donta said.

“If one doesn’t work, do you say all antibiotics don’t work?,” he asked. “If one cancer drug stops working, do you not try and find another? There’s insufficient information in the guidelines for physicians to make a decision.”

Phillips of Wilton said many peer-reviewed articles published in medical and scientific journals make the case that chronic Lyme disease does exist.

What they hope the new review of the IDSA guidelines do, they said, is take all this into account and give doctors a chance to treat each case individually, rather than with a one-size-fits-all approach.

“Let the doctors have some flexibility,” Cameron said.

Contact Robert Miller at bmiller@newstimes.com

Some good comments from newstimes.com site:

first of all, my own comments:

For an example of a very flawed double-blind study often cited by the IDSA guidelines authors to back up their allegation that long-term antibiotics don’t help chronic lyme patients, see this analysis (by a firm that specializes in analyzing medical studies for hidden bias for use in court cases):
http://www.verimresearch.com/Verim%20Research…

In brief: the often-cited Klempner study took a very small number of patients who had already had treatment failures with antibiotics (meaning they were difficult cases for whom antibiotics don’t work well), then treated them for only 30 days with an IV antibiotic and for only two months with oral doxycycline, and then did a subjective symptom survey of the patients and other subjects who received placebo instead of antibiotics.

The study’s authors then proclaimed that because the survey results didn’t differ between the treated patients and those who received placebo, this proves that long-term antibiotics don’t do anything for Lyme.

In reality, the study didn’t really treat it’s patients with anything remotely resembling ‘long-term antibiotics’, and picked an oral antibiotic that frequently fails to show results in those patients who experience antibiotic treatment failures. There were many other flaws- the Verim Research analysis summarizes some of them on page 6 and 7 of the PDF, which are a good introduction to the entire issue of Lyme treatment controversy.

Chronic Lyme patients who are lucky enough to have access to a lyme-literate doctor are often treated with 6 months to many years of antibiotics. For those for whom simple treatment doesn’t work (and for some people it’s specifically doxycycline or amoxycillin that don’t work), doctors may progress to using combinations of antibiotics, or longer treatment with IV. Doxycycline is a first step for many patients but when it doesn’t work more expensive antibiotics, and combinations of antibiotics, are usually prescribed by knowledgeable doctors such as members of International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (www.ilads.org ).

The Klempner study was designed with many built-in conditions that seem designed to predispose it’s small sample size of subjects to treatment failure, and the IDSA guidelines authors seemed to base their guidelines literature review on similar studies, hand-picked to prove their extreme position.

When the 2006 guidelines were announced, the ILADS president produced a statement that there were something like 1800 good studies on Lyme treatment in existence, but that the IDSA guidelines authors had hand-picked the worst 400 to prove their point.

*****************
Phillis Mervine from CALDA commenting on the article:

Your article quotes Dr. Eugene Shapiro as saying that having stricter guidelines means doctors who follow the IDSA protocols see patients fewer times. That’s because IDSA’s treatment protocol has a 50% failure rate. No intelligent patient with any resources would continue such a self-defeating course when alternatives are available.

What IDSA says, in effect, is that persistent infection can’t be proven to cause symptoms. In early March, the American Society of Microbiology published research that proved that one month of treatment with the IV drug ceftriaxone did not **** all the Lyme spirochetes in infected mice. This is the most recent research to prove persistence of infection.

A few weeks later, IDSA President Donald Poretz sent a letter to members of Congress, saying, “[T]here are no convincing published scientific data that support the existence of chronic Lyme disease.” We wonder what type of evidence the IDSA would accept, if any.

According to previous IDSA statements, equally meaningless are positive Lyme antibody tests plus symptoms; positive Lyme bacteria DNA plus symptoms; post-treatment symptoms; positive brain SPECT scans plus symptoms; tick bite in a known endemic area followed by symptoms.

In case anyone has missed the message, there is no justification for extended antibiotic treatment in the IDSA belief system. Although numerous studies have shown benefit of longer and/or more aggressive treatments, IDSA’s position is that ‘enough is enough’ They oppose treating for longer than two weeks, even when people improve on treatment and relapse when treatment is stopped. Where would people with cancer be today if we treated them like that?

CALDA and other patient advocacy groups tell people to look for a doctor who belongs to the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (www.ilads.org ), whose guidelines allow clinical discretion and are flexible. We also refer patients to their local online support group, which in Connecticut may be found at http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/connecti…

Phyllis Mervine
California Lyme Disease Association
www.lymedisease.org

*************************
and another good comment:
Thank you, Mr. Miller, for your fair and balanced reporting of this issue. And thank you, News-Times, for showing the integrity to support Mr. Miller’s journalistic efforts. Not all of the newspapers in CT have been fair in reporting the results of AG Blumenthal’s investigation, and I am proud of the News-Times for having done so.
As a psychotherapist who sees children and adults suffering from the effects of chronic, persistent, Lyme disease and coinfections, I have seen the damage that is done to the patients and their families by untreated or undertreated Lyme. I have also seen them recover, and be able to resume work and school, when treated efficaciously, comprehensively, by their courageous doctors, who do not give up on them, or put them on paliative care, when they fail to get better in 30 days of abx. I have seen them resume full lives, after months or years of anti-microbial treatment, by doctors who understand chronic Lyme.
By denying the magnitude of the Attorney General’s findings (http://www.ct.gov/ag/cwp/view.asp… ), the IDSA is announcing that they are not accepting responsibility for the corruption in the process found by the Attorney General. By not acknowledging the points made by the AG, they are failing the patients once again, and sustaining the suspicion held by many that they, in fact, do have something to hide.
The attorney general emphasized that his findings were about the PROCESS of developing the guidelines, and this PROCESS was seriously flawed. I urge the readers to check out the text of the AG’s press release on the website. It will clearly show who, in fact, can be believed.
Sandy Berenbaum, LCSW, BCD
Southbury, CT and Brewster, NY

**********************************************

Here’s another good article(from a Maryland newspaper) that just came out:

http://www.stardem.com/articles/2008/05/11/news/32096.txt

Society to review Lyme disease guidelines
By STEVE NERY News Editor
Published: Sunday, May 11, 2008 5:24 PM CDT
The Infectious Diseases Society of America has agreed to reassess its controversial Lyme disease diagnostic and treatment guidelines after an antitrust investigation uncovered serious flaws with them, Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal announced May 1.

The IDSA guidelines were under fire from Lyme disease patient advocacy groups, including vocal groups in Maryland, for restricting long-term care and denying the existence of chronic Lyme disease. Blumenthal’s move also could affect Congressional bills, now stuck in committees, that aim to develop better testing and treatment for the tick-borne ailment.

“My office uncovered undisclosed financial interests held by several of the most powerful IDSA panelists,” Blumenthal said in a statement. “The IDSA’s guidelines improperly ignored or minimized consideration of alternative medical opinion and evidence regarding chronic Lyme disease, potentially raising relevant questions about whether the recommendations reflected all relevant science.”
According to the IDSA guidelines, patients should receive antibiotics for no more than four weeks.

“United Healthcare, Health Net, Blue Cross of California, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and other insurers have used the guidelines as justification to deny reimbursement for long-term antibiotic treatment,” according to Blumenthal’s release.

Blumenthal’s investigation resulted in several findings, including:

The IDSA failed to conduct a conflict of interest review for any of the panelists on the 2006 panel. Several of them had conflicts of interest, involving relationships with drug companies, diagnostic tests, patents and consulting arrangements with insurance companies.

• The chairman, who had a bias against the existence of chronic Lyme, was allowed to handpick the other members of the panel.

• In 2000, the group removed a panelist who dissented from the position of the others on chronic Lyme disease to achieve consensus.

• The panel blocked the appointments of others by saying was it was already fully staffed, even though more members were later added.

• The IDSA portrayed the American Academy of Neurology’s guidelines as corroborating its own even though it knew both groups shared several authors.

The new panel, which will consist of eight to 12 members, will reassess the 2006 guidelines individually to determine if they are justified, according to Blumenthal’s release. The panelists will all be screened for conflicts of interest and cannot have served on the last panel. At least 75 percent of the members will have to vote in favor of recommendation from 2006 for it to be affirmed.

“We congratulate Attorney General Blumenthal for exposing the IDSA’s conflicts of interest and helping reduce the suffering of Lyme patients everywhere,” said Pat Smith, president of the national Lyme Disease Association.

Lucy Barnes, director of the Lyme Disease Education and Support Groups of Maryland, said it’s terrible that so many people have suffered as a result of the IDSA’s restrictive guidelines. She pointed to the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society’s guidelines, available online at www.ilads.org, as a better alternative.

Barnes and other members of Lyme disease support groups hope the move will prompt the U.S. Congress to give hearings to bills designed to develop better testing and treatment of the disease. Both introduced in early 2007, Senate Bill 1708 now awaits a hearing by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, while House Bill 741 awaits a hearing from the House Subcommittee on Health.

All of Maryland’s Congressional members, including U.S. Rep. Wayne T. Gilchrest, R-Md.-1st, Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., and Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md., signed onto the bills. Local Lyme disease groups have been urging Mikulski, a member of the health committee, to help get SB1708 a hearing. Melissa Schwartz, a spokesman for Mikulski, said only Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Ma., the chairman of the committee, can get the bill a hearing.

The only member from Maryland on the House committee, U.S. Rep. Albert Wynn, D-Md.-4th, removed himself from all his committee assignments weeks ago as he’s resigning from Congress effective in June.

The legislation would provide $20 million annually for five years to help develop better diagnostic testing and treatment, as well as $250,000 annually to fund a tick-borne diseases advisory committee. The committee, to be made up of members of the scientific committee, volunteer organizations, health-care providers, patient representatives and health department representatives, would also work to develop better reporting and enhance prevention efforts.

If not acted upon, the legislation will die at the end of the year, as a similar measure did in 2006. Volunteer groups are planning on showing up at the office of U.S. Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J.-6th, from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. this Wednesday. For more information, visit www.LymeRights.org.

IDSA President Donald Poretz wrote the committee members in March opposing passage of the bills and questioning the existence of chronic Lyme disease.

“The premise for prolonged antibiotic therapy for Lyme disease is the notion that some spirochetes can persist despite conventional treatment courses, thereby giving rise to the vague symptoms ascribed to chronic Lyme disease. Not only is this assertion microbiologically implausible, there are no convincing published scientific data that support the existence of chronic Lyme disease,” Poretz wrote.

Poretz’s letter was dated March 21, meaning it was written after a University of California at Davis Center for Comparative Medicine study concluded that the maximum treatment recommended by the IDSA did not kill all Borrelia burgdorferi spirochetes, the tiny organisms responsible for Lyme disease, in mice in lab tests.

Instead of a federal advisory committee, Poretz proposed the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies conduct a review of Lyme disease diagnosis, treatment and prevention methods, adequacy of current treatment guidelines, treatment options for “post-Lyme disease disorder,” effectiveness of current prevention methods and controversies associated with chronic Lyme disease.

Barnes also wrote the committee members, fearing that if the bills are not passed, “we are going to lose more chronically ill patients to a treatable but very serious infectious disease.”

“The IDSA is so distressed by the possibility that researchers outside their tight-knit group will be allowed to sit at a table and present scientific evidence and recommendations that could prove them wrong, they are willing to fight bills and forfeit the much-needed $100,000,000 in research funding they would provide over five years, just to keep from being exposed,” Barnes wrote.

Barnes cited several passages from the Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control which refer to the chronic Lyme disease that the IDSA denies exists.

“No patient wants to have antibiotic treatment without good reason and good science backing the protocols; and no doctor wants to prescribe treatment if it is not needed, as the IDSA would have you believe,” Barnes wrote. “That deduction is as absurd and preposterous as a person wanting to have chemotherapy if they didn’t need it.”

Barnes also pointed out that the IDSA recommends against using several antibiotics that produce an anti-inflammatory effect except for Doxycycline, the cheapest of them all.

Biodiesel Essentials class in Marietta, OH May 17-18, 10-5 each day
at Washington State Community College Auto/Diesel Truck Systems department, room 121.
$120, no one turned away for lack of funds

This two-day class will teach you everything you need to know to get started making high-quality biodiesel fuel out of waste vegetable oil. We will also have a full ‘home-scale’ biodiesel system on a trailer on site, and will discuss equipment design for larger systems. This class is a good preparation for the Chicago-area advanced ‘farm-scale biodiesel production’ class happening at the end of May (see www.girlmark.com/tour for details).

To register for the class, please go to www.girlmark.com/tour or simply show up on the morning of the first day.
map of campus, you’ll be looking for Auto/Diesel Truck Systems department, room 121:
http://www.wscc.edu/Main/maps.asp

For the past few months I’ve been slowly working on the van. I have two biodiesel classes coming up in the Midwest, one in Ohio next weekend, and one in Chicago after Memorial Day. Earlier this winter, I replaced the computer and parts of the the glow plug system, and the only real problem left has been that my vacuum pump is starting to go and I didn’t want to mess with the incredible hassle of working inside the cramped engine compartment of my van. My friend Gimpy calls working on van components “ship in a bottle” work because of the lack of access.

I’ve been planning on getting North Carolina license plates this week but had temporarily misplaced my second ID when it took a nap in my lab notebook by accident, so I was stymied a few days ago when I’d planned on turning in the California plates.

I rented a car so that I could still do a whole bunch of errands while the van is out of commission, and a few days ago, Matt and I went down to Chatham Alignment to leave them the van. Chatham Alignment is a heavy truck shop 10 minutes south of town, and for years they have been the default repair shop for all of the co-ops horrible and abused old trucks. The co-op is really hard on trucks. I think I may have presided over the last days of the janky dodge last month when it, on my watch, it developed an inexplicable electrical problem that no one can find. The Janky Dodge now shuts off on it’s own, but only when in the midst of a drive around the traffic circle in town. Last month Matt nearly lost his brakes in the (1989 model) BioDually, which has already received a new engine and transmission on the co-op’s shift. I believe that the BioBox, which burned up this fall after burning up an enormous amount of co-op dollars, it is still sitting somewhere on the property while Matt tries to sell the remnants on Craigslist. I hear that someone at Chatham Alignment once called it the BioJunk. As we drove away I made comments to Matt on how huge their lifts and bays were. He made fun of me mercilessly for liking big lifts. I can’t help it. Mechanic girls like big tools even more than mechanic boys do, we need them more.

Today I remembered that they still hadn’t called me and that this was surprising, considering that a vacuum pump doesn’t take that long. I was a little bit concerned that perhaps this meant that something else was wrong with the vehicle. Oh well, no matter, I don’t really need it until next week.

One of my rental car errands took me down to Sanford, an industrial town 20 miles south of Pittsboro. I was down there to take a look at the community college, and more importantly, the drive, as I’m considering taking some classes next fall. I’m 99% sure that I can’t handle the drive down to Sanford everyday- I don’t have any other reason to ever go to Sanford, the school is on the other side of town meaning I’d have to deal with extra traffic on local roads, and my martial arts school is 40 miles from there, in the opposite direction from Pittsboro. The branch of Central Carolina Community College that’s down in Sanford has an excellent ‘mechanical engineering’ program-that’s mechanical engineering as in machining, boiler and plant maintenance, not as in ‘practicing engineer’. I’m trying to figure out where I’m going to learn machining- and this sounds like actually the perfect school for the skills I want to learn next, but one of the things I hate the most about living here is having to drive 20 miles to get to anything that’s not available in Pittsboro. I don’t think I can handle a drive south, followed by a drive north in the same day for kung fu, so I’m not sure what I’m going to be doing in the fall.

On the way back, it was after work hours, and I didn’t think that Chatham Alignment was going to be open. I kept my eyes peeled for their driveway just in case it looks like someone was working late.

In the driveway was a sheriff car. And police tape. My eyes followed the tape, straight up to the building, and saw- each of the big truck bays boarded up with fresh plywood, topped with big streaks of black smoke damage. The shop that had a serious fire. I screeched the car to a halt and ran in to the driveway, frantically looking for my van. No van. Oh shit. No wonder they didn’t call today.

The sheriff let me through, as Kevin, the owner, was sitting on his truck in the middle of the damage. As I walked around the cop car, the van came into view. I had missed it in my initial panic. Phew! I ran across the yard, hoping that my vehicle was unhurt. Things still looked good.

Kevin, and his other mechanic, didn’t look so good. I spent an hour talking to him about the fire, his business, his life, and every single retarded little problem that the co-op vehicles had ever suffered, most of which he had had to deal with. After he found out that I was associated with biodiesel, he just unloaded all kinds of well-deserved ridicule on my friends’ mechanical skills and general judgement. In his defense, he did warn me that he was about to talk trash right before the flood of stories started.

Oh, and, the van. I am so blessedly lucky.

Turns out the fire had started right after they had left for the day yesterday. Somebody drove by on their way home from work and saw it, and called 911. This is where I get lucky and my charmed life kicks in. ‘They’ turned out to be a construction crew with several men in a truck.

They dove into heroics. They started trying to push vehicles away from the burning building. They only managed to save two of us. They got one of Kevin’s tow trucks, which was unlocked, pushed down the hill away from the building. The other tow truck that was left behind near the front of the building ended up destroyed. (And, unfortunately, Rachel Burton’s lemon of a diesel motorcycle is still inside some corner of the building, completely unhurt)

My van was parked directly in front of one of the burning bays. It was locked at the time. The construction workers saw my California license plates, and realized that I was a customer and prioritized saving my van, over Kevins stuff. Although it was locked and in gear, they had chain or tow rope with them, somehow tied my van to their truck, and dragged it 50 feet away from the fire to safety.

I begged and pleaded with Kevin to tell me who did the saving, as those people deserve several massive cases of beer, or a fruit basket, or something in between.

oh my god, I’m actually crying about this I’m so happy. If this investigation, or something like it, had happened in the 90’s I would’ve gotten proper treatment the first time and wouldn’t still be sick. Perhaps I’ll post an explanation once I recover my senses. (incidentally while the specific IDSA guidelines that are the subject of the attorney general’s investigation are from 2006, the same players involved have been involved in trying to block chronic Lyme treatment for decades)

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Attorney General’s Investigation Reveals Flawed Lyme Disease Guideline Process, IDSA Agrees To Reassess Guidelines, Install Independent Arbiter

May 1, 2008
Attorney General Richard Blumenthal today announced that his antitrust investigation has uncovered serious flaws in the Infectious Diseases Society of America’s (IDSA) process for writing its 2006 Lyme disease guidelines and the IDSA has agreed to reassess them with the assistance of an outside arbiter.

The IDSA guidelines have sweeping and significant impacts on Lyme disease medical care. They are commonly applied by insurance companies in restricting coverage for long-term antibiotic treatment or other medical care and also strongly influence physician treatment decisions.

Insurance companies have denied coverage for long-term antibiotic treatment relying on these guidelines as justification. The guidelines are also widely cited for conclusions that chronic Lyme disease is nonexistent.

“This agreement vindicates my investigation – finding undisclosed financial interests and forcing a reassessment of IDSA guidelines,” Blumenthal said. “My office uncovered undisclosed financial interests held by several of the most powerful IDSA panelists. The IDSA’s guideline panel improperly ignored or minimized consideration of alternative medical opinion and evidence regarding chronic Lyme disease, potentially raising serious questions about whether the recommendations reflected all relevant science.

“The IDSA’s Lyme guideline process lacked important procedural safeguards requiring complete reevaluation of the 2006 Lyme disease guidelines – in effect a comprehensive reassessment through a new panel. The new panel will accept and analyze all evidence, including divergent opinion. An independent neutral ombudsman – expert in medical ethics and conflicts of interest, selected by both the IDSA and my office – will assess the new panel for conflicts of interests and ensure its integrity.”

Blumenthal’s findings include the following:

* The IDSA failed to conduct a conflicts of interest review for any of the panelists prior to their appointment to the 2006 Lyme disease guideline panel;

* Subsequent disclosures demonstrate that several of the 2006 Lyme disease panelists had conflicts of interest;

* The IDSA failed to follow its own procedures for appointing the 2006 panel chairman and members, enabling the chairman, who held a bias regarding the existence of chronic Lyme, to handpick a likeminded panel without scrutiny by or formal approval of the IDSA’s oversight committee;

* The IDSA’s 2000 and 2006 Lyme disease panels refused to accept or meaningfully consider information regarding the existence of chronic Lyme disease, once removing a panelist from the 2000 panel who dissented from the group’s position on chronic Lyme disease to achieve “consensus";

* The IDSA blocked appointment of scientists and physicians with divergent views on chronic Lyme who sought to serve on the 2006 guidelines panel by informing them that the panel was fully staffed, even though it was later expanded;

* The IDSA portrayed another medical association’s Lyme disease guidelines as corroborating its own when it knew that the two panels shared several authors, including the chairmen of both groups, and were working on guidelines at the same time. In allowing its panelists to serve on both groups at the same time, IDSA violated its own conflicts of interest policy.

IDSA has reached an agreement with Blumenthal’s office calling for creation of a review panel to thoroughly scrutinize the 2006 Lyme disease guidelines and update or revise them if necessary. The panel – comprised of individuals without conflicts of interest – will comprehensively review medical and scientific evidence and hold a scientific hearing to provide a forum for additional evidence. It will then determine whether each recommendation in the 2006 Lyme disease guidelines is justified by the evidence or needs revision or updating.

Blumenthal added, “The IDSA’s 2006 Lyme disease guideline panel undercut its credibility by allowing individuals with financial interests – in drug companies, Lyme disease diagnostic tests, patents and consulting arrangements with insurance companies – to exclude divergent medical evidence and opinion. In today’s healthcare system, clinical practice guidelines have tremendous influence on the marketing of medical services and products, insurance reimbursements and treatment decisions. As a result, medical societies that publish such guidelines have a legal and moral duty to use exacting safeguards and scientific standards.

“Our investigation was always about the IDSA’s guidelines process – not the science. IDSA should be recognized for its cooperation and agreement to address the serious concerns raised by my office. Our agreement with IDSA ensures that a new, conflicts-free panel will collect and review all pertinent information, reassess each recommendation and make necessary changes.

“This Action Plan – incorporating a conflicts screen by an independent neutral expert and a public hearing to receive additional evidence – can serve as a model for all medical organizations and societies that publish medical guidelines. This review should strengthen the public’s confidence in such critical standards.”

THE GUIDELINE REVIEW PROCESS

Under its agreement with the Attorney General’s Office, the IDSA will create a review panel of eight to 12 members, none of whom served on the 2006 IDSA guideline panel. The IDSA must conduct an open application process and consider all applicants.

The agreement calls for the ombudsman selected by Blumenthal’s office and the IDSA to ensure that the review panel and its chairperson are free of conflicts of interest.

Blumenthal and IDSA agreed to appoint Dr. Howard A. Brody as the ombudsman. Dr. Brody is a recognized expert and author on medical ethics and conflicts of interest and the director of the Institute for Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch. Brody authored the book, “Hooked: Ethics, the Medical Profession and the Pharmaceutical Industry.”

To assure that the review panel obtains divergent information, the panel will conduct an open scientific hearing at which it will hear scientific and medical presentations from interested parties. The agreement requires the hearing to be broadcast live to the public on the Internet via the IDSA’s website. The Attorney General’s Office, Dr. Brody and the review panel will together finalize the list of presenters at the hearing.

Once it has collected information from its review and open hearing, the panel will assess the information and determine whether the data and evidence supports each of the recommendations in the 2006 Lyme disease guidelines.

The panel will then vote on each recommendation in the IDSA’s 2006 Lyme disease guidelines on whether it is supported by the scientific evidence. At least 75 percent of panel members must vote to sustain each recommendation or it will be revised.

Once the panel has acted on each recommendation, it will have three options: make no changes, modify the guidelines in part or replace them entirely.

The panel’s final report will be published on the IDSA’s website.

ADDITIONAL FINDINGS OF BLUMENTHAL’S INVESTIGATION

IDSA convened panels in 2000 and 2006 to research and publish guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of Lyme disease. Blumenthal’s office found that the IDSA disregarded a 2000 panel member who argued that chronic and persistent Lyme disease exists. The 2000 panel pressured the panelist to conform to the group consensus and removed him as an author when he refused.

IDSA sought to portray a second set of Lyme disease guidelines issued by the American Academy of Neurology (AAN) as independently corroborating its findings. In fact, IDSA knew that the two panels shared key members, including the respective panel chairmen and were working on both sets of guidelines a the same time – a violation of IDSA’s conflicts of interest policy.

The resulting IDSA and AAN guidelines not only reached the same conclusions regarding the non-existence of chronic Lyme disease, their reasoning at times used strikingly similar language. Both entities, for example, dubbed symptoms persisting after treatment “Post-Lyme Syndrome” and defined it the same way.

When IDSA learned of the improper links between its panel and the AAN’s panel, instead of enforcing its conflict of interest policy, it aggressively sought the AAN’s endorsement to “strengthen” its guidelines’ impact. The AAN panel – particularly members who also served on the IDSA panel – worked equally hard to win AAN’s backing of IDSA’s conclusions.

The two entities sought to portray each other’s guidelines as separate and independent when the facts call into question that contention.

The IDSA subsequently cited AAN’s supposed independent corroboration of its findings as part of its attempts to defeat federal legislation to create a Lyme disease advisory committee and state legislation supporting antibiotic therapy for chronic Lyme disease.

In a step that the British Medical Journal deemed “unusual,” the IDSA included in its Lyme guidelines a statement calling them “voluntary” with “the ultimate determination of their application to be made by the physician in light of each patient’s individual circumstances.” In fact, United Healthcare, Health Net, Blue Cross of California, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and other insurers have used the guidelines as justification to deny reimbursement for long-term antibiotic treatment.

Blumenthal thanked members his office who worked on the investigation – Assistant Attorney General Thomas Ryan, former Assistant Attorney General Steven Rutstein and Paralegal Lorraine Measer under the direction of Assistant Attorney General Michael Cole, Chief of the Attorney General’s Antitrust Department.

To view the entire IDSA agreement, go to the Attorney General’s website.

http://www.ct.gov/ag/cwp/view.asp?a=2795&q=414284

Today I had one of those interminable airport days, starting with getting a ride to the airport 5 hours ahead of schedule (I slept in the lobby for a while). My second flight involved a guy next to me fiddling loudly with a Rubik’s Cube (which was actually kind of cute, he was friendly and at one point was entertaining the other woman in our row with the solution, which I haven’t thought about for at least 12 years) while my feet fell asleep and my brain just wanted this limbo to end. I have started on a new strategy with the last few flights- getting up and walking around. Yep, not much new news to report in my life!

I’d loaded my laptop with about 100 web pages and forum threads, and waded into the intricacies of the Dieselcraft and Spinner centrifuge threads, info on commodities pricing and what it’s done to commercial biodiesel in this country, and a bunch of oddball permaculture stuff from my hippie social networking site. Eventually this was all read, and my new laptop has awesome battery life, so I was just sitting there noodling away on a piece of workshop syllabus. I was trying to write down every single possible trick there was to teach in the next System Tricks class, when I got slammo’d by a bright new idea for how to caveman-automate the Appleseed process using only timers, Rick’s heater controller, and a couple of extra pumps. I think I can actually make this thing compete with the BioPro for something like $600 of controllers/timers/pumps or $700 more in auxiliary heating equipment, and, no welding needed yet. I started fidgeting in my tiny airline seat and had to fight down the massive urge to get on the internet up there in the air and yell at all my biodieseler friends about the grand new discovery.

I needed to build one here for some future classes anyway, might be doing that this weekend.

I’m so fricking excited.

Marc Franke from Iowa Renewable Energy Association has been quietly putting together a fantastic web site about biofuels and renewable energy sustainability. Before you run out and scream that ethanol is a scam, read his debunking of all the anti-ethanol propaganda we’ve been assaulted with. Apparently petroleum buys a lot of propaganda per gallon…

http://www.itsgood4.us/Renewables.htm

I just had a cool conversation with Jennifer Radtke from Biofuel Oasis about pricing, and their involvement, or lack thereof, in the petroleum market. There had been a raging debate on one semi-local biodiesel forum about pricing of diesel, and we were all speculating that Oasis will soon raise their price, as they’re currently selling B99 lower than the price of diesel.

At the moment, they’re getting their fuel from Bentley Biofuels in Minden NV (200 miles away) and Yokayo Biofuels in Ukiah (100 miles away), and like everyone else in town, they’re hoping, praying, and crossing their fingers that Oakland-based Blue Sky Biodiesel starts producing fuel for sale soon. Yokayo and Bentley both make recycled-restaurant-oil fuel, which makes sense for Yokayo since there’s no oilseed farming to speak of in California (OK, maybe cottonseed oil, but it’s not a major player). Both of those producers fuel all their vehicles with biodiesel, and pick up restaurant oil using biodiesel-fueled collections trucks. Bentley uses solar hot water in part of their process, further insulating them from the global energy market.

Jennifer said that the producers indicated they’re not raising prices (at the moment anyway) and that this means that Biofuel Oasis has ‘arrived’ at the success story of being independent of the diesel supply pricing. They’re currently selling B99 below the price of petrodiesel. Obviously two things can go wrong:

1) a distributor can get ’sucked dry’ by customers who are only interested in biodiesel temporarily, while the price is low. Business like this is terrible for planning- you can’t build a distributorship or a production plant with large capacity for these temporary ‘rush’ customers, who will vaporize as soon as market forces raise the price again. Running out of fuel is even more terrible for your loyal regular customers. Most biodiesel vendors have dealt with this before at times of diesel price surge, and this means that biodiesel prices are almost always kept higher than diesel to prevent the ‘rush’ on the biodiesel. Piedmont Biofuels is struggling with this terribly right now.

2) the other concern is of course that customers who shop only for price, ie those who don’t regularly use biodiesel, will fill up without getting properly educated about the special needs of biodiesel, such as filter clogging or cold weather use. Here in the Bay Area there’s no real concern about cold weather at this time, but drive 200 miles to Nevada and you’re in serious trouble this time of year. Of course the whole point of distributorships like Biofuel Oasis is that they do the new customer education and hand-holding that you can’t possibly get by just selling biodiesel via a regular petroleum company convenience store, where the minimum-wage kids working behind the counter can’t possibly provide that service, and you’re stuck hoping that the customer reads the brochure or warning signs that you put up. In 2005 there was a serious problem with cold weather-related issues catching new biofuel drivers unaware due to the fact that gas prices spiked in the fall.

While we don’t know that problem #1 won’t surface once word gets out that Oasis has cheaper fuel, and force Oasis/the producers to raise prices, for the moment, we’re certainly dealing with one really nice thing here. By working with local/distributed sources of biodiesel feedstock and because the producers and distributors have tried hard to be independent of the petroleum supply markets, we’re temporarily seeing them be insulated from the recent price spikes. The money being spent on this biodiesel stays almost entirely local.

My Wilmington ‘biodiesel crash course’ next weekend is nearly full. If it fills up before you get in, please consider coming to one of the many Pittsboro classes I’m teaching this summer:

No experience required:
Biodiesel Essentials- May 3-4
just added- another session of Biodiesel Essentials repeats June 7-8
Biodiesel Equipment Intensive June 14-15

The following two classes are for students with prior experience, or for those who have attended a Biodiesel Essentials class or something similar taught by others:

Biodiesel System Tricks June 28-29
Biodiesel Production Advanced Topics July 26-27

To register for these classes, please see www.girlmark.com/tour

All proceeds from the Pittsboro classes are a benefit for the Piedmont Biofuels summer internship program, and will pay for things like intern stipends, supplies to build an outdoor shower and tent platforms for interns and future visitors, improvements to an on-site classroom, supplies for biodiesel equipment the interns will build, and more. The internship runs from June through August and will involve intensive instruction in biodiesel chemistry and production practices, lab work, experiments, and some work for the co-op and it’s associated farm site. It will be taught by myself and many of the local biodiesel and sustainable homesteading skills experts involved in the Piedmont Biofuels community. For more information about the Piedmont Biofuels summer internship please see www.biofuels.coop

I finally have my computer act more or less together, to the point where the machine is a tool and not an adversary. The brain is also still working normally a month after my chelation therapy (which I repeated a couple of weeks ago). It’s been an uphill battle to get the digital life organized. I’m still installing new software but I feel like I have my tools mostly organized. I blew out my arm injury again last week, but I’m in a position to stop typing if I need to.

More little things, going well.

I drove past a diesel pump in San Francisco this morning- $4.69 a gallon.

I’ll be in Oakland again in May, and we scheduled another System Tricks class at my ‘home’ system:

Thursday, May 22 Introduction to Biodiesel Homebrewing
Friday or Saturday May 23 and 24, two sessions of Biodiesel System Tricks class:

www.girlmark.com/tour has the details…

I haven’t been on the biodiesel forums in so long, I forgot my Infopop login… not to mention the other gazillion forums I frequented less frequently.

sheesh.

in other news, I’m soooo excited about being reunited with my Tankenstein system in Oakland, it’s unbelievable how much an ugly hunk of metal makes me happy.

Biodiesel Production Classes with Maria ‘girl Mark’ Alovert
Spring-summer 2008
www.girlmark.com/tour

Detailed class descriptions at bottom of this post:

Wilmington, NC:
Biodiesel Production Crash Course

April 4: Introduction To Biodiesel Homebrewing
April 5-6 Biodiesel Production System Tricks (must have prior experience or attend Friday class first)

These are two separate classes, you may take both or just one depending on your level of experience and interest.
Sponsored by Cape Fear Biofuels
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Brooksville, FL
April 26-27

Advanced Topics biodiesel class
(must have prior experience or have attended an introductory class- some of my recent students are offering a class in Tampa on March 30, see www.groups.yahoo.com/group/FloridaBiodiesel):

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Marietta, OH
May 17-18
Biodiesel Essentials class
no experience required

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Oklahoma City, OK area
June 21-22
Biodiesel Essentials class
no experience required

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Grayslake, IL
May 30-June 1:

Introduction To Biodiesel Homebrewing:
May 30
Outgrowing The Appleseed: Larger Batch System Considerations (must have prior experience or attend introductory class)
May 31-June 1

The May 31-June 1 class is similar to Advanced Topics, but with a special focus on larger batches and farm/fleet/co-op production falling below true commercial scale.

Sponsored by The Biodiesel Co-op at Prairie Crossing

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Biodiesel Production Series
Pittsboro, NC:
various dates. You may attend one of all of the classes depending on your experience and interest.

May 3-4 Biodiesel Essentials (no experience required)
June 14-15 Equipment Building Intensive (no experience required)
June 28-29 Biodiesel Production System Tricks (must have prior experience or Essentials/Introduction class)
July 26-27 Advanced Topics (must have prior experience or Essentials/Introduction class)

All proceeds from Pittsboro classes benefit Piedmont Biofuels biodiesel internship program

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Central New Mexico
August 9-10

Biodiesel Essentials
no experience required

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Class Descriptions:
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These classes are half of a four-part series:

-Biodiesel Essentials (2 days including ‘Appleseed’ reactor build and more lab time) or Introduction to Homebrewing (one day, more rushed)
-System Tricks- hands-on reactor operations and tricks class for those with some experience or those who’ve taken any prior class
-Equipment Building Intensive (two days, includes building GL1 EcoSystem equipment, methanol recovery, advanced wash tanks, Turk Burners, pumps, and more). No experience necessary.
-Advanced Topics (two days, discussion-based advanced topics class for those with experience or those who’ve taken a prior class)

this spring I’m also offering a special class similar to Advanced Topics:
Outgrowing The Appleseed (similar to Advanced Topics, this is a class on larger processors such as farm-scale systems that do not necessarily use standard commercial technology. Must have prior experience with making small batches of biodiesel)
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Descriptions of classes:

One-day Introduction To Biodiesel Homebrewing
April 4, 9-5, Wilmington, NC
or
May 30, 9-5 Grayslake, IL
No Experience necessary
$75

Introduction class:
This is a one-day, sped-up version of my usual weekend Biodiesel Essentials class.

Biodiesel Essentials:
Pittsboro, NC May 3-4
Marietta, OH, May 17-18
Oklahoma City, OK area June 21-22
Central New Mexico (I’m still working out which town) August 9-10

$120, class is 10-4 each day Sat and Sunday

Two-day class for either beginners or those who want a refresher on quality control.
This is similar to Introduction To Homebrewing, but includes much more time to cover more information, more hands-on time, and a three-hour equipment building sesssion or ‘lab’ session to explore topics you’re interested in in more depth.

Some topics covered:
biodiesel/SVO/solvent thinning options and history, biodiesel chemistry, testing oil (titration and water testing), (hands-on), making test batches (hands-on), an overview of equipment, a tour of the full Appleseed-type for the Wilmington, Grayslake, and Pittsboro classes, long discussion of quality control factors, quality testing (hands-on), mistwashing and other water washing options, breaking emulsion (hands-on), two-stage base biodiesel, waste water and glycerine disposal, water reuse and uses for glycerine, common pitfalls, hands-on experience recovering from failed batches and emulsion, safety

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Two-day Reactor Mechanics and System Tricks Class
10-4 each day
Wilmington, NC, April 5-6
or
Pittsboro, NC, June 28-29
Must have prior exprience or attend the Introduction class on Friday April 4 or any Biodiesel Essentials class I offer
$120, 9-5

This class is geared to people who already know how to make biodiesel, either in a lab-scale or one-liter setting, or to who already homebrew but would like to compare notes with me on how I manage my system. You may also take this class if you are new to biodiesel but have attended a regular homebrewing class taught by someone else. We dont go into a lot of detail on titration and chemistry here so that’s the info you should have ‘down’ already on your own prior to taking this ’system tricks’ class. If you feel like you’ve researched biodiesel production heavily but have little practical experience this is probably the best of my classes for you if you can already titrate oil and make test batches, and understand the basic steps involved.

In the System Tricks class we make a full-size batches of biodiesel in the Appleseed processor, wash the batch in a heavily modified drum-based wash tank, discuss Graham Laming EcoSystem vapor recovery piping for safety, and discuss methanol recovery (and POSSIBLY run the still in the Wilmington class, depending on our site’s electrical availability, which currently has me limited to insufficient power to run all the equipment at once). We will cover a lot of the finer details that make the process efficient, safer, produce higher quality fuel, cheaper, and produce fewer messes. We will run a multifuel Turk Burner and discuss ways to safely heat using waste oil burners and glycerine-burning methods.

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Biodiesel Equipment Building Intensive:
Pittsboro, NC June 14-15

This class builds equipment and includes a heavy emphasis on system design and equipment theory.
This two-day class will build a reactor, including a possible Apple Turnover system, a methanol recovery condensor, inexpensive homebuilt pumps, wash tanks, other washing equipment, methanol/lye mixing equipment, and a Graham Laming-style EcoSystem vapor recovery system. Contact me if you’d like to purchase parts to build any of this for yourself. In addition, the Pittsboro class will include a tour of the Piedmont Biodiesel Co-op and we will discuss their equipment and it’s advantages and shortcomings. We will discuss experimental continuous process equipment as well.

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Advanced Topics Class
9-5 each day
April 26-27
Brooksville, FL

July 26-27
Pittsboro, NC

Must have prior experience or attend a beginners’ class. Florida folks, see www.groups.yahoo.com/group/FloridaBiodiesel for info on a March 30 class taught by three of my recent students. Pittsboro attendees without experience should attend any of my other Introduction or Essentials classes in the area first.

Topics covered:
Strong focus on quality control, analysis of real-world problems with offspec biodiesel, acid-base biodiesel process, advanced topics in dewatering, testing for soap, methanol recovery and equipment design, testing recovered methanol for purity, waterless washing with Amberlite, Magnesol, and Graham Laming’s process, larger-scale equipment design, ethanol-based and E-85-based biodiesel, treating wash water and glycerine for disposal, testing wash water and glycerine, real-world test results related to biodegradability, in-depth disposal/sidestreams discussion
burning glycerine safely for energy, hydronic applications for biodiesel and wash water heating, more advanced discussion of safety and disaster prevention scenarios for larger-scale processor systems, discussion of regulatory topics for non-commercial producers larger than homebrew, solar heating options, very through discussion/demonstration of several different options in washing, including drawbacks and advantages, greywater systems for wash water recycling.

Pittsboro Advanced Topics Class will include a tour of the Piedmont Biofuels Co-op site, a discussion of a continuous process used by the co-op, and a tour of the biodiesel analytical laboratory at Central Carolina Community College. The Brooksville Fl Advanced Topics Class will include attendees with a lot of experience with the BioPro processor and the GL1 (Eco-System) methanol recovery/waterless washing process.

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Outgrowing The Appleseed:
currently only offered in Grayslake, IL May 31-June 1 (with an optional Introduction class on May 30)

This class falls somewhere between System Tricks and Advanced Topics (with some information from both as well as new information), and focuses on what is often called ‘farm-scale’ and ‘fleet-scale’. This class covers production considerations for systems in the 250-gallon to 600-gallon range, with some information on continuous process alternatives to the batch system.

The concern with this scale of processing is about applying homebrew or hobby-scale techniques to larger production, which often brings about greater safety concerns and more complicated quality control considerations.

While homebrewing is a great way to become familiar with biodiesel production and a great way to go through ‘the learning curve’ with unparalleled support from the online homebrew community, the process becomes more complicated on a larger scale.

Some homebrew-scale techniques and equipment scale up to larger batch sizes, while many do not. For those making biodiesel for fleet/business/farm use, serious concern has to be paid to efficiency and safety to make this scale of production make financial sense. Scaling up from hobby-scale to this size of production sometimes brings on regulatory issues that homebrew scale producers do not deal with, yet production on this scale is still typically a do-it-yourself effort where producers don’t tend to seek out engineering assistance and sometimes risk bigger messes and accidents than either homebrewers or commercial producers tend to experience. This class will cover some of the issues that have come up for fleets, co-ops, and farm production, from an equipment, safety, and quality control perspective.

This class is for people with past biodiesel experience, or those who attend the one-day Introduction class on Friday May 30, or a similar introductory hands-on biodiesel production class.

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Registration info and other classes info is at www.girlmark.com/tour

One of the first things I have to mess with while here is to figure out how my Crap is making it to the East Coast. I didn’t want to drive my van out here and do a round-trip, and moving vans are really expensive. My thought was that I could probably find a cheap diesel here in the Bay Area that I could duct-tape together well enough to make the 3000 mile trip to North Carolina and then sell after the trip, and increase the available onboard space by buying a cheap trailer. In theory I’d do a drive somewhere in mid-May, giving myself almost two weeks to get to the East Coast before I have a workshop in Chicago. Tom decided to loan me some cash for the process. We’ve been lending each other the same few hundred bucks for various largish purchases, passing it back and forth for the past few years, and had thought we were over that already, but here it is again.

An additional headache is figuring out what to do with my VW Rabbit, which I really want on the East Coast- I can’t seem to find a cheap small car there either- but is a pretty uncomfortable car to drive across country. I could trailer the poor thing but that takes up valueable space on the theoretical trailer and drastically constricts what kind of a trailer I can get away with.

I’m definitely starting to feel the ’small diesel vehicle shortage’ crunch, and desperately need to drive something that’s not my van when I go back and forth between Pittsboro and the ‘big city’ of Chapel Hill/Raleigh/Durham. I’m starting to think about something other than biodiesel- either an EV, or an ethanol gasser. The other day in Oakland I was behind an old Honda Civic that smelled sweet and had a ‘this car is on a low-carbon diet’ sticker on the back- presumably ethanol. I’m reading Dave Blume’s gigantic book on ethanol production, and have access to a still at the college I can do small-scale experiments with when I get back. I’ve started toying with the idea of getting a Civic or something and making my own ethanol. Ugh, permitting. I’ve heard mixed reports of how much of a pain in the butt the BATF permit is to get. Between what I know about solar thermal and waste oil burners and vacuum, I feel like I’m enough of a master of cheap BTU’s to make ethanol quite economically, and it’s of interest to me anyway for biodiesel production after my trip to Fiji. We’ll see how far that idea gets.

EV-wise, I don’t know, it’s a project I’ve been thinking about for a few years since I’ve shared shop space with the amazing Phil, an EV nut, but I’d be on my own getting into it in North Carolina. There’s the ‘around Pittsboro’ range of driving that I should be able to hit on a bicycle, though I’ve been too sick most of the winter to try it, and that’s probably where an EV makes a lot of sense. Most of the Piedmonters don’t bike around there (it’s about 9 miles between the co-op and the industrial plant, and shorter but slower on the woods trail), due to the high-speed-trucks-on-a-narrow-country-road mentality. I feel like quite a loser for not biking even though I had pretty good reasons. My other commute is the 20 mile one to Carrboro/Chapel Hill for kung fu, and that’s within EV range. Oh, country living. I haven’t started hitchiking around there yet, that ought to work as a one-way to Carrboro for days when I have a ride back at night. I’m also considering starting an online rideboard for others with the same problem. Surely this has been addressed in rural communities like ours in the past?

Last week I caught the sails of a 1980’s Ford truck that briefly appeared on Craigslist before being pulled down, and went to take a look. It’s pretty- the owner is a Japanese car mechanic with the most immaculate shop I’d ever seen, and the truck looks like he spent weekends polishing the engine or something. It’s got gremlins- some fuel cutting-out problem that looks like either a (best case scenario) air leak, or worst case scenario, injection pump. I’ve had the same sort of gremlins in past Fords for various reasons. The price was low enough, and the vehicle is nice enough, that I should be able to re-sell it even if I can’t get it fixed. If it’s what I think it is, I just scored a fairly nice moving truck. Friday I’m heading out to try to drive it to Oakland, with Andrew Morris running cover behind me in a car in case it breaks down, and some tow service phone numbers in my pocket. Wish me luck.

Oh, and did I ever mention that when I was a toddler, some of my favorite toys were toy trains, buses, ships, trucks and so forth? It’s like I was born to like transportation.

Tomorrow I start working in biodiesel again, or at least making motions towards getting this 300-gallon ‘plant’ built and advertising my 9 upcoming workshops, but for the past 7 days I’ve been having something like a martial arts vacation here in California. I’m amazed at how well my mercury detox process worked, and how much that seemed to have fixed everything. I can’t wait to do it again (not while couchsurfing here though) and see how much further it improves my world, but for the moment, I can pretty much say I’m symptom-free. That came just in time for this trip, of course, or at least just in time for this visit to involve a fever pitch of physical activity that I couldn’t have done last month.

I’m staying at my friends’ jujitsu/aikido school in Oakland. A bunch of the staff live in a large rambling communal appartment upstairs, and though I don’t really intend to pursue those arts, I feel somewhat obligated to attend some of their jujitsu classes because I’ve started to in the past and the schedule meshes well with the other school I’m attending. I’m here for a month training in the same style I’m doing in North Carolina- a Kajukenbo kung fu school- and the net effect is that for the past week I’ve been working out every single day at the highest peak level I could muster without tearing anything or holding anything back. Luckily there’s a 48 hour break on the weekend- at the end of 6 straight days of this I was the sorest I’ve been in 10 years.

It’s been an awesome immersion experience. I can roll out of bed on Saturday, drink water, and go downstairs to train- after having a 20-mile commute from Pittsboro to my school in Chapel Hill, it’s a total dream. 10 years ago when I started training in Kajukenbo I lived at my school- having a live-in student is sort of a tradition in some of the Japanese arts (which ours is not), I think, and it’s been GREAT for me to have that experience. It feels like a monastic experience to focus on this so much, and I feel like this month here is going to do a lot to help me recover from my 8-year break in training due to the Lyme tragedy.

The drawback is that I’m starting to feel like I have nothing intelligent to say (though I’m taking in a vast amount of information, it’s just happening faster than the speed of blog). As many of my friends know, I’m one of those people who’s prone to intensive, obsessive, immersion experiences with any new task/activity/hobby I’m involved with. I’ve been waiting all winter for the energy to do this with biodiesel, and feeling awful that I had so many opportunities where I live to do so and had no energy to take advantage of them. Now that I can act on my obsessive tendencies and work my ass off again, I can’t wait for this summer (Or tomorrow, for that matter) to kick biodiesel ass.

I’m having a pretty hedonistic Bay Area vacation in general, too- sort of realizing I’m single for the first time in years, going out to eat a lot, going on dates, messing around in girly clothes, and getting beautified. And all I can think about is my last workout. The effect is very much like I’m stuck halfway between being a dumb blonde and being a dumb jock. I fucking love it.

I did an intensive wrestling session in the jujitsu class on Thursday. Just by some fluke, only I and one other student showed up that day (usually they have about 15 in every class, the room’s bursting at the seams) , and I requested a grappling lesson, something I’m trying to learn a lot more about. The other student was a guy not too much bigger than me, so it was a good match, and we got to work on just one particular hold for over an hour, playing with the different ways to get out of it or counter any attempts to get out of it, then playing with trying the same thing on our teacher who outweighed us by about 90 pounds. Grappling is an amazing upper body workout. The next day we both found ourselves with sore muscles, including ones we never knew were involved in grappling (or even knew existed for that matter). The following day it got worse- I keep forgetting that everything is at it’s peak of soreness two days from the original workout. That night I was going out to dinner, and wore high heels (on top of my taped ankle). I haven’t worn high heels in about 5 years. It was shocking to feel the same wrestling-related upper body muscles get worked. Somehow the same ones that help you get out of a headlock also work to make it possible to walk in femmy high heels…

I just spent a few days in Pittsboro detoxing from my mercury toxicity load. Anyone who knows me well has probably heard me talk about how terrified I’d been to try chelation therapy again (I was talking about this on the blog about a year ago, with disasterour results). There are very things I’m afraid of, but chelation has caused me such major health crashes that I’ve been terrified to try it again. My doctor thinks that mercury toxicity is probably at the heart of my recurring Lyme issues or whatever it is I’ve experienced all winter (antibiotics didn’t seem to help, so I don’t even know for sure that it’s a Lyme relapse as opposed to something else related to mercury, antibiotic side effects, etc).

Chelation consists of taking EDTA and a whole lot of binders (I take Metachel, chlorella, sodium alginate, and other products that purport to bind to the EDTA-mercury complex to ensure it’s eliminated rather than re-attaching in the body or brain somewhere). I seem to have some problems getting rid of toxins- I haven’t had genetic testing done, but one prevalent theory is that people who dont’ do well with chelation have a genetic susceptibility to various liver functions being disrupted, probably by Lyme in my case, and my doctor suggested a variety of ways to help overcome that, which I’d been doing over the past year.

Last week after I had a week of weird flu symptoms and a really bad memory day on Sunday, I decided to take the plunge into chelation somewhat on a whim before heading out on my california trip- I was tired of the memory/concentration problems- even though everything else- energy, sleep, etc was doing OK, I still had this frustrating inability to learn physical combinations in my martial arts class, was having word recall issues, etc. I decided that even if I crashed again, it really couldn’t get much worse than what I’ve been dealing with all winter, and my California trip involved few responsibilities, and I figured I could go be sick at a friend’s house, or delay the trip entirely, if things really went south.

The big news is that it worked much better than any time in the past. I’m overjoyed that I’m finally getting somewhere with this. In the past when I’ve disturbed my mercury load I’ve instantly crashed into the worst Lyme hell, had all my symptoms come back, gotten instant short-term memory and concentration issues, etc. This time around I went around relatively functional during the three days of chelation, other than needing to take some supplement or another every single hour, drink gallons of water, and have weird surges of unnatural energy followed by weird surges of dizziness and other strange stuff I normally associate with chelation.

The energy part was funny - I was wired and tired at the same time, a bit like when you have too much sleep deprivation and coffee to compensate, and act like a moron as a result. I ran around the homestead’s three households re-organizing and matching everyone’s Tupperware (several people I live with always bitch and moan about how their Tupperware gets ’stolen’ by the other housemates). I made a couple of cheesecakes and a half gallon of granola and a half gallon of yogurt for the housemates and did a big spread of low-carb baked goods for myself. I went jogging on my sprained ankle. I went down to the Chicken People’s place and cleaned out their chicken coop so as to use the manure for my future garden. I dumpstered a garbage bag of produce culls and built a big compost pile with the manure and other material. I prodded and nagged Bob and Camille about getting our collective garden project started. I went down to another farm and talked with the farmer about ordering medicinal herbs for my garden and his greenhouse. I ran around all over Pittsboro trying to find a source of bamboo to cut for garden deer fence (our garden’s not going to last very many years- Bob and Camille and I are all fans of container gardening, so that’s not going to be a waste of effort as we can just forklift the container to the next location when the land goes away). I went to the CSA and asked Doug to plant me an extra dozen cabbage for my sauerkraut making, which is starting to be really popular with the roommates and the Friday Local Lunch crowd. I was starting to feel like Little Miss Susie Homesteader in a big way. To counterbalance this lifestylism, I did a bunch of biodiesel experiments revolving around oil de-watering at the local college, and ran dozens of moisture tests on the Karl Fischer machine (newsflash- if the machine is calibrated right, which I"d still like to double-check, I got moisture down to 200 PPM, an unheard of low number for nasty waste oil, not that it needs to be that low for making biodiesel). My experimental record shows clearly that the experimenter is on drugs- the first five experiments last Tuesday all show ‘BOTCHED’ because I was having the ‘dizzy/disoriented’ sort of spell rather than the ‘dumb brute energy’ kind, and couldn’t seem to bring myself to push the buttons, and inject the sample and tare the syringe weight in the right order.

I eventually got myself on the plane to California with sanity semi-intact and everything I needed to enjoy myself for a month, including dresses to go swing dancing/tango dancing in, and other party clothes, all mixed up in my suitcase with tools and martial arts gear. My grinder, various measuring tools and squares, a bag full of hole saws, safety gear, welding jacket and gloves and a whole bunch of pumps and valves, were all mixed up for padding/packing reasons in the suitcases with my underwear and lacy tops and other girly stuff. Tee hee.

I feel like I really skated through with some good luck on the chelation this time around. I disobeyed a few of the rules (mostly diet ones) and still came out of it OK, should be more careful next time. Next time should be in a few weeks. I’m ecstatic that as the side effects (weird energy spells and dizziness/disorientation spells) faded in my first couple of days here in California, I started to feel 100% normal again for the first time all winter. Just in time.

Growing Out Of The Appleseed: Production Considerations Between Homebrew and Commercial Scales

Grayslake IL
May 30-June 1
to register, see www.girlmark.com/tour

This class falls somewhere between System Tricks and Advanced Topics (with some information from both as well as new information), and focuses on what is often called ‘farm-scale’ and ‘fleet-scale’. This class covers production considerations for systems in the 250-gallon to 600-gallon range, with some information on continuous process alternatives to the batch system.

The concern with this scale of processing is about applying homebrew or hobby-scale techniques to larger production, which often brings about greater safety concerns and more complicated quality control considerations.

While homebrewing is a great way to become familiar with biodiesel production and a great way to go through ‘the learning curve’ with unparalleled support from the online homebrew community, the process becomes more complicated on a larger scale.

Some homebrew-scale techniques and equipment scale up to larger batch sizes, while many do not. For those making biodiesel for fleet/business/farm use, serious concern has to be paid to efficiency and safety to make this scale of production make financial sense. Scaling up from hobby-scale to this size of production sometimes brings on regulatory issues that homebrew scale producers do not deal with, yet production on this scale is still typically a do-it-yourself effort where producers don’t tend to seek out engineering assistance and sometimes risk bigger messes and accidents than either homebrewers or commercial producers tend to experience. This class will cover some of the issues that have come up for fleets, co-ops, and farm production, from an equipment, safety, and quality control perspective.

This class is for people with past biodiesel experience, or those who attend the one-day Introduction class on Friday May 30.

to register, see www.girlmark.com/tour

While I’m a blogging frenzy, two more pieces of news:

-I’m teaching an advanced class in Northwest Illinois around May 30-June 1. This will be preceded by a one-day Friday Biodiesel Essentials class for beginners. The Advanced class this time is on 250-600 gallon per batch processors, called “Growing Out of the Appleseed"- it’s part of the endlessly-evolving ‘farm-scale’ curriculum I’ve been playing with for a while.

-I was toying around for a few months with the idea of starting some kind of East Coast knockoff of Aprovecho Research Institute or SEIt out here, a campus for researching/demonstrating/teaching what I call North American Appropriate Technology, meaning the solar/biomass good stuff that those places teach workshops on.

I pitched the idea around to various people in November and December, and it didn’t get much of a reception, and has been a sort of orphan project since. It’s massively off-topic to the biodiesel project here and there’s a competing facility going in (to some extent) at the local college, someday.

It didn’t help that both of my boyfriends (in other news- I have a new boyfriend) over the past few months both said ‘don’t do THAT, get into private industry instead, spending your life doing education of the masses is stupid’ or something like that.

Since the idea didn’t fly with anyone else, I decided to just start small and do bits of it incrementally- scheduling a few ‘benefit’ workshops to pay for at least building out a classroom (in an existing raw building that’s sitting around here underutilized) that can double as a solar demonstration site and a biodiesel co-op. Girl Mark Bliss- a classroom that has secondary containment built in. Basically, I figured there’s a need for various projects around here to have another classroom to use, and while I’m pouring a slab, (the building has dirt floors), I might as well put in secondary containment and a PEX loops for solar radiant heating and install some solar hot water someday.

Last week, my ideas apparently caught the appropriate people’s attention and now there’s likely to be a frenzy of grantwriting to make this into a much bigger project. Exciting, feels like a headlong rush into something I still haven’t 100% committed to, but at least it’s caught everyone else’s imagination in a big way and that’s good enough.

We were talking about what to call the thing. I’m historically TERRIBLE at naming projects with catchy names. Biodiesel Homebrew Guide. Biodiesel Co-ops Conference. California Biodiesel Community Conference. Do-it-yourself Skillshare. The $150 Weldless Processor (which thankfully became the Appleseed eventually). They don’t exactly roll off the tongue and I feel like I’m great at coming up with concepts and a dullard at naming them anything but the most generic descriptor.

So today someone was asking me what we should call our ‘SEI-copycat’ or ‘Aprovecho East’. I put out another yet terrible generic working title- it’s a renewable energy education campus, of course. They shot it down after pointing out that the acronym sounds like ‘Reek’. We’ll see where this goes. At least I know what I’m doing all summer.

I’m heading back to Berkeley for a month in a few days. I’ll be working on getting my Big Move done- not really sure yet how my crap is coming out East, but I’m getting it at least organized to come out here and moving out of the welding shop after this trip. I’ll spend a month selling Crap off, an activity I did really well at earlier in the summer, when I last downsized. That time, I ended up more or less breaking even, thanks to having bought The Crap on Craigslist in the first place. It was like having free furniture for two or three years and not losing any money at it. Cool.

I’m hoping to do the same this time around with all the old biodiesel equipment left over from various experiments over the years. There’s quite a collection of industrial stuff that I no longer need to have around and no sense in shipping any of it East. I still have an amazing shop with crane access over at the welding shop, so I’ve reserved a piece of real estate and forklift use, and have the go-ahead to weld and sprawl for a few weeks.

The working theory is that I’ll use a month to build out a propane-tank biodiesel plant out of tanks and pumps that I have around, and tanks that others have around from other projects, and see how far I get. I should be able to get a substantial amount of it built without spending any significant money on new parts, thanks to a couple of years of salvaging plumbing and metal for this project.

If it’s not done in a month there are places to store ‘the plant’ for a few months and I’ll just repeat this silly activity in the fall and get it finished in a second sitting. If it’s half-done and at least the reactor works, there are probably a few places to deploy it till then and I’ll get free storage out of the whole thing and some friend will get reactor use in the meantime. If it’s done in a month it’ll be for sale as a complete system. This should be a 250-gallons-per-batch thing with heat exchangers and a flash evaporator for oil dewatering. Stay tuned if interested.

I’m also spending a bunch of time training at martial arts schools while out there. I’ll be staying at my friends’ dojo part of the time, which should help my training mindset, and I’m insanely excited about having a chance to focus on nothing but welding and martial arts for a few weeks, with maybe a few outings to go swing dance in the meantime. I’ve been doing well here in Pittsboro at getting in shape at the kung fu school I’ve fallen in love with, but it requires a 25-minute drive to Carrboro, something that we all frown on here. It’s exciting to think about biking to class from the welding shop, and doing it multiple times a week.

I’m also pretty excited about spending a month in the big city again, and have been having a great time getting a tourist mindset on while I figure out what I’m going to spend my time doing for all that time. It also means experiencing spring and it’s foods a month earlier.

Not that I want to live there- Tom only had to remind me of some of the flakey New Age bullshit that Berkeley is well known for. I went online today to plan for my California trip and both the Berkeley and Oakland forums I’m on had posts about recent shootings. I have to remind myself that I haven’t had a parking ticket in MONTHS while here. I haven’t had to think about earthquakes. I woke up before dawn on the morning after the eclipse, half-deleriously watching the same full moon setting through the trees outside my second-story bedroom window, the same view that gets spectacular sunset colors 12 hours earlier. The stars here are spectacular, we’re far enough away from the city here that light pollution isn’t quite as bad as I’m used to in the past few years of Bay Area living. I went jogging today, down one of the miles of trails we have behind the house in the woods, on a whim, while getting over the last of my flu. Two days ago I realized just how much of I an overwhelming feeling of appreciation I have for my perfect roommates, and remembered living with some seriously un-perfect flakes for several years.

Little things, so many of them, about how much my current home rocks, in case I forget about it in all the swing dancing and sushi eating and processor building I’m supposedly going to go do in San Francisco…

Can I just say how much I LOVE email filters. I’m starting to get my email life back. I set up the ‘route email through gmail’ thing, and am watching Viagra spam pile up, all on gmail side of things where I never need to see it unless I want to take a tourist-ey stroll through the spam folder. I occasionally visit the spam folder just to laugh at the bastids.

the little things are really making me happy these days.

I have an occasional problem, well known to everyone who works with the general public on biodiesel projects, whereby I deal with the truly email illiterate (OK, maybe I shouldn’t be making fun of them since I’ve crawled into a 100% computerless cave for the last few months, but still, in the past…). I get these questions all the time from (presumably older) biodieselers who barely use a computer- they’re usually half of a couple where the wife is the only one with the email account (and it really sucks when Mr. refuses to even type his question and Mrs has to write it herself, I feel really bad when I get an email to the effect of “he says it makes a milkshake when he rinses the biofuel, what do we do now?"). When I see a technical email about emulsion or glycerine burners, or questions about a truck warranty, and it’s coming to me on flowered HTML stationary that’s supposedly coming from “Tammie” or “Crystal", I usually scroll down and look for Tammy’s husband’s name signed to the bottom of the letter. The husband has no idea his manly diesel question is coming across with little pink roses printed in the background with his words in purple font.

I spent most of the day setting up my email filters exactly how I want them, making my whole broken system much more user-friendly finally. A measure of success is watching everything sort into an appropriate mailbox based on sender, topic, etc. aaahh. One of the funny sides of the ‘dealing with biodiesel computer-illiterates’ is that I of course get on people’s bulk-mailing joke-of-the-day/email hoax sorts of mailings- which sucks- I really don’t want to get these as I’m trying to keep the inbox manageable without having to spend hours a day sorting through what’s what. Now I’m even sorting them to the trash, more or less. Aaah, bliss… Of course it helps that I get less email now than I did before my computer exile started, so who knows what’ll happen when I come out of hiding again and they find me again. Currently the system is working. I feel this immense, very emotional gratitude to my filters and the whole system at the moment.

Little things…

Yesterday I spent all day working past the elbow and brainfog and finally set up a Gmail account to handle two of my normal email accounts (classregistration@girlmark and alovert@b100 now go there, my girlmark_list_email account is still broken but you shouldn’t be writing me there anyway unless you’re making a post to something I belong to on Yahoogroups).

It’s the latest step of my ‘reclaim the computer’ process I’m going through slowly- I’m getting online about every 10 days to set up one more fix to my several major computer/digital organizational catastrophes.

My normal email account gets several hundred spam a day. Per account. Of which I have three, of which all three are posted widely on the internet, two of which have at various times wound up on my web pages with Paypal links attached (which is like broadcasting yourself as a target for phishing scams, and generates mindboggling gobs of spam). Plus, I’ve been writing posts to email lists for years now with some of the same accounts, and anyone who’s inadvertently sending out spam and has me in their address book from that is blindly bombarding me with viagra ads and more, sometimes even while they sleep.

A long time ago, Thunderbird junk filters worked OK and virtually never even made mistakes in my case, but a year ago it seemed that the volume of spam crossing the internet increased exponentially and I lost the battle with the spammers. At this point least 35% of my daily thousands seem to get through (Thunderbird doesn’t junk-file email scam messages, annoyingly, which are probably what I’m mostly seeing in the inbox). Worse, my Thunderbird filters started mistakenly deleting real email at an alarming rate, which I only figured out in the fall when other things (hardware problems, other bugs I couldn’t figure out how to fix, and a breaking-down operating system) were already too broken to fix quickly, and the whole process of ‘fix my email problems’ went on the back burner while I watched the system go to hell.

I pretty much can’t use webmail (I don’t want to manage a set of server-side junk filters also and simply can’t read through the unfiltered volume). I use a cell phone as a modem while I’m traveling, also, or when my painfully-slow home connection is flaking out, and that means that if I don’t check email and download spam EVERY SINGLE DAY, it turns into an hour of downloading garbage. Backing up my email to an external hard drive is also painfully slow unless I remember to dump the trash first, which means I don’t even know what I’m missing half the time as I don’t archive my trash for this reason. At one point last summer I just threw up my hands and realized that spam has just about broken the internet for some people.

I got to the point where I really hated humanity for breeding spammers- email and the internet is such a wonderful creation, that’s revolutionized so many life possibilities for people- how can you possibly go break the whole thing for what seems to be the sake of vandalism? I just wanted to give up on the whole email system and go crawl back to a Luddite cave somewhere. Among other important messages, I missed all information about my close friend Colleen’s wedding last summer because all of her mail started going into the trash while penis enlargement ads bombarded my inbox(es) instead, so for about a year we were having these weird one-way conversations in which I kept writing her email to the effect of ‘I know you’re sick with MS so I don’t want to be a pest, but if you have it in you to write back please tell me how things are going’ and she eventually figured out that I simply didn’t get her replies.

Anyway, Google has spectacular spam filters, but I hate using webmail with a violent passion, hate ads, and don’t want to give up my own domain name email accounts (gmail (or firefox plugins, in the case of the problem of how to eliminate the ads) now addresses all of these concerns, but that’s a fairly new development in free webmail). There are a couple of ways to use Gmail to ’scrub’ spam from a regular account, which involve sending your regular email to Gmail, then picking it up via an email client like Thunderbird, all cleaned up. In theory, you give up some version of privacy to do this, but I decided I hated not having functional email worse than I liked using my right to the privacy to receive spoof bank account emails.

I did it by setting up the more elaborate Google Apps account rather than just regular Gmail and POP3, because that’s what my email provider recommended, but there’s another way to do this (note posts are circa 2005 and that was probably pre-Google Apps, but I can see how someone wouldn’t want to use Google Apps for various reasons):

http://mboffin.com/post.aspx?id=1636

If I have the jargon right, the way Google Apps handles it is that I’m now using them as my email server entirely, rather than keeping my Dreamhost email server and POP’ing the mail to Gmail when I want to read it, which is what they’re discussing above.

anyway, I’m still not caught up on being able to handle email because I haven’t set up the Thunderbird side of things (another massive re-organization project for other reasons) but I can at least read the damn things again. Mostly.

Biodiesel classes in Wilmington, North Carolina:

Introduction to Biodiesel Production April 4, 9-5
Biodiesel Production System Tricks, April 5-6, 10-4

for more information about these two classes- www.girlmark.com/tour

‘I thought you’d retired’ said one of my students today after my class host announced that we’d just scheduled an Advanced Topics class for the end of April. Drat, I thought I had too. It’s not looking so good for my impending quitting of my job. We’re even scheduling an October class at another student’s site near Tampa also.

Anyway, I’m unable to get my other laptop online and so can’t put up a registration link on my webpage, but here’ s the advance notice:

Advanced Topics in Biodiesel class
April 26-27
Brooksville, FL
www.girlmark.com/tour (registration link and more information about this class will be up shortly)

Ack. I’m still losing it with my arm injury.

Last week I felt pretty smug about the fact that I have finally had enough experience with arm/hand injuries that are exacerbated by typing/mouse use, to have gotten over RSI denial and just stay away from the computer completely when these things flare up. I actually did a bit of work with tools last week- I started a bunch of work on my van, and installed a water heater(yes, for heating shower water, not making biodiesel) at my volunteer janitor ‘job’, went to kung fu class all week and beat the crap out of a punching bag, and none of this set off the elbow injury. Every time I get injuried, I find myself begging and praying to some kind of the medical Gods is that I recover enough arm to handle tools daily. I swear I think I can live without email as long as I can run a wood shop.

I was feeling like I’d made the right decision by shelving the computer and putting my life on ’suspend’ for two months when I ran into Lyle Estill who didn’t stop typing when a similar injury hit, and is now suffering a typical RSI inability to use his arms for the same reason- too much bad-posture typing at the kitchen table, and not being able to stop doing so. He has just submitted a book manuscript. Meaning it’s probably too late for his injury, as all of his book was typed, injuries and all, rather than dictated. In other words, he’s probably 100% fucked. In celebration of this, he’s FINALLY agreed to let me help him figure out how to use his buggy voice recognition software so it can finally learn how to recognize the word biodiesel (as opposed to ‘buy a diesel’, which is what the software thinks you’re saying if you haven’t first read the software’s manual and don’t know that there’s a provision for training the program to understand the odd or technical terms you use)

Lyle calls my fight with the injury ‘the arms race’. Last week I thought I’d won the arms race, and was flaunting my tools-using while he rubbed his elbows and admitted that voice recognition might have a future after all. Last time I got an injury, it was on the other arm, had started as a sports injury, and didn’t clear up for 18 months, until I stopped using the computer or my hands completely for over two months and let everything go to hell while I waited for my hand to heal. It’s been almost this long this time and it isn’t working. Crap.

of course, I haven’t gotten voice recognition, or anything else, set up yet either- according to the dates on this blog, I got online on the 9th and I believe the computers, both of them, have been off ever since, when my arms started twanging. Last night, I re-started the painful process of transferring my files, trying to untangle the mess I have in my email filters and downloading updated software for the new machine. An hour or two into this, I hadn’t even done any typing, and my elbow had already started sending me warning shots just from using a mouse (with the opposite hand) and apparently sitting with my arms up on the keyboard. Today I wrote exactly one very short Lyme forum post and one very long meeting-notes email, and my arm instantly reverted back to a Square One of pain.

This is going to suck. I am doing a lot of traveling in Febuary, which means that I won’t have the luxury of having a quiet room to myself to do voice recognition dictation in (the program doesn’t work in noisy environments, and my brain doesn’t dictate with others around). Virtually everything I need to do is on hold because of this.

I returned from my Long Island class to a new laptop (can you spell ‘generating e-waste’?), and a massive amount of work configuring it, loading up new software, taking the opportunity to get re-organized, and transferring my old stuff over (can’t just do it via a backup as that’s one of the many things that wasn’t working on the old machine). I can’t wait to get back to voice-recognition-based writing.

On top of everything, I lost my phone on the trip as well, so I’m continuing to be in unreachable neverland till I get that resolved also (thank God for Palm-based PDA phones, and insurance- everything’s backed up so I didn’t lose any contacts, and a more evolved phone is coming in the mail).

I should be back online for real by Friday, and should be reachable by phone around then too.

my most boring blog entry ever…

Something nasty got me sick on the way back from Fiji, and I took weeks getting over it, and kept trying to figure out what was keeping me feeling under the weather. I kept getting ’sorta-sick’ all December. After too much typing while I was working in Fiji, my computer and my most recent elbow injury/typing arm went kaput around the same time (new computer on the way, arm still avoiding typing as much as possible), so I avoided all tools and typing while waiting for the arm to get better, laid around getting to know My Friend The Explosive Cough, got zero done, and had the most unproductive month I’ve had in months.

A few days ago, still wondering what had me feeling sick, I finally had a full-scale Lyme relapse, which explains what’s been happening all of December. Drat, I was trying to be in denial about it the past couple of weeks. It’s been a really miserable few days while I down drugs to get it under control, and chug excessive amounts of caffeine to keep my energy semi-functional, and try to not look like an accident-prone idiot with dyslexia and zero short-term memory to everyone around me.

I’m back on antibiotics after having had almost three months with no symptoms. I could look at it two ways- either be upset that I’m sick again or be happy that I got through for this long with zero symptoms. I don’t think I"m nearly as ill as during the last serious relapse in early July. Throughout my treatment, my improvements have generally been a series of ups and downs but with a general improvement over time after each relapse, so I’m hoping this is just more of the same trend. Bad timing, though, I"m going to NYC to teach a class this weekend.

I think something turned for the better today, or at least I’m hoping that’s what I’m feeling.

Tom’s visiting at the moment and will do the drive with me, so I pawned off a bunch of the serious trip prep work on him- which adds up to finding out that the PCM (ie the main computer) on my van is malfunctioning.

Looking back it seems that I’ve gotten extra-sick with Lyme symptoms for the past 4 years around this time- since I don’t get depressed and doubt I’m somehow getting winter depression without me feeling depressed, the only explanation I can think of is food-related, something about binging on too much sugary crap over the holidays. I see a pretty intense connection between when I eat low-carb and feeling symptom-free, which seems to be something some Lyme doctors have noticed, so I think that I just brought this on myself. It’d suck if that means no sugars for the next couple of years.

I’m going to stop traveling to teach these homebrew workshops. You’ll have to come find me in North Carolina after Febuary, where I’ll continue to teach locally, with less frequency.

This is a funny time to be quitting since there’s again a huge explosion of interest from the cheap-fuel side and money’s flying around, but I’m too burned out to keep working on this business, I’m bored with the particular community I’ve been working with, and I can’t stomach continuing to put off “having a life", so I’m scaling back dramatically despite the timing.

I’ve been sick for over a week with something horrible that I caught on the plane back from Fiji. I got to spend an hour in line at the airport listening to a tourist cough explosively behind me the entire time, which is exactly what I’m doing now- explosively coughing every 1.3 minutes, especially at fun times like 3:00 am, 3:02 am, 3:03 am, etc)

A normal person would have just gone home after that trip and would have gone straight to three days in bed. Instead, after I landed in Los Angeles on my way back to North Carolina, I took a giant detour to San Francisco to visit The Boyfriend, instantly came down with the flu the next morning, and spent evening packing my move-east, which was followed by yet another day on the plane home. I was co-hosting a combined delayed four-pack bulk-birthday party for myself and a few other November/December birthday people in North Carolina the next day, and besides the locals, we had out-of-town visitors Frankie Abralind, Matt ‘Farmer’ Steiman, and Forrest Gregg from Frybrid coming to visit us to talk greasy science all party long. There were three other birthday people so I could have just begged out of it, stayed in SF till I got better, and gotten another flight home when I wasn’t endangering people with my little colony of microbes. Unfortunately, I’ve become so cavalier about traveling and it’s effect on my body that I ignored all of that, pushed through, and paid for it later. Needless to say, I haven’t really been conscious since then till yesterday.

Now, back to quitting my job:

I’ve recently moved to an incredible (or is it NCredible?) community in rural NC, into a house with biodiesel enthusiasts, where biodiesel talk permeates everything and I adore my new roommates. The move coincides with the seeming end of my Lyme Disease saga- knock on wood, I seem to have been symptom-free since late September which makes life extremely exciting and the possibilities for what I can now do seem endless. Unfortunately, I haven’t really been there- I moved in about 6 weeks ago and my room still looks like I’m living out of a suitcase, because I still am, and I still am slave to my schedule and my job. It’s stopped being fun doing this since it’s keeping me from more fun opportunities and I don’t need the money anymore, not living in high-rent California.

Everyone I meet in the sustainability circles here in town has read Lyle’s book, so when I’m introduced to them I often hear something to the effect of ‘oh, I’ve read about you in Lyle’s book’ (to which I say ‘Lies! Lies! it’s all lies! or something to that effect, see previous post about what I think of journalists in general, including those who are my friends).

I keep finding myself sounding like some kind of very fake social butterfly in those interactions, though- since I’ve also heard about most everyone in the sustainability scene in town also, I usually wind up getting very enthusiastic and saying something about how interested I am in what that person does (like oyster mushroom cultivation, or raising livestock, or herbalism classes, or other pursuits that some of these people are immersed in). I sound fake, but I really am fascinated by the opportunities to learn some of these things and the opportunities here are endless. I’m getting in shape for the first time in years, and found a few martial arts schools to check out whenever my lungs start to work again, and I have a barn to work in where I can try my hand at a gazillion biodiesel projects. My welder and a shopful of tools is already with me from my trip, so I have virtually no limits on what I can do. I want to make ethanol for fuel use. I want to find a 500-gallon-batch farm-scale biodiesel project, hopefully nearby, to build and tinker with. I want to continue my Fiji experiments. I lie awake at night reinventing the mechanically-automated batch reactor and find myself in the stores seeking out new methoxide mixer parts for the new open-source methoxide mixer. I want to explore the machinist class possibilities at the community college in the next town. I’m curious about the various tinkerer guys associated with the sustainability/offgrid world here, and what I can learn from them. My mind’s on greywater and wood heat and pellet stoves. I’ve put out feelers to a local nonprofit about taking on a glorified janitor job keeping one of their projects looking it’s best. The Boyfriend’s moving here soon, and we’re kicking around a gazillion nonprofit project ideas having to do with starting a research center for some variety of North American Appropriate Technology.

The sky’s the limit. Yet looming over it all is my enemy the Travel Schedule, which says that in two+ weeks I’m leaving again to go teach beginners how to titrate and to answer questions about what car to get.

During last night’s 3 am coughing fit, I decided I’m quitting my job- the boss is too much of a slave-driver and the hours suck. The traveling fly-in workshop was supposed to be a temporary job while I had a hand injury that precluded doing anything else, and I’ve done it for about a year longer than I’d initially intended. While it’s been a tremendous amount of fun to meet many of the homebrewers on the forums, and I’ve learned a phenomenal amount about how people actually do things out there that they don’t talk about on the forums, it’s now getting in the way of having a life a bit too much.

I’m going to schedule a few classes in the far distant future, and teach a few of them locally in NC this spring. In the meantime, my most immediate interest is finding consulting or building work on farm-scale projects, batch systems in the 250-500 gallon batch stage, in the Southeast, within North or South Carolina or Virginia.

I’m in Fiji working on ethyl esters and GL’s one-day process (I haven’t started the GL process stuff, I don’t think it’ll work with ethanol, and we immediately discovered that our venturi wasn’t working properly).

I thought I was coming here primarily for a regular methanol process/waste oil/acid-base process sort of setup, but they make their own ethanol and are doing such a spectacular job of it that it costs them about 45 Fijian cents a liter, versus nearly $3 dollars per liter methanol, so we absolutely have to make some of this stuff work with at least partial ethanol.

They are using solar thermal to provide some of the ethanol boiler heat, and zeolite to dehydrate it to high purity, with more solar (basically a large solar box cooker) to dehydrate the zeolite. You gotta love the proximity to the equator, the solar thermal works so well that they often overheat the boiler water in their manually-controlled solar setup, and make steam by accident.

Anyway, I’ve had a lot of success running small ethyl batches (I’ve done a lot with this in the distant past also), including with impure ethanol, and have done some two-stage base-base biodiesel this way, which I didnt’ think was going to be easy.

I’ve been posting like mad on the Infopop ethanol-based biodiesel forum because I’m exploring some new territory, I have lots of questions, and I have limited internet time to research whether others have done some of this before. If you’re interested in the subject, please go check out my recent posts at the ethanol section of the forum:

http://biodiesel.infopop.cc/eve/forums/a/frm/f/9601000031

I’m going to try acid-base two stage with it as well, not sure if that’ll get me anywhere with the home brew acid-base process, I kinda doubt it, but it’s worth trying.

Today my job is to sit in airports.

Thanks to the slow-boat methanol delaying my original trip, I was stuck getting whatever flights I could get on this extremely busy travel weekend- which meant getting on an 7:30 flight just to sit in the Chicago airport in the US for 5 hours, followed by another 5-hour sit in the LA airport later tonight. I feel like I’m in suspended animation of some sort.

It’s really disorienting to be in such limbo. I stayed up all night to catch the 5:30 am ride out to the airport- I haven’t been staying up late since I’ve lived out in the woods- then slept deeply on the plane with earplugs in and a jacket over my head, and it’s adding to the total disorientation I’m feeling to suddenly find myself in the grey concrete of the Chicago airport.

I finally started getting excited about the half-way-round-the-world travel disorientation when I walked outside in the middle of last night to a near-full moon, glittery stars, and a mild winter night (Thanksgiving was t-shirt weather-warm). It was 2 am but the sky nearly seemed as light as dawn, throwing my time perception off entirely. I’ve been living here in the house in the woods for a month and was gone for the previous bright-moon nights. I had to remind myself that all of this near-daylit glory was indeed happening in the deepest, deadest moment of night.

At dawn my driver and I walked half-asleep through the woods to my car and the not-quite-fallen autumn leaves shimmered silvery in the bright moonlight like a heavy snowfall had somehow come after the t-shirt spring bliss the day before.

This bizarre day in airport purgatory is going to end with a nighttime flight over the Pacific. Am I going to see the full moon from there?

ooh, I’m burned out. I’ve had too much travel in the last few months I guess, and since I just moved into a new place I’m all ready for this trip to be over. It hasn’t even started yet. It should be a lot of fun, the job is a ‘get a commercial operation started’ sort of troubleshooting/iron-out-the-kinks gig that I want to do more of. The methanol boat has finally arrived and all is set to go. They’re all excited to get started, I’m excited, and it’s going to be great once I get over the extreme agony of airports and air travel, sometime next week.

We had impromptou Loser Thanksgiving yesterday- about 10 people who didn’t have a family Thanksgiving to go to all congregated at my new place (where most of the roommates were gone) and brought or made enough food for 50. It reminded me again of why I’m psyched to be on the East Coast. I’m not sure why it’s so much easier for me to feel at home here, but I do.

Life is intense, life is good, life is hard, life is overwhelming at the moment.

Life is:
‘too-much-travel’ insecurity
personal issues with having moved away from the East Coast
personal issues, good and bad, with The Boyfriend
trying to figure out what I want to do for a living that doesn’t involve the workshops, whether biodiesel or not
getting excited about music again for the first time in years
getting into shape for the first time in years, running everywhere, working out, being in good pain every day from the running for the first time since Lyme. I never walk from building to building anymore at the new place- I always sprint the distance, I’m ecstatic about what I can suddenly do and about getting my health back and being athletic again. Joy…
ironing out my new home logistics
playing catch-up on what Tom calls ‘life maintenance’
struggling with my computer and my disorganized digital life
biodiesel experiments

Agh. I’m ready for December to be here.

Wow, tour is over. It’s exciting. I’m living in the woods and it’s been a great day catching up on email and listening to the wind in the trees. I kept thinking I was hearing a car drive up. It was just trees.

I now have one very long trip from here to Fiji and back, with a stop in California on the way home (I tried to look it up on Google Maps to see if it was possible to get mileage. I got an error message saying, sorry, we can’t find driving directions from the East Coast to Fiji)

After the Fiji consulting madness, I get a month off, or something like a month. Then in theory this madness starts up again, if I let it. At this point I get to decide what I’m doing- I’m in a new place with room for an office for once, a good shop, and… do I want to venture out into consulting full-time, give up doing these classes for the moment, or do something completely unrelated to biodiesel? Assorted ‘North American Appropriate Technology’ projects beckon.

I got the go-ahead from The Boyfriend to stay out East permanently. He made an emergency trip out here to check out the place, got to see what I was so excited about, and is making plans to move out next fall sometime. It’s a long-distance relationship till then, luckily he’s working a telecommute job and can do things like travel out here pretty frequently.

I was supposed to leave for Fiji in three days, which is about four days after I got back from the Tennessee class, and an absolutely awful idea from the stress perspective.

Luckily for me, there was an email right after we confirmed my plane ticket- unluckily for our project, the methanol supply to Fiji is coming from New Zealand by cargo ship, and it’s delayed some as-yet-unknown number of days. My German client there keeps referring to it as ‘boat’, which makes me think of someone rowing a barrel of methanol to Fiji, very slowly. I get to sit here and play with GL’s Process and figure out other fun stuff for them with some more leisure time while we wait to hear on the methanol.

Just looked at the calendar and it’s my birthday tomorrow, which I’d more or less forgotten about. I guess that fits the definition of ‘busy’.

Biodiesel Essentials class
Jan 5th-6th

Riverhead, NY

Class registration fee:
$120

No one turned away for lack of funds.
Register at www.girlmark.com/tour

You may build an Appleseed biodiesel processor at this class if you buy
a kit from http://b100supply.com in advance.

B100supply gives a discount
to those who attend this workshop and other people’s workshops- $50 off
the cost of the basic or deluxe processor kit.

This class teaches you everything you need to know to make high quality
biodiesel, use your system more efficiently, and make informed decisions
about shortcuts. We cover the following topics, but also tailor the
class to more advanced students or different questions, as appropriate.
There are extensive hands-on lab portions in the class during which you
will get individual attention to make sure you understand the topics
fully and can do the techniques on your own at home.

Some topics:
biodiesel/SVO/solvent thinning (ie DSE etc) options and history,
biodiesel chemistry, testing oil (titration and water testing), making
test batches, an overview of equipment, a chance to build your own
reactor at the end of Sunday’s class, quality control factors, quality
testing, mistwashing and other water washing options, breaking emulsion,
two-stage base biodiesel, waste water and glycerine disposal, reuse,
waterless soap removal with Amberlite and GL’s process, common pitfalls,
hands-on experience recovering from failed batches and emulsion, safety

Tonight after class Will from MSbiofuels.com and I explored the rumor of deep-fried possum. Sort of like Lyle’s ‘I can make fuel out of a dead squirrel‘ comment a while back.

Of course, the rumor turned out to be false. The restaurant was this great barbeque joint called Leatha’s, run by a lady who’s a gazillion years young.

Apparently some TV cooking show did a segment on them, for which the restaurant cooked up armadillo, squirrel, chitlins, and some other typically depression-era food.

It’s now turned into an endless rumor that ‘Leatha’s has possum, not on the menu, you have to ask for it’.

That’s what you get for talking to the press for a day- your waitresses have to endlessly answer questions about the possum in the back room forevermore. Of course our biodiesel-influenced version of the rumor said that the possum was deep-fried, too.

I think I rant about the press nearly as much as how libertarians rant about hating the government.

We took our place in the long line of idiots that have asked a server about the armadillo (luckily Will had remembered on the drive over that the rumor was all about armadillo, not possum, which is slightly less insulting and makes a LOT more sense, since possums make their living being deeply disgusting and supposedly taste awful as a result of eating carrion).

She sweetly told us that they’d only done it for the TV show, but also that they couldn’t serve it or squirrel right now anyway because it’s not hunting season. The thought of the government protecting squirrel from hungry people is kinda funny.

I never can sleep the night before a class. The next few weeks my life enters an even more insane fever pitch of travel taking me around the Southeast… and abroad. I get December off, though. It starts again in Febuary. Somewhere in the meantime I get to do a biodiesel training for a project in the South Pacific, further confusing my brain that’s already addled by the constantly changing scenery.

Today I drove the rest of the 800 miles to Mississippi with , made it in time for the pre-class social we’d organized, and nothing blew out in the process. I’m starting to trust this van (the trailer, not so much). The drive was a near-nonstop with, apparently, no stop for food (because, like, there’s really no “food” on the road between Atlanta and lower Mississippi- the convenience stores carry an amazing variety of inedibles)- when I got to within 15 miles of my destination the host mentioned on the phone that dinner would be in an hour, and I experienced a bizarre starvation meltdown.
I burst through the doors of a chicken place to get something to stave off disaster, and could barely place an order for a snack to the person behind the counter. She commented ‘wow, you’re THAT hungry, huh?’ with a tone of concern- I think it’s pretty obvious when I’m melting down.

Tonight I was ecstatic to see that I was going to bed at 9:30… and now it’s 1 am and I"m still wide awake, despite the grueling drive. It really amazes me that I just can’t EVER sleep before a class. Tomorrow morning I’ve got a full house, and I’m sure I’ll just hit the ‘play’ button and go on autopilot and somehow use complete sentences and teach the course without really being there.

I haven’t really been to this part of the Gulf Coast since 1992. I actually went to mechanic school in New Orleans when I was 18, which was quite the experience- it was a job training program run through the federal JTPA, which meant that most of the students were there due to a probation requirement or a welfare requirement and I was probably the only one there on my own. Needless to say, they were all men, most of whom had done a lot of time in prison. They were REALLY amused by me and what I was doing there wanting to learn to work on cars. I learned a lot about prison life and their, um, values, from their conversations.

Entering Mississippi reminded me visually that this is the poorest state in the country (I think?), and that a lot more rural areas elsewhere looked like this a few years ago. Crappy roads, few chain stores (that’s not exactly bad in some ways), fourth-rate supermarket that turned out to look like a bad truckstop convenience store on steroids- I had to look to find the produce section, and was absolutely amazed at the amount of packaged processed junkfood garbage that filled the shelves. Not surprisingly, looked like lots of unhealthy people (OK, this WAS definitely in a poor part of a city, maybe I’m extrapolating unfairly to the rest of the state which I shouldn’t).

One of the Piedmont Biofuels guys I was on the phone with pointed out that parts of NC looked like this once (actually I hung out with illiterate bikers in such a place in NC once, too, that also being part of my now-less-formal mechanic education). He felt that some of those NC towns were now just plain dead and empty, with the loss of crappy-job industry like chicken processing (which is what was going on in this part of MS). It’s kind of interesting- the Piedmont crew seems to be extraordinarily sensitive to what’s going on in chicken processing these days, since their feedstock is coming from that gigantic wastestream source primarily.

Monday I flee here with whatever trailer tires I can manage to wrangle out of the local economy, run 6 hours back to Atlanta, actually relax for a day (though that means doing biodiesel-ey stuff, for me). Next week is a class in western Tennessee. I have things to do 9 hours from there, first, however.

Partway through my drive down here the Boyfriend called. I’d just been in California for 8 days of hell, processing what the hell we’re going to do there. I don’t want to go back, I don’t wanna I don’t wanna. I’ve been working on him to get out to the East Coast for the winter, do some visiting and some projects, and try to deepen some of the relationships we have with friends up and down these states- the Piedmont crew, Matt Steiman and Jenn, Dorn and Sarah, and our buddies Lu and Dawn. The trip was hell, we spent a lot of time going ’round and ’round about various issues about my having decided to leave and not come back, and I was extremely relieved that a) we worked through them and b)I’m back East.

I’d returned from the flight from California, spent a near-delerious day getting the van together and dealing with emotional turmoil, more phone calls from the Boyfriend and more resolution, all in a good way though- and then immediately jumped in the van and drove the 800 miles to another world, Mississippi. In this alternate reality that’s definitely not the California I just escaped, my host claimed tonight that there’s a diner nearby that serves deep-fried possum. And I thought I had issues. Another local who was standing nearby agreed that in fact you can buy such a thing at that one restaurant, but it’s kind of hush-hush and not on the menu. I can’t tell if they’re pulling my leg, but I am determined to find out. I immediately insisted that I get to see (and presumably eat, and possibly even review) this scary thing. I wonder what fryer oil (or french fries for that matter) that have had possum fried in it is like?

After this I’m heading back 800 miles to where I came from. The Boyfriend just decided today that he’s going to get on a plane- we spent a few HOURS of my drive on the phone, all of which helped me deal with the horrendous drive- and follow me out there for a week while I"m in inter-class hell, the better to make the decision about whether to come spend the winter here with me or not. I’ll be picking him up on Wednesday, spending a few days trying to see what we think of my new situation here, then driving another 10 hours to another class. Then back, spending some more time processing what he’ll think of my new winter home, then dropping him at the airport. I have a birthday on the 16th which I’ll probably spend packing, then on the 17th I shift gears and fly out to Fiji for 10 days to do a training for a production startup. then… I’m back, I have free time (ie poverty), and I get to finally get to know the community I just joined out here.

I have three more biodiesel classes happening before winter (I’m not sure what I"m teaching where this winter yet):

Biodiesel Homebrewing Classes with biodiesel equipment build:

-Austin, TX Oct 27-28

-Hattiesburg, MS (actually Seminary MS) Nov 3-4 with barbeque/advanced equipment build on Nov 2nd

-Fayetteville, TN Nov 10-11

There’s plenty of space in the classes. I’ve got a ‘no one turned away for lack of funds’ policy, too. We usually wind up building reactors from the b100supply Appleseed processor kits in the classes, too, and in Mississippi, there’s a special pre-class build session/barbeque/fish fry the evening before.

Topics covered:
titration
oil collection
emissions
SVO/biodiesel/solvent thinning options- differences and cautions
real-life quality problems and what to do to prevent them
easy biodiesel chemistry
practice making test batches, titrating oil, testing oil for water, etc
5% water prewash
two-stage base-base process
dewatering oil
washing biodiesel, equipment tricks related to washing
drying biodiesel
how to tell how much to wash or dry
dealing with really bad oil
testing, testing, testing
quality control factors and how they inter-relate
dealing with wash water safely
options for glycerine disposal
burning glycerine safely
fire safety
upsizing batches from the small homebrew systems
waterless “washing”
‘open lab’ for more practice

Equipment: static mixers, eductors, venturis, hydronic heating, solar heating, plumbing 101, bigger pumps, collections equipment, etc

The Mississippi and Tennessee classes will also have my super-fancy homebrew processor on a trailer, which has a methanol recovery unit and most of the above items to show.

More info:
http://www.girlmark.com/tour

Because of discussions about real-world quality control issues which came up in the discussion-based Advanced Topics biodiesel classes I’ve done recently (incidentally there’ll be more of those coming this winter, see http://girlmark.com/tour), I’m spending some extra time this fall in doing some testing of the finer points of the 3/27 test to try to learn more about it’s parameters.

At the moment I’m trying to figure out what exactly happens across various fatty acid profiles and with various cold temperatures at which the test can be done. I have access to some very limited laboratory use periodically, and hope to correlate some of the cold-temperature physical properties of the 3/27 to GC or other conversion testing.

However, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum:

It just so happens that the day I went to the lab to make up my Big Testing Series samples, I had just filled up with what turned out to be bad fuel from a Co-op That Shall Not Be Named (CTSNBN). This group remains Not Be Named because I don’t want to embarass these people and they actually do try really hard to make quality fuel and use 3/27, pHlip test, and sometimes even do GC testing using an outside lab, something that few homebrewers have done.

They work with fairly difficult feedstock Their feedstock varies wildly, depending on what members (or the cat) drag in, and is sometimes pretty high in FFA. They do two-stage base/base 80/20 processing and sometimes make really well-testing fuel as some of the GC samples reveal- they’ve been well within ASTM before when using better quality feedstock.

However, their oil is sometimes high in FFA, they do not do acidbase processing to deal with it, they dont’ have really good dewatering for the bad oil, and they react at lower temperatures than desirable. I now suspect that we all should use more KOH than just 7 g+ purity compensation, too, and they aren’t doing this yet.

At one of my recent classes I made a full-size batch and counted off 6 major quality control things (temperature, water, bad oil, measurements, etc) that I did wrong in front of the class, yet my big batch still made good biodiesel that passed 3/27 at 64F, and I used this to illustrate the point that 2-stage base-base biodiesel process can be used to make up for a huge array of quality control ’sins’. It looks like the Co-op That Shall Not Be Named must have done at least 7 things wrong because their fuel turned out to be just bad enough to cause problems, and unfortunately 2-stage base process did not save them there.

The first sign of trouble was that the fuel was refusing to clear fully after days of active drying (ie circulating through a sprayer). I’d never seen that before and tried some 3/27 tests.

It appeared to pass at about 72F and failed at about 66F. Bad news- this
is the exact situation we’re afraid of, people not checking their 3/27
test at cold enough temperatures, and getting a false pass.

I actually spent many hours testing various other home brew samples and
most of the other WVO-based samples didn’t have a pass/fail point at
quite this high of a temp, which gives me more confidence in the test-
ie most commonly it seemed that the fuel could pass at 60F and fail at
40F (I tested most of the samples at 65F or lower, picked that temp ust
because that’s what my ice bath maintained well, then challenged the
same sample again at much lower temps to see what could cause it to fail).

Most of the other samples, if they clearly passed at 60F or so, also passed at lower temperatures , at least till I got down to the 40F’s.

I tested about 10 samples so it was
good to see that this wasn’t a common problem. These were mostly samples
made in production runs by various homebrewers I’d recently met.

I’m currently doing a project to characterize cold-temperature anomalies
with 3/27 and to try to send samples to a lab to get some more
correlation between it and GC or other conversion tests. I’ve been
talking up labs as I often do, trying to find a way to do this testing
without paying Magellan $89 a sample for GC testing. I’ve found a few
educational institutions where I may be able to do this.

The obvious problem with the Fuel That Shall Not Be Named made by the
Co-op That Shall Not Be Named is that the fuel was borderline hazy- like
it’s almost dry but not quite. Definitely not what I"d call ‘bright and
clear and dry’ but what some people would call ‘clear enough’ if they
didn’t know better.

offtopic diversion: Earlier that day I was at a
laboratory chatting with an ASTM petroleum diesel committee guy, and
they certainly had problems with ASTM settling on a real definition and real test for ‘bright and clear’ (which I think is in the gasoline spec or something)- clarity is a bit subjective, even to chemists on the ASTM committees. Homebrewers with any level of experience do know what bright and clear and dry means, but newbies can be confused by something that’s ‘almost dry’ but not quite sparkling clear. I got to argue briefly with a couple of fuel-hungry co-op members who put this slightly macho peer pressure on me (’that looks good enough to ME, I’d use that in MY Truck’ said the men, the implication being that I was being a wimp. I gave in to the peer pressure and used it in my truck. Bad idea.)

Anyway, the lack of ‘clear drying’ appearance of the Fuel That Shall Not Be Named caused me to take some stuff to the lab and try to test it.

It failed 3/27 if it was chilled slightly below room temp. I was really
careful in how I tested the temperature- I had a laboratory chilling
device that was an ice bath (looked like a big insulated crockpot so
it’d stay at temp for a while) in which the ice (or ice and salt)
chilled four little wells and you’d stick the sample tubes into the
wells to get air-cooled (ie the tubes weren’t in the ice itself, just in
cold copper wells).

My technique was to leave the samples (and sealed prepared methanol vials) in the chiller wells for 10 minutes till the temp
stabilized, and to use a thermometer stuck in the biodiesel sample only
(the methanol was sealed) to tell me when that temp was stable. Then I"d
do the test. I also had corks with thermometers stuck in the middle,
which I could use to actually take the temperature of the 3/27 test
itself, without evaporating significant methanol. (evaporating the methanol supposedly makes the test fail prematurely)

I was using a pipette
pump to transfer my 3 ml of biodiesel, and a large syringe to transfer
27 ml of methanol. My methanol was reagent grade, from a bladder
(meaning it couldn’t evaporate easily or get contaminated with water). I
was transferring it using the syringe really quickly. I also measured
the weight of the methanol and fuel samples using a very accurate
balance accurate to .001 gram (not quite analytical balance but not the
average homebrew equipment).

While doing this I found that a pure sample of “Co-op That Shall Not Be
Named” fuel had gelled completely in the chiller. This is after I’d pumped it into my truck, and just as cold weather was coming. Uh oh. I looked at the temp
and it was turning to slush at something like 64F, which is exceedingly
high for biodiesel. Palm oil or animal fat biodiesel clouds in the
45F-52F range from what I’ve seen- this was much, much worse.
Incidentally it’s probably really well-washed (soap tests to follow this
weekend to make sure)

I’ll post my results on the other samples at my blog (girlmark.com/blog) another time- I was graphing
them all on paper and havent typed up the results yet.

I picked the 3 most interesting samples and got them tested with other
tests. We used the SAFTest, an enzymatic test that gives total glycerol
results similar to the total glycerol GC results, but does not separate
out individual MG, DG, and TG values. We also got to run one on a GC.

One Infopop homebrewer’s acid-base fuel, which had started life as 27 titration(homebrew titration) slop, got an incredibly good .10 total glycerol on the SafTest (max allowable by ASTM D6751 GC method is a .24, and there’s a huge difference between .10 and .24). This stuff was the fuel that did the best on 3/27 tests, by the way. The 3/27 test on it was a very clear, colorless, with no dropout- looked just like methanol with no biodiesel added to it. It also stayed clear down to 39F which is as cold as my ice-water challenge bath could go.

Another sample that failed 3/27 ‘barely’ (ie it dropped material at a
light temp challenge of 60F, passed, with a very cloudy appearance at
our room temperature of 72F, but could have been oxidized/polymerized,
so the failing could have reflected polymerization rather than
conversion. The sample was quite old and therefore we suspected
polymerization). It tested out at .25 on the SafTest. It sorta
correlates to the 3/27 behavior, but it’s not possible to tell what we
were really seeing on 3/27, because of the age (we assume that 3/27 also
tests for polymerization). I also didn’t do a good job on this
particular sample when running my 3/27 tests- I had taken the 72F test
and just chilled it to
60 and stopped testing that particular vial when I got it to fail, so I
didnt’ really give it long enough at 72F to see if it would have
eventually dropped out material at 72F also. I’ll do so this weekend
with a fresh sample and a fresh sample of methanol. However it was
definitely not a clear pass. There is nothing wrong with the way we did
the SafTest on this, by the way, just that my 3/27 testing wasn’t
comprehensive enough.

A third sample was the Goo That Shall Not Be Named. It came up as a .30
on the SafTest. It was run on a GC today but I don’t have the results
yet- the tech said that from the chromatogram it looked like it was
really high in di and triglycerides with some monoglycerides, but I
won’t know till next week when the tech comes back to work and
integrates the chromatogram more carefully than ChemStation does.

Interesting thing to gather from this:

Assumign soap wasnt the problem (it shake-tests really clean, nothing in
the water):

-it doesn’t take much di/monoglycerides to cause a serious problem with
cold-flow properties at times (see postscript below!). At .30 total
glycerol, this particular goo turns very opaque and cloudy at about 65 F
and becomes a complete gel at 45. Incidentally,
I’ve seen chromatography results (from Magellan) for other ‘goo-causing’
bad commercial fuel, and one of the ones I recall was a .34 total
glycerol, and clogged fuel filters all over the bay area.

I had run 15 gallons of this week’s goo into my van, with nothing else
in the tank, and it caused the engine to lope. I happened to discover
the gelling problem that night in the lab, and immediately got some
diesel, so I’m now driving on Goo-50 instead of Goo-100. This morning I
had a huge cloud of black smoke on startup, and the engine is running
with some surging (filter clogging?) and a couple of times today, when
starting from a cold engine, I could smell my exhaust strongly for the
first time in months- my GMC 6.5 is recently rebuilt and has barely any
odor even on petrodiesel.

-it was really obvious from a 60F 3/27 test that the stuff had something
very wrong with it. It caused an overall clouding- very, very white,
with oily granules suspended in the methanol. I’d never seen that
before, it’s not like the ’snow’ you get with very soapy samples.

-However, this fuel looked cloudy-but-no-dropout (after 30 minutes) at
72F. The folks who made that fuel had done 3/27 tests and they had
called it a ‘pass’- obviously, they hadn’t chilled the sample.

I tend to drop my 3/27 samples (methanol vial and biodiesel sample
before mixing) into the fridge for a few minutes before testing, just to
minimize this possibility. In the absence of a fridge get a cup of ice.
To be really exact use a thermometer… we don’t know yet if there’s a
magic science about 68F, Andrew’s recommended temperature for the test,
but my experiments at lower temps seem to back up that there’s a
correlation between better conversion and ability of the test to avoid
dropout at lower temps.

More to come soon…

postscript:

Just wanted to clarify something important:
when I said this:

> >
> >
> > -it doesn’t take much di/monoglycerides to cause a serious problem with
> > cold-flow properties. At .30 total glycerol, this goo turns very opaque
> > and cloudy at about 65 F and becomes a complete gel at 45. Incidentally,
> > I’ve seen chromatography results (from Magellan) for other ‘goo-causing’
> > bad commercial fuel, and one of the ones I recall was a .34 total
> > glycerol, and clogged fuel filters all over the bay area.
> >
> > .

I do not mean that .30 total glycerol will always cause filter clogging
and gelling at brisk autumn temperatures, or that .30 total glycerol can
be always detected by the kind of extremely odd 3/27 behavior I
described (the white color of the whole vial and the granules of fat
that didn’t seem to settle easily are very unusual). Mostof the time
really bad fuel just drops out a big blob of oil, with the methanol
eventually clearing.

I actually think that what the Co-op That Shall Not Be Named is
experiencing is the unusual, once-in-a-blue-moon phenomenon described
variously as crystalization of monoglycerides and other similar stuff. I
heard there was a recent AOCS paper on this phenomenon that was a
response to Randall Von Weidel and the Austrian researchers’ insistance
that sterols primarily cause this filter clogging, and that new study
found that it was in fact monoglycerides, not sterols, primarily, that
causes this filter-clogging thickening of part of the biodiesel (I feel
vindicated as I’ve been railing about this phenomenon for years, and
have primarily found it in commercial fuel where someone cut corners…
somewhere). I believe I heard, if I understood right, that they also
found that what randall calls “near-spec” is a serious problem
(Randall says that you don’t have to be far off-spec to see filter
clogging/material dropout/goo problems, which is also what I’ve found
upon testing various bad fuel made by commercial producers and
bootleggers in California that all caused similar problems no matter the
season).

I also suspect that the goo phenomenon can be caused by more than one
factor and that what we see is more than one kind of phenomena.

I also hope my truck continues to start in the morning, as I’d hate to
pump out 30 gallons of half-petrodiesel, half-goo.

Mark

Lyle coined (I think) the awesome phrase ‘imblogable’. That’s when events are happening quicker than your mouth can run. Or your fingers can type. Or there are hours in the day…

I’ve been completely imblogable for the past three months. It was such an insane rush of overwork getting ready to leave for the road.

Tonight I pulled a 12-hour day- I’m midway through four days of Boot Camp (ie advanced class is this weekend in PA, regular class was the past two days and a different regular class was the previous weekend).

I taught from 10-4:30, had lunch with Matt Steiman and the president of the college that’s hosting this class (Dickinson College- amazing sustainability initiative, with Jen and Matt growing organic produce for the dining halls and a bunch of imblogably great projects). Spent the afternoon’s 10-minute break begging the school’s mechanic to weld/machine a fitting for my methoxide mixer. After the break it was three hours of juggling a bunch of biodiesel newbies who were working their way through a 3-hour ‘open lab’ project and simultaneous equipment build (at which a plumber disagreed with a farmer’s way of cleaning up copper for soldering a condensor, which is really funny considering the two different professions). At 4:30 I was literally running to car to drive to the weld store before it closes for the weekend, to buy a gas cylinder for the little MIG I brought along, at 5:00 I spent 10 minutes scarfing down some apples and cheese for dinner while driving back to the shop, came back at 5:10 and finished a methanol recovery condensor at, at 5:25 I heard the sound of running water and smelled the smell of (non-methanol-containing) biodiesel- in the wrong place- ran into the biodiesel shop and discovered a massive wash water spill- all while Matt was gone to an organic farming engagement in another town (luckily they have secondary containment around the entire room, so it’s only biodiesel equipment that’s floating in 80 gallons of soap water, a few gallons of emulsion, and 50 gallons of biodiesel), called Matt and did damage control till 5:35, cleaned up, washed glassware and table surfaces and titration kits and re-arranged everything for the weekend class till 8:45, ran to Office Depot for last-minute supplies and Lowe’s for spill clean-up supplies till 10:00, felt glazed over, exhausted, and sick of all things plumbing-related while shopping for a million other odds and ends for my system at Lowes (till 10:00 pm), ran back to the shop and Matt’s personal Lake Biodiesel at 10:15, dropped off cleaning supplies in front of the door to Lake Biodiesel, finally took a deep breath at 10:18 pm.

Remembered that I hadn’t eaten substantial food since lunch. Climbed over the railroad embankment and ran in the rain to the diner, collapsed in a booth, gobbled down a slab of protein. Could see myself in the mirror looking half dead. went back over the railroad embankment to meet Matt and Jen, in their fancy dinner clothes, staring at the awful spill (in it’s containment). Took photos of matt in white pants and dress shoes in the dry ‘hill’ that the floor formed in the middle of the spill. Laughed. Discussed how much worse it could have been. Discussed changes tot he equipment. blamed the spill on the fact that we were all wearing nice clothes and shoes. Biodiesel hates nice shoes. (the spill was a total freak accident, and the spill containment/secondary containment did what it was supposed to).

Ran ‘home’ and shoveled out the inbox for hours. Ugh.

Up next week:
Advanced Topics class the next two days
possible visit to an Old Order Mennonite farmer who makes biodiesel in an Appleseed (they use it in tractors, and no, he doesn’t have to go far to collect oil (a problem for non-car-drivers) as there’s a big oil source nearby)
probable visit to another organic farmer in NY State to get his system running (?)
possible trailer upgrade thanks to the same farmer’s connections
heading to New Hampshire to catch up with Dorn and teach the farm-scale biodiesel class at his place

I’m teaching a biodiesel workshop in Lee, New Hampshire- somewhat near Dover and Portsmouth, NH.

The workshop site is a farm which has been hosting a biodiesel co-op for three years, and has built some impressive small-farm biodiesel production equipment inspired by Argentinian farm-scale biodiesel processors (theirs are somewhat of a hybrid of Appleseed systems and larger-scale techniques involving methanol recovery). They have also grown oilseed in conjunction with nearby UNH as experimentation in oil yields for farmers making their own fuel.

The class will cover homebrewing basics but will also have a good tour of the farm-scale biodiesel equipment and will address the special issues that that scale brings up.

Lee, NH

Sept 22-23

10-4 each day

$120

For more information and to register, see www.girlmark.com/tour

Topics covered in the homebrew production side of the class:

-biodiesel/SVO/solvent thinning options and history, biodiesel chemistry, testing oil (titration and water testing), making test batches, an overview of equipment, a chance to build your own reactor at the end of Sunday’s class, quality control factors that influence conversion quality, quality testing, mistwashing and other water washing options, breaking emulsion, two-stage base biodiesel, waste water and glycerine disposal, irrigating with waste wash water, neutralizing wash water, water reuse, common pitfalls, hands-on experience recovering from failed batches and emulsion, safety, dewatering oil, spill prevention, burning glycerine for energy, hydronic heating or solar heating of your biodiesel system

Info about the host’s sunflower trials:

http://www.biodieselmagazine.com/article-print.jsp?article_id=1432
http://extension.unh.edu/News/SunDiesl.htm
http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060903/REPOSITORY/609030353/1012/NEWS
http://www.uvm.edu/vtvegandberry/Pubs/Final%20Report%205-15-2007.pdf

Phew, I finally made it to the East Coast with no problems. Tom drove out with me on what he called the ‘cross-country death march’- we just drove for three days, alternating sleeping and driving. It was even weirder than flying crosscountry- I feel a bit like I went to sleep in Sacramento and awoke in Pennsylvania three days later with some bad dreams about I-80, convenience stores and buying B11 at truck stops. Somehow since the last trip across I-80 the country’s changed- there are signs for E-85 everywhere, B-20 in a few places, and so much more of the country is smothered with soy fields. Pennsylvania has been swallowed by soy and corn since I was last here for any period of time 7 years ago- supposedly mostly as a result of biofuels. I’m not sure if that’s better or worse than what they were doing before - cows and hay, which doesn’t seem like a high-dollar proposition for farmers. But it’s bizarre to see the change. We started counting the fields while driving around here this week- soy, soy, soy, corn, followed by corn, corn, soy, development, more soy, soy, corn. As usual I experienced my vast horror at seeing Iowa soil wasted on corn and soy- Iowa has the ‘black earth’ phenomenon that Ukraine and a couple of other places on Earth do. Ukrainians traditionally used this fertile soil to develop an intensively diverse agriculture. Iowa could be the California of Midwest or Eastern agriculture, but we waste it growing industrial corn monoculture instead.

The prep for the trip was insane- I don’t think I’ve worked that hard in my whole life. About Day 2 of the trip I started to really hate the trailer, again. It’s still too small. Arrrggh. Tom’s really sick of hearing about the trailer- it took over my life for the past few months- and keeps suggesting I just buy a larger one on the East Coast.

We packed the house for the Milwaukee class, and the students included
everyone from contractors to welders to a firefighter to a bunch of high
school teachers to members of the local biodiesel distribution co-op and
several local homebrewers with experience and even one bad batch to
contribute. There were a couple of SVO cars in the parking lot to look at.

The contingent of teachers were from Bloom High School in Chicago, and
some of them got a grant from BP a while back to include biodiesel in
their curriculum (two were chem teachers and one was a biology teacher).

Here’s a link to a story about the grant and one of the teachers:
http://www.wbez.org/CityRoom_Story.aspx?storyID=12669

The teachers brought half their own lab- it was funny opening the trunk
of their Jetta to discover a jug of sulfuric acid, a big pile of
burettes (fragile) kinda clanking around loose on the back seat among
with their camping equipment and sleeping bags, and a huge array of
other biodiesel supplies. They had everything but the kitchen sink in
there. One of them , Barry Latham, brought a sample of a home-built
filter column for doing experiments with zeolite (he was testing 4A
zeolite to remove water from finished biodiesel, with very good results)

An amusing aside is that as has happened before, the science teachers
ended up talking “over me” during the class more than any of the other
students- for which we made fun of them mercilessly (they teach high
school, where you’d think they’d get the same treatment from their own
kids). I have seen this in class before- amusingly, the other example
was a high school shop teacher with biofuels experience who sat in the
back, talked to his other teacher friends during my lecture, and made
what ended out to be the worst fuel in the room during the lab.

The teacher contingent ended up conducting some slightly more advanced
experiments during the labs (soap water neutralization with their
sulfuric acid and my bromophenol blue), and of course everyone wanted to
be in their ‘lab group’. We had a fairly long period of “open lab” at
the end with everyone enthusiastically trying out different things, so I
think a lot of folks got to see a variety of techniques and experiments.
Some people ended up going home with the experiments, and some supplies
to finish washing and 3/27 testing them to see the outcome of the
experiments. We made and broke an amazing emulsion (of fuel that passed
the 3/27 test, incidentally, so we got to see how to troubleshoot the
causes of emulsions and narrow it down to glycerine contamination in
this case).

Jill Krysinski, the biology teacher from Bloom High School science club
ended up putting together a powerpoint of her notes and photos- which I
think is really useful. It doesn’t show every single step of the
process- no drying tests or cold tests or quality control stuff, but has
a lot of info as she captured it (there’s one or two very minor
mis-interpretations as with any note-taking 1) amberlite is not
molecular sieve, and it’s used for soap removal in commercial biodiesel
plants, not water removal 2) the photo of what she thought was finished
fuel ready to dry was actually a ‘first wash’ that someone brought in,
but this point wasn’t made very clear by me and 3) I don’t think I said
anything about color of finished biodiesel meaning that the fuel is bad,
but one particular batch she photographed in class was poor conversion
AND happened to be really dark- people shouldn’t interpret her comments
as saying that ‘dark’ is a sign of poor conversion as it could just as
easily be a sign of onions being fried in the oil or other sources of
dark color). The class covered more info than just this basic process,
incidentally- but she mostly put the ‘basics’ into the powerpoint. She
has a lot of my info in there that I dont normally see covered on the
forums- things about BOD of wash water, for instance.

Here is a link to Jill’s Powerpoint about making biodiesel- most of
these photos came from the class
http://www.bloomhs.org/apps/classes/show_assignment.jsp?REC_ID=170187&rn=475519

Incidentally, I told this class to use 8 g/liter for KOH rather than
the usual 7 g/liter because I was ’rounding up’ a bit from compensating
for a 90% purity KOH. I’m starting to think that KOH is often less pure
than the assay states, and that using ‘a bit more’ is a good idea. It
seems to me that people who switch from NaOH to KOH experience
conversion problems sometimes, and the explanation is either that the
KOH isn’t as concentrated as the manufacturer says, or that the user
allows large buckets of KOH to deteriorate from frequent opening
(whereas they still sometimes buy NaOH in small containers at Lowes
hardware stores under the Roebic brand so it doesn’t have as much of a
chance to carbonize)

We tried to get everyone thinking about how to set up experiments well-
things like not changing more than one variable when you do test
batches. We had a good example from one of the hosts of a ‘bad batch’-
NaOH biodiesel glop that he has 50 gallons of- so people really got the
idea of what can go wrong and how to avoid it. He was able to make a
perfectly usable batch of fuel from the same bad oil, using KOH, and I
think it made it fairly obvious to everyone that they shouldn’t even
bother working with NaOH due to this and other risks.

I think everyone got a lot out of the whole thing and of course we’re
trying to get them onto the local Wisconsin/Illinois email list ( to
join send an email to biodiesel-subscribe@v2b.org ) so they stay in
touch. I’ll probably teach this class again and also do an advanced
topics class either here or in Michigan sometime in the early spring, so
as to be able to catch the farmers before they get busy. Last year I
taught this class in Michigan in early March and I’ll probably aim for
the same sort of timing this spring- early March was the latest that the
farmers were really available up there so I’ll come around in late
Febuary or early March.

Big thanks to the Milwaukee biodiesel co-op, the folks who do the
Biodiesel@v2b.org Chicagoland email list, Swee of Future Green, and Kyle
Capizzi for hosting this class!

Links:
Chicago/Wisconsin/Illinois mailing list for those interested in
biodiesel and SVO: no web page currently, to join send an email to
biodiesel-subscribe@v2b.org
Milwaukee biodiesel co-op, selling commercially produced ASTM biodiesel:
http://www.mkebio.org/
Future Green, a green/fair trade products store that helped sponsor us
and found us the good site to have the class: www.futuregreen.net
Biodiesel schoolteacher email list for others who integrate biodiesel
into elementary or high school curriculum:
www.groups.yahoo.com/group/biodiesel_in_schools

Mark

>

The Milwaukee biodiesel class is at an enormous warehouse space, so there’s room for any last-minute attendees. If you wish to come and haven’t already registered, please bring your own folding chair as that’s the only limitation on attendance here.

Biodiesel Homebrewing Workshop:

10-5 Saturday and Sunday Aug 25-26

Barry Trucking
120 National Ave,
Milwaukee, WI 53204

(corner of 1st & National)

$120 no one turned away for lack of funds

Bring your own folding chair if you have not pre-registered- this class is in a huge warehouse facility but we only have chairs for those we already know are coming.

Bring a drinking water bottle and wear ‘work clothes’, the facility is a former truck repair shop and may be oily/dusty in places.

Other info:
It’ll be my usual two day, hands-on biodiesel homebrewing class, which has
evolved a bit since the last Wisconsin classes I taught in 2004. classregistration@girlmark.com

At the end of the class, we will be building a few processors for students who wish to buy themselves a b100supply.com kit of processor
parts- this is completely optional, and you can help the others build their processors even if you don’t get your own kit parts.

More info is below:

Approximate schedule:
Saturday and Sunday, August 25-26, 10-4ish (probably 4:30 on Sunday, realistically)

register at www.girlmark.com/tour or just show up (with your own chair if you couldn’t pre-register!) and pay “at the door”

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some suggested reading:

Please take a look through www.biodieselcommunity.org for some info (and
photos) of what the process looks like.

www.b100supply.com also has a GREAT ‘biodiesel library’ with a lot of good
articles in it.

I’ll have copies of Biodiesel Homebrew Guide for sale at the class:
www.localb100.com/book.html and I"ll also have a few copies of Jennifer
Radtke’s book ‘Not a Gas Station’, which is about starting the Biofuel
Oasis commercial fueling station. Each of these is $15.

****************************************
Saturday:
10-noon- lecture: general biofuels introduction, SVO conversions and
diesel blending (ie DSE, etc) discussions, cold weather issues,
emissions, discussion of early biofuels research that has gotten us
where we are today with biodiesel, potential mechanical problems,
explanation of biodiesel chemistry and the basic process

noon-12:30 demonstration of the basic process

12:30-1:15 lunch

1:15-4 : students practice titration and make 1-liter batches.

During the basic practice you’ll practice oil water content testing,
blank titration, titration with a burette as well as cheaper equipment,
phenol red and turmeric titrations, really nasty oil as well as normal
oil, 5% glycerine remix prewash and two-stage process, along with
intentionally making mistakes for Sunday’s class.

If we get through the basic 1-liter batches quickly enough, I"ll start
the next day’s topics and demonstrations on Saturday afternoon.

Sunday:
10-12:30 lecture and demo: washing, biodiesel equipment, quality control
and quality testing discussion and demonstration, and a more detailed
discussion of quality problems that can affect vehicles.

12:30-1:15 lunch

1:15-2:15 -students do ‘open lab’ practice, with help from some
experienced biodieselers who are coming to visit- you can perform
quality tests, wash your test batches from the day before, make more
test batches with different oil and different variables if you wish, do
ethanol-based biodiesel, attempt to fix some of the ‘mistakes’ we’ll
intentionally make (ie emulsion and ‘glop’), and more . You can also
start on your processor if you wish to instead. Intermittent lecturing
will take place during the lab, on topics such as ethanol-based
biodiesel and alternative lab techniques

2:15-4 plumbing/techniques demo and processor building (and continuation
of open lab, with help available for either lab or processor build- you
can filter back and forth between activities).

We’ve been talking at biodieselnow.com about having a Michigan biodiesel
get-together on one of the evenings after my class in Saginaw this weekend.

Eric Klammer (mtushmoo on various biodiesel forums) graciously agreed to
host a barbeque on the evening of the 17th (this Friday) at his place in
Saginaw. The discussion of where to go and so forth is here at biodieselnow:

http://www.biodieselnow.com/forums/thread/132738.aspx

If he doesn’t post his address on the forum thread or you miss it, one
way to connect with us is to come to the SVSU classroom where the class
is held, at the end of class at 4 pm on Friday, and caravan over to
Eric’s (and the grocery/beer store along the way) with the rest of us:

Directions to SVSU
Campus map:

Meet for caravanning over to Eric’s at the end of class at 4 pm, in Pioneer Hall, room 119 (building 32 on the
map- see approximate center of map).

For the barbeque: bring grillables and BYOB, bring photos of your
reactor and equipment, bring your SVO vehicle, and any other
stories/stuff to share with the local greasers!

Also, there’s talk of starting up a Michigan biodiesel/SVO yahoogroup.
Please email me if you’re interested in starting this list and
co-moderating with a few other folks.

classregistration@girlmark.com
Mark

I was distraught last week over the fact that I was too busy with trip prep to be a good Lyme activist. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to draw attention to Lyme Disease issues had just come up- it was announced in the papers that President Bush had had Lyme Disease a year ago

A few issues that came up:
a. Lots of us patients wonder if he’d had it in the past, thus explaining the deterioration in his public speaking over the years- it’s not a disease that you develop immunity to after exposure, and it seems that some folks get over it the first time, suffer from symptoms such as mental deterioration, and then develop more obvious physical symptoms such as the erythemia migrans “bullseye rash” only the second time around).

b. We’re all suspicious about the fact that ‘they’ took a year to announce that he’d been treated (which is really unusual for politicians’ health issues)- which makes me think he’d had ongoing problems clearing the symptoms or had been treated for an extended period of time. The same articles discussing the presidential Lyme also went to great lengths to come up with an explanation for his recent vertigo/confusion (which are classic Lyme symptoms, totally consistent with what you’d go through a year after initial treatment)- which they claimed were due to something left over from a head cold months ago.

c. There are some terrible political issues in the US around the treatment of Lyme patients- there’s been an ongoing antitrust investigation by the Connecticut Attorney General of the medical society (the IDSA, mentioned below) that set the prevailing short treatment course guidelines for Lyme- and there’s been a huge recent backlash in the media (a couple of really inaccurate articles in forbes in particular) which seems to be driven by that medical society’s press releases.

Meanwhile this disease is the #1 vector-borne (ie insect-borne) disease in the US, now found in 49 states- and the cost to society of the fact that doctors tend to undertreat patients is eventually going to be enormous. We’re at a stage in Lyme treatment politics that’s similar to what AIDS patients went through in the early 80’s. Having the President come down with this heavily politicized disease right at the time when there’s raging debate over proper treatment is a huge opportunity. I’m sorry that I"m missing the chance to harrass my local media about it.

Here’s an opinion piece that covers some of the US medical politics about Lyme treatment- unfortunately, written over in Britain at the Guardian’s commentary blog (and yes, it’s commentary and opinion, but the info they’re listing is valid regardless of your political affiliation). Incidentally, I think that the president’s health report DID list a three-week treatment course, so the premise of this opinion piece is wrong [edit- I’m wrong- actually , they only listed ‘a standard course of antibiotics’ which means it was probably longer than three weeks or whatever]- but there’s a lot of debate about why oh why did they not reveal the info to the public for a year (which makes us all think it was a much longer treatment than three weeks, that and the stigma of a President getting a disease that can make you stupid…)

I’m linking this article because it describes all the political issues with Lyme treatment and insurer issues fairly concisely.

If you click on the original article you get all the links to the relevant info:

*****************************
Bush and Lyme disease: what’s the secret?
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/dean_baker_and_helene_jorgensen_/2007/08/bush_and_lyme_disease_whats_th.html
The White House won’t reveal the length of the president’s antibiotics course. Are they protecting the insurance industry?
Dean Baker and Helene Jorgensen

August 13, 2007 4:10 PM | Printable version

The White House reported last week that President Bush was treated for Lyme disease last summer after he discovered the bull’s eye rash associated with the disease on his leg. According to the spokesperson, Bush’s doctors determined that he had fully recovered from the disease in his annual physical earlier this summer. However, the spokesperson refused to disclose the treatment that Bush had received, citing doctor-patient privilege.

While Bush has the right to keep details of his medical treatments private, this is certainly a sharp contrast with how the White House dealt with Bush’s recent surgery. The public got the play-by-play on the operation in which several polyps were removed from the presidential colon. By comparison, the course of treatment for Lyme would appear to be G-rated.

Some background on the controversies surrounding Lyme disease could explain this peculiar turn to secrecy. The standard course of treatment recommended by the medical establishment is two weeks of antibiotics. This is supposed to be sufficient to kill the bacteria and cure the patient.

However, there are tens of thousands of people in the United States who developed Lyme and did not fully recover after receiving this treatment. Instead they experienced increasingly severe symptoms, which include joint and nerve pain, headaches, cognitive problems, and fatigue. In some cases the symptoms are debilitating, preventing the patient from working or carrying on a normal life.

International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society (ILADS), a group of doctors specialising in tick-borne diseases, recommends treating people with chronic Lyme with extended courses of antibiotics. ILADS recommends treatment until the symptoms go away, as is done with syphilis and some other diseases. This can take years and be fairly expensive.

Insurers often refuse to pay for the extended course of treatment advocated by ILADS, forcing chronic Lyme patients to pay for treatment themselves. This is an especially severe hardship for people with chronic Lyme, since many cannot work. Getting turned down by the insurer often means financial ruin.

Lately the battle with insurers has heated up as the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the American Academy of Neurology, the main bodies of the medical establishment that deal with Lyme patients, both issued new guidelines strongly endorsing the two-week treatment path. This will provide powerful ammunition for insurers who don’t want to pay the bills of people with chronic Lyme disease.

This is why Bush’s course of treatment for Lyme is a matter of public interest. If his doctors thought it was appropriate that the president get treated for a period of time that is longer than the standard two-week course, and if this fact became public knowledge, it might call the two-week standard into question. Lyme sufferers and their doctors would be able to point out that the president’s doctors (presumably not quacks) thought that a longer course of treatment was beneficial.

This could help to prompt more serious research on treating chronic Lyme and make it more difficult for insurers to cut off treatment for chronic Lyme victims.

Given the controversy around the disease it is difficult to see why Bush would not disclose his treatment, unless he was in fact treated for more than the standard two weeks. After all, what would be the issue if his spokesperson told the press that Bush got two weeks of antibiotic treatment?

If our suspicions are true, this is yet another disgusting episode of this administration’s hypocrisy. He personally has benefited from a course of treatment that through his silence he would deny to tens of thousands of others. Thank you, Mr President.

I’m really amused. I’ve been talking to Will Aultman of the http://www.msbiofuels.com Mississippi class about an early October date for a class there. They’ve got an active group, he’s really enthusiastic, etc.

The members of the group just informed him that most of them couldn’t attend the date we’d originally chosen, because of a conflict with a big NASCAR race nearby that everyone’s going to. It’s amusing compared to the kinds of enviro hippie commie pinko folks who come to the Berkeley classes, for instance, proving my point that biodiesel appeals to everybody.

Really cheap fuel pre-empted by really fast cars…

Mark

ps we’re now talking about the class being in early November, near Hattiesburg, at this point.

Well, I missed my deadline for leaving for my cross-country drive, and am now flying out for the first two classes. I thought I was having a horrible Lyme relapse- I’d been fighting it with all the pharmaceuticals and herbs at my disposal, pleading and begging and cajoling with my health, telling myself it’s ‘all in my head’, etc- all to no avail.

The feeling of my Lyme, by the way, is exactly the same as having the flu, but without the sinus/sore throat symptoms- extreme exhaustion, visual distortions where I get something like mild tunnel vision , cognitive problems, sore eyes etc. Oddly I also had major lymph node swelling, which used to be a Lyme symptom years ago and worried me a lot as I hadn’t experienced it in a while. Of course that’s a flu symptom as well.

I’d had a bad Lyme relapse right before the Aug 4 System Tricks class and had beaten it back with some new and more extreme herbs (poke root, incidentally, a poison), and it was surprising that I couldn’t get it to have the same effect this time. I was especially mystified as to how I could be getting worse while on antibiotics.

Last night I finally made the decision to ‘just’ fly out for my first two classes (I can teach without the trailer system, though there are a couple of processors to use in the Michigan class, and I’m going to UPS myself the Turk burner!)- then to come back to SF and do the cross-country drive after Labor Day (I had already had plans to drive out for two weeks, then fly home for Labor Day regardless of this setback).

I’m ready to leave now, but didn’t want to do the three or four-day drive while feeling like this. Turns out that Tom can come with me after Labor Day- I’ll be headed to Pennsylvania, where he used to live, so it’ll be a lot more fun than rushing to Michigan right now with the trailer by myself. But it felt like a defeat to get so close to packed and gone and juggle such an insanely complex series of preparations, and then have my body and my drugs not co-operate.

I came home to Tom’s late last night, started getting a runny nose and grumbling stomach. He mentioned the same thing- and I realized that we were both simply getting sick- with the flu. Hooray!

It’s not the first time this year that I didn’t realize I’m getting ‘that kind of sick’. Because of the combo of things I’m taking (andrographis and boneset being two of the herbs, which are major flu/cold fighters), and the weird Lyme autoimmune weirdness, I just never recognize the symptoms of an oncoming cold or flu till I finally get the sore throat/runny nose, which seems to take forever now. I tend to half-fight-off the flu for two weeks, not knowing what’s going on, before it gets the better of me. Of course that’s what the lymph node stuff was all about this time.

Ironic, but I was really grateful for the flu virus this time around. It’s a ‘Congratulations- That’s Terrible’ sort of moment.

I"m taking the System Tricks class on the road- teaching a two-day version of it at Frankie Lind’s farm-scale plant in Maryland, not far from Baltimore/Washington DC. We’re planning the following:

Friday, Sept 28: optional beginners’ biodiesel class taught by Frankie Lind (sorry, I don’t know the cost of this yet)
Saturday-Sunday Sept 29 and 30: two-day System Tricks advanced beginners class

free (rough) camping is available, and we’re planning a bonfire/barbeque/social on Saturday night open to anyone from the local biodiesel community as well as the campers

For info and to register, please see www.girlmark.com/tour
$120 for weekend class, with a $10 discount for anyone subscribing to Frankie’s BiodieselSmarter magazine

***********************

The below syllabus is from my July class, the DC one will be similar:

Start a batch of fuel in Appleseed homebrew processor.
Discuss safe heating, tank fires, use of hydronic heating methods, and heat exchangers. Demonstrate heat exchanger-based Appleseed.
Discuss some electrical safety interconnects proposed for heating element control in ‘regular’ electric heaters.
Discuss tricks for measuring lye safely
Discuss tricks for measuring methanol safely
Discuss pumps for pumping methanol safely
Demonstrate air-powered pumps and discuss air compressor requirements and electrical consumption if using air pumps for reactor mixing.
Discuss materials compatibility with various fuel processes and chemicals used, and discuss where inappropriate plastics can still be used with fewer consequences.
Discuss sight tubes and sight glass sources, ways of using them, ways of installing them, what to look for in industrial parts catalogs
Demonstrate use of powered methanol/lye mixers that are not just passive carboy method. Discuss pros and cons of both types of systems.
Discuss methanol vapor release to atmosphere.
Discuss fire safety issues.

drain a batch of glycerine in another Appleseed and discuss how to avoid methanol vapor exposure during this process
discuss/demonstrate how to separate glycerine from biodiesel to minimize emulsions. Most beginner mistakes having to do with emulsion are actually a separation issue where the person inadvertently contaminates their wash tank with extra soap because they haven’t separated the glycerine from the biodiesel completely. There are some tests to ensure this is actually done.
Discuss standpipe separating tanks, and demonstrate several ways of designing them.
Discuss ways to minimize contamination with unwanted material.
Discuss various kinds of quick-connects and other ways to deal with the messes caused by hoses. Most spills and other hazards are probably due to homebrewers relying on hose rather than pipe.
Demonstrate the use of hard plumbing and ways of managing multiple valves
Demonstrate different methods of labeling the process and the steps, and demonstrate one system using a ‘protocol checklist’ to minimize confusion when operating multiple valves.

Transfer finished fuel from processor trailer to wash tanks and discuss washing equipment
Demonstrate several types of washing nozzles and important considerations
Discuss closed versus open wash tanks
Discuss venting and air displacement
Demonstrate use of non-siphoning overflow mistwash tank plumbing
Demonstrate use of sump pump to move water to a drain
Demonstrate soap test titration
Discuss emulsions (I will make one for us to play with)
Break emulsion with various ways
Discuss wash tank heating methods
Discuss water disposal and ways of separating oils and water and what happens when it is done with various methods
Discuss/demonstrate water neutralizing

Drain wash water from first wash and discuss “how you know when you’re finished with washing”
Go into more detail on emulsions and water retention
Demonstrate separation of water and biodiesel using various kinds of tanks
Discuss “white stuff” that isn’t emulsion
Discuss materials compatibility and water hardness issues with regards to washing
Discuss three different drying methods for getting water out of washed biodiesel
Discuss tests for dryness of finished biodiesel

Test some finished biodiesel for quality in various ways

When the batch that we’re making is finished processing, we can perform an 80%/20% two-stage base-base process and demonstrate various equipment methods required to make it easier
We will follow it with a 5% water prewash for minimizing soap in wash. There are many ways of handling this complex process (80/20 followed by 5%) and we’ll demonstrate and discuss several possible solutions to the unwanted complexity

We will burn some glycerine in a homemade glycerine burner and demonstrate ways of moving the heat safely to heat a batch of oil for another batch of biodiesel.

I’ll briefly discuss filtration though this isn’t terribly complex
We’ll discuss different hosing material and tricks for handling/wrangling lots of hose

We’ll demonstrate a ‘cubee handling’ system for minimizing the hassle involved in processing oil that comes in 5 gallon cubes
We’ll demonstrate straining of oil
We’ll discuss, possibly only theoretically as it cant be shown in a one-day class, the ‘heat and let settle’ method of dewatering wet oil
We’ll discuss fire safety if you choose to dewater oil using boiling temperatures.

Registration info and other classes info is at www.girlmark.com/tour

Mark

oh no, oh no, I’ve turned into one of THOSE people. The ones who preach biodiesel but don’t find time to get onto the biodiesel forums to stay in touch, keep current, or receive feedback. I’ve sneered at this phenomenon for years.

I’ve given Lyle a hard time over the past Piedmont Biofuels tendency to ‘push designs out to the web’- a one-way street whereby info heads out just to their site but not to a forum, which means that there’s no feedback, which means that a couple of years ago they put some photos of a methanol recovery pot still- heated by 190F coolant only, which means that there’s no way it actually worked as described.

Lyle sorta shrugged that they had worse problems to address at the time. I took my haranguing message to Matt, who was officially responsible for the quality of the “homebrewing side” of their machine. Matt listened, and I think things got vetted a bit better, though that’s mostly because of their increasing experience/good techniques rather than anything I said.

I took a long, long break from the forums at some point when my health fell apart this winter (after the Advanced Topics class in Febuary I believe). It’s been an interesting 6 months or so- I finally got to see what it’s like to not be 100% immersed in the hobby. I started off trying to just stay off the computer completely- trying to break my Internet addiction. I sorta think that Internet can be as bad as TV, the content is just a bit more interactive but the effect on timesuck is the same . I’ll never get those hours back that I’ve wasted reading the Battles of the SVO Wingnuts over at Infopop last winter.

Of course the effect was that I stayed off the computer for two weeks and then found myself timewasting on health forums before realizing what was happening. More recently I’ve managed to kick that habit (mostly because of being too damn busy) and am working my way through books when I have the time, mostly 5 minutes each night in bed just prior to collapsing from exhaustion. Last month’s reading was economics. Yawn. Economics is pretty good ‘puts-you-to-sleep’ material. (incidentally, even in the books I’m reading, the authors are fighting. I can’t get away from trolling and rants and such. I just read the inspirational book The End of Poverty by UN economist Jeffery Sachs and am now wading through a nasty, ranting, negative rebuttal by World Bank economist William Easterly in a book called White Mans’ Burden, which focuses mostly on proving Sachs wrong, and which I unfortunately find myself agreeing with.

I was supposed to get back onto the biodiesel forums in July, in preparation for my trip. No Dice. I’ve never worked so hard in my life as I have the past few weeks in physical preparations. I barely have time to check email. I’m not just deleting it outright anymore like I was for a while but I still dont’ have time to respond to anything. Ugh.

I spent part of March working on the Tankenstein system and making fuel in our janky temporary half-assed tripping-over-hoses setup that I’m embarrassed about, threw some outrageous amount of energy into the process trying to get us out of the dark ages, huffing paint fumes while welding things onto salvaged Harbor Freight parts painted, no doubt, with the finest of Chinese lead paint. We’re in one of those classic homebrew co-op dilemmas of needing to upgrade our system but being unable to keep up with the incoming oil. We’ve created an immense amount of trouble for ourselves by having to work around our incoming liquids without having the materials handling plumbing under control. Did I ever say how much I hate hoses? Almost as much as I hate extension cords.

March was the last “Big Push” to get things welded up and ready- during which Tom came down with a bad case of malaria- and last month was the next round of plumbing it all up- during which Tom came down with a really weird injury that hobbled him from helping for most of the month. At the last minute we welded and plumbed and threw together the nicest big reactor ever.

Another System Tricks class will be held on August 4 or 5:
www.girlmark.com/tour

… I seem to be all set to go.

A month ago I thought I was such a wreck when it came to my leaving-for-tour schedule.

But now…

The trailer system is in pieces but ready to re-assemble onto the trailer.

I’m nearly moved out of my house. Tom walked into my room today and said ‘you could be all moved out in two hours’.

My shop is organized for the times when I come back a week at a time . Of course, ‘organized’ means I just put a lot of stuff onto a ‘deal with in 6 months’ rack, way up high.

I made good friends with Craigslist and virtually all of my furniture and excess ‘big stuff’ flew out the door at the same prices I’d paid for it two years ago. The good Craigslist giveth, and the good Craigslist taketh away. That means I essentially had ‘free’ furniture (and bicycles, kitchen equipment, etc) for two years, and now I don’t have to store it for the next few months.

My auto tools are in order, I’ve figured out what else I need, and no major automotive crises seem to be on the horizon for the van (the car’s another story but that might just become Tom’s local driver- no out-of-town trips- till I get back).

Somewhere in the midst of this I had that major Lyme-or-mercury-toxicity-symptoms problem, spent a lot of time vegetating on the couch at the shop. In the midst of all of that I also had to haul Tom to the emergency room when we thought he’d broken his leg helping me last week, which screwed up our collective progress on our moves/move-ins/projects for a few days.

One of my fun Lyme-or-mercury symptoms last week was spending a few nights in total anxiety, not getting enough sleep, feeling horribly incompetent all day trying to get over the lack of sleep. I hadn’t been insomniac in months, and before that, my Lyme sleep pattern was that of isomnia at night coupled with very deep sleep and inability to wake up once I finally went under. Last couple of months and especially once I’d had my latest Lyme relapse it became weird and different- I’m easily woken up now and I actually started dreading sleeping at my house because my loud roommate keeps odd and loud hours, with habits like using power tools at 1:30 am followed immediately by early morning bellowing into the phone just inches from my historic-architecture, paper-thin door. I started freaking out about my inability to control my sleep patterns (I don’t normally ‘freak out’ about things much, this new anxiety is a bad development). Last week in the midst of my Lyme-induced insomnia and light sleep, I woke up to him arguing with and yelling insults at some guy (who I think was his client!) at 7:30 in the morning directly outside my non-soundproof paper-thin door.

Anyway, the upshot is that now that I have late-night insomnia AND early-morning insomnia, I found myself in the absurd position of laying awake at night BECAUSE I’m worrying about whether I’ll get woken up by something in the morning.

I finally got over the insomnia one night and drifted into good sleep- only to be woken up by a damn EARTHQUAKE that rattled the house at 4 oclock in the morning.

Somehow I’ve managed to be functional enough to keep making progress on The To-do List.

And before then I’d spent several weeks helping Tom move out of his place, build his new place, screw up royally in the process of the move-out, and so on.

I can barely believe it that I’m nearly ready to go, and I still have lots of time left here.

Of course I managed all of this by not turning on my computer AT ALL for a week. Today was a no-fun day of catching up. Hence the procrastinating (I mean blogging)

I’ve been going nuts for the past two months trying to figure out my trailer situation. I have an 8 x 5 trailer (8 x 5 being the deck, not including the wheels), and about three weeks ago I became resigned to the fact that I really have exactly 6 x 10 worth of tanks and tools to fit on it.

Adding to the frustration, I need a trailer configuration that doesn’t exist- a flatbed on the back over the axle for the system, and an enclosed ‘tool room’ on the front that I can throw class supplies into. I spent the 2004 tour fighting rain that constantly flooded my plastic class supplies bins. I hated having to tie down/untie tarps, worried about losing things (in fact some Biodiesel Homebrew Guide loose pages- back when I hand-collated all of the copies- went flying like confetti across an Iowa cornfield just three miles from the BECON ISU energy demonstration plant when a plastic bin lost it’s bungees and therefore it’s lid… The ridiculousness of the situation had me laughing at that one as I chased after the forty copies of Page 83-84 blowing across the highway in a record windstorm)

For about 5 weeks I went through some heartache trying to get Jeremy, a neighbor at NIMBY, to sell me his 6 x 10 Big Tex 35-SA that sits at the end of our street, unmoving, taunting me with it’s 6 x 10 vastness. I can fit three tanks across on a 6 x 10, and only 2 tanks across on a 5 x 8, and I REALLY want three tanks across. I really want my three tanks across near the axle, not lined up one side. I also need to spend some time welding a new superstructure onto the trailer so I can fit the system and all of it’s plumbing onto it.

Once I finally tracked the neighbor down, there was a big game of financial Tetris involved, which took my hopes up and down a rollercoaster ride of yes-no-yes-no’s. Jeremy needed a bigger trailer and I knew of a bigger trailer being sold by Don, but Don had promised it for loan to the Kinetic Steamworks folks, and it took forever to figure out if these things could all be rearranged without someone looking like an asshole and whether Jeremy could even afford Don’s trailer in the first place. I needed a Jeremy-sized trailer and he was willing to sell it for the great price of $600 but had-to-figure-out-if-he-could-afford-the-bigger-trailer and I was negotiating with Don, the seller of the bigger trailer for him. Summer’s the bad time to try to get a cheap trailer in the Bay Area- they’re all going to Burning Man for one last hurrah before sale in September. In August of 2004, when I also left for tour right before the artists left for Burning Man, I had to really fight someone for the rights to keep the 8 x 5 I’d finagled out of him earlier.

Annoyingly, I only figured out that I DEFINITELY need a larger trailer about three weeks ago, when I took a ‘test flight’ trip to the North Coast and realized that I can’t handle the tools without a bigger tool room.

Last week Jeremy gave up and realized that he can’t come up with money for a Bigger Trailer at this time, dashing my Big Tex 35-SA hopes for good.

I took my dejected self to stare at the 8 x 5, and decided to just expand the 8 x 5 to 10′ long- it won’t solve the ‘three tanks across’ problem as elegantly as a 6′ wide would, but I’ll just have to live with it. After the System Tricks class I’ll weld up the tool room. For the tool room, I need to find a Wells Cargo style raintight side door (I don’t want to fabricate my own door- I think the smartest thing is to splice in a side door from a well-made enclosed trailer)- do they sell them as spare parts? Can I find a crashed enclosed trailer at a junkyard? Anyone got a good solution for this for me?

answers or trailers may be emailed to Alovert@b100.org

The most exciting thing I did this weekend was attend the community meeting that Biofuel Oasis put on about their move. Basically, there’s a semi-controversy being stirred up over the fact that their new landlord seems to be evicting a prior business to make room for Oasis. It’s not exactly true, but there’s now an email war flying around the area with well meaning people thinking that Oasis is buying a building and evicting a poor tenant (they’re doing neither).

More info shortly.

I was supposed to get on a red-eye flight to Denver in a few hours to head to the Colorado co-ops conference. Unfortunately, I’m sick again. My Lyme symptoms came back after my bout with the mercury amalgam removal procedure a couple of weeks ago.

The problems are actually pretty mild compared to earlier in the year- each relapse is easier to deal with than the previous. I actually managed to do a ‘test flight’ road trip last weekend that required a half-day drive each way, and it was no problem doing the driving even though I was sick- so there’s no chance that this will impact my upcoming tour.

But last night after a day of brainfog and fighting the exhaustion, I decided that it was really smarter to stay home and take meds rather than do another weekend of travel right before I’m supposed to have my act together for my Big Trip in August. (I’d dropped out of the conference organizing when I was sick in April and fell off the face of the biodiesel planet, so this isn’t a big tragedy other than that I’m personally bummed to miss it).

I just took my first Lyme antibiotics in 8 months tonight. I’d been symptom-free for the past two months just on herbs alone, but I have an unchangeable date with the road in three weeks, and a trailer system to finish, and an RV van to outfit, and I’m not taking any chances.

I’ve got a date for the one-day Reactor Mechanics and System Tricks class:

Session 1: July 28
Session 2: July 29th (class is only one day long but repeats for a second session)
Oakland, CA
$70

This class is geared to people who already know how to make biodiesel, either in a lab-scale or one-liter setting or who already homebrew but would like to compare notes with me on how I manage my system. You may take this class after attending a regular homebrewing class taught by someone else as well as if you have learned how to make biodiesel on your own. We dont go into a lot of detail on titration and chemistry here so that’s the info you should have ‘down’ already on your own prior to taking this “system tricks” class.

This class will be fairly small as the space only holds about 10 people.

*********************************************

Syllabus will look something like this:

Start a batch of fuel in a large Appleseed homebrew processor.
Discuss safe heating, tank fires, use of hydronic heating methods, and heat exchangers. Demonstrate heat exchanger-based Appleseed.
Discuss some electrical safety interconnects proposed for heating element control in ‘regular’ electric heaters.
Discuss tricks for measuring lye safely
Discuss tricks for measuring methanol safely
Discuss pumps for pumping methanol safely
Demonstrate air-powered pumps and discuss air compressor requirements and electrical consumption if using air pumps for reactor mixing.
Discuss materials compatibility with various fuel processes and chemicals used, and discuss where inappropriate plastics can still be used with fewer consequences.
Discuss sight tubes and sight glass sources, ways of using them, ways of installing them, what to look for in industrial parts catalogs
Demonstrate use of powered methanol/lye mixers that are not just passive carboy method. Discuss pros and cons of both types of systems.
Discuss methanol vapor release to atmosphere.
Discuss fire safety issues.

drain a batch of glycerine in another Appleseed (my processor trailer) and discuss how to avoid methanol vapor exposure during this process
discuss/demonstrate how to separate glycerine from biodiesel to minimize emulsions. Most beginner mistakes having to do with emulsion are actually a separation issue where the person inadvertently contaminates their wash tank with extra soap because they haven’t separated the glycerine from the biodiesel completely. There are some tests to ensure this is actually done.
Discuss standpipe separating tanks, and demonstrate several ways of designing them.
Discuss ways to minimize contamination with unwanted material.
Discuss various kinds of quick-connects and other ways to deal with the messes caused by hoses. Most spills and other hazards are probably due to homebrewers relying on hose rather than pipe.
Demonstrate the use of hard plumbing and ways of managing multiple valves
Demonstrate different methods of labeling the process and the steps, and demonstrate one system using a ‘protocol checklist’ to minimize confusion when operating multiple valves.

Transfer finished fuel from processor trailer to wash tanks and discuss washing equipment
Demonstrate several types of washing nozzles and important considerations
Discuss closed versus open wash tanks
Discuss venting and air displacement
Demonstrate use of non-siphoning overflow mistwash tank plumbing
Demonstrate use of sump pump to move water to a drain
Demonstrate soap test titration
Discuss emulsions (I will make one for us to play with)
Break emulsion with various ways
Discuss wash tank heating methods
Discuss water disposal and ways of separating oils and water and what happens when it is done with various methods
Discuss/demonstrate water neutralizing

Drain wash water from first wash and discuss “how you know when you’re finished with washing”
Go into more detail on emulsions and water retention
Demonstrate separation of water and biodiesel using various kinds of tanks
Discuss “white stuff” that isn’t emulsion
Discuss materials compatibility and water hardness issues with regards to washing
Discuss three different drying methods for getting water out of washed biodiesel
Discuss tests for dryness of finished biodiesel

Test some finished biodiesel for quality in various ways

When the batch that we’re making is finished processing, we can perform an 80%/20% two-stage base-base process and demonstrate various equipment methods required to make it easier
We will follow it with a 5% water prewash for minimizing soap in wash. There are many ways of handling this complex process (80/20 followed by 5%) and we’ll demonstrate and discuss several possible solutions to the unwanted complexity

We will burn some glycerine in a homemade glycerine burner and demonstrate ways of moving the heat safely to heat a batch of oil for another batch of biodiesel.

I’ll briefly discuss filtration though this isn’t terribly complex
We’ll discuss different hosing material and tricks for handling/wrangling lots of hose

We’ll demonstrate a ‘cubee handling’ system for minimizing the hassle involved in processing oil that comes in 5 gallon cubes
We’ll demonstrate straining of oil
We’ll discuss, possibly only theoretically as it cant be shown in a one-day class, the ‘heat and let settle’ method of dewatering wet oil
We’ll discuss fire safety if you choose to dewater oil using boiling temperatures.

Registration info and other classes info is at www.girlmark.com/tour

Mark

Vingnettes from my jackass life: Tonight while finishing up Tom’s move-out I found a sandwich bag of Magnesol hiding in Tom’s basement. I’ve never done anything to do with biodiesel at Tom’s house.

But I seem to spend my life chasing down the loose samples and class supplies that try to sprawl out of control and take over my living spaces.

They leap across time and space and wind up in buildings and places I didnt think I took them to.

Class generates a lot of crap in small useless quantities, and I struggle to keep it under control.

It’s like a bad B movie- “Attack of the Used 3/27 Vials” or perhaps “1220 ml of Engineered Glop- It Came From Literbatchland". I’d finally consolidated my liquids samples down to one small tub of interesting stuff, but things like unlabeled bags of Magnesol still occasionally teleport themselves into my sock drawer or whatever.

I’ve yet to get messed with at airport security or stopped by police while driving class supplies around, but I’m sure the day is coming, and there’ll be some explaining to do as the supplies seem to make themselves a bit too cozy and ‘at home’ in my personal possessions. And they probably look quite ‘terroristic’ to the wrong cop.

Long gone is the day of the supplies-only suitcase and the clothes-only suitcase. Showing up at the airport, there might be a bunch of digital scales in my carryon luggage or my clean clothing may be doing double duty as a cushioning wrapper for methoxide glassware in the class supplies suitcase.

Did I mention I have a class this weekend? I’d scheduled that prior to Tom’s household all deciding to move out the same weekend. So all this building of offices, moving and detangling of possessions, unraveling the mysteries of various bills and stuffing things into storage units is really poor timing. Somehow despite July 4th I still have a nearly-full class when I assumed that I’d be teaching to 6 people because of the holiday.

On top of all that I had an unexpected dental procedure done this week that put me into a run-in with mercury toxicity symptoms- I’d had some mercury amalgam fillings removed while they were dealing with other emergency stuff and seem to have inhaled a bit of it (yes, my dentist knows how to handle the removal safely, but there are always risks with it).

So I spent about 36 hours in la-la land afterwards- cognitive difficulties, forgetting the names of things and people like I’m some Alzheimers’ patient, not remembering what I had to do from moment to moment, sleeping 11 hours again for no good reason, in Lyme pain, and otherwise experiencing my mix of nasties all over again.

At the end of Day 2 I snapped out of it and managed to sheetrock the office, tape and plaster the stuff, and do this till about 4 am in preparation for the move.

I’ve barely slept for days. Today’s activities: pack, clean, disassemble house. Spend all night catching up on email as I hadn’t checked in for days now and things were going wrong.

We have an emergency as the packing proceeds, when we realize that we really don’t have storage space for the futon couch, and there’s no where to put it. I spend time on Craigslist listing all our remaining big furniture (that we have no reason to keep storing at this point) hoping that SOMETHING sells tomorrow so we can fit it all.

Write last night’s blog for some stupid reason instead of sleeping. clean up the yard and dismantle compost, to restore the grounds to suburban-style sterility for the move-out. Timeline, 6 am.

Mow a bunch of lawn as soon as it’s late enough to not force all remaining sleepers in the neighborhood to join my crazy schedule, timeline, 8 am.

Move my remaining crap- dammit, it’s ALL biodiesel stuff, how did that wind up here at Tom’s???. timeline, 10 am.

By then I hadn’t really slept from the packing the night before and was simultaneously delerious and starving and stinky. Grab a 5-minute nap- the stress I’m feeling meant that the 5 minutes of sleep resulted in a full (but fleeting) brain reset. 5-minute shower- I’m running out of time to get to a doctor appointment but I stink and am covered with lawn juice and crushed slug parts, most likely.

Wobble my still-dizzy and delerious self over to a diner for breakfast, with 15 minutes to spare. Breakfast takes 12 minutes to be prepared and I wolf it down in 2 1/2 minutes before running back, getting in the van, and driving to the doctor.

This doctor’s an acupuncturist, so I get to lay in a darkened room after the needles are in, and fidget uncomfortably thinking about my to-do list (i’m not one of those people who find acupuncture relaxing).

Run to grocery store and post office, mail books, feel delerious enough to have trouble counting how many I"m putting into the packages, I can’t count past 10 anymore.

Go home, sleep 2 hours, Tom’s in the same condition as me but has more crap to move and pack and de-install. We’re deleriously napping for the last time in this house.

My Craigslist futon couch-selling ad works, the guy comes over and Tom’s relaying me his questions through the closed door because I’m in no condition to be coherent to someone’s face.

I’m worse than half asleep and I"m trying to go into salesman mode and sell the unseen buyer on the futon. It works and the thing goes away. Phew, crisis averted. It’s 4:30 by now, where’d the day go? We pack further .

We go out to eat sushi to deal with the stress. It’s a semi-expensive dinner, well worth the effect is has as a second ‘brain reset’for the day, and Tom jokes that we’re basically eating the futon, as dinner isn’t much less than what we sold the cheapo futon for. That was an emotional brain reset, but the bodies are still wanting to fall over.

The solution is coffee- mine’s a 4-shot espresso drink. This is the last walk ‘home’ from this particular coffee place which I"ll have no real reason to go to in the future. It’s the last sunset walk in the neighborhood, where we’ve probably walked a hundred times for ’serious talks’ and every other kind of ‘walk’ reason and just for the joy of it.

I continue packing and moving and cleaning up. By 12 am we’re running stuff to the storage unit.

And a funny possibility happens. I’m packing the van haphazardly at this point. In the back is a bunch of my most valued used biodiesel oily crap. In the front is a bunch of food, clean clothes, dishes. That dividing line between the class supplies and the personal stuff is starting to get really thin again, dammit.

Filthy oily stuff might be touching something lacy. It’s the last of my personal crap from the house- and one of the boxes has a used syringe laying prominently on top so I don’t forget to dispose of it properly.

I get prescription Vitamin B-12 injections as part of the Lyme/mercury treatment. The B12 gives me quite a bit of energy and this week I’ve been injecting the stuff dutifully, to help keep up with the stress.

Only I’ve been too busy to go to my own house and haven’t been there in days, and dont’ have my sharps container with me. It’s normally no big deal- I re-sheathe the syringes and had them in a sock drawer here till I can get to the sharps container.

Only now there’s no more sock drawer at Tom’s, and everything’s going along to on my rounds from Tom’s to the shop to storage to the house. I decided to stick the used syringes on top so I don’t forget to drop them in the sharps box when I swing through at my other house.

I’m also transporting guns to safe storage- they can’t be at my house as there’s not even a key for the front door- we never lock the place. In the US, there are fairly lax rules about ownership of hunting rifles and shotguns, which means that I dont’ know those rules well as all I’ve ever owned is a shotgun. I think there’s something on the books about transporting the ammo and the gun in the trunk and not the driver’s compartment.

Since I first learned guns while living near New York City where guns are completely illegal (and that’s a good thing in the city, by the way), I’m ultra paranoid about the possible consequences of transportation. I think I’m wrong to be so paranoid but I’m ignorant of the law. Which we know is no excuse.

Anyway, so now I"m paranoid, delerious, I’ve got a van with no trunk, so now we’ve got guns, ammo, all my unlabeled medicinal herbs that probably look like drugs to the wrong cop, me being really tired and delerious, the van’s starting to act up and I keep thinking I"ll break down, it’s 2 am. I’m heading into West Oakland, incidentally, a high-crime high-drugs area. Tom’s driving in front of me with expired registration on his vehicle. I have a gigantic bag of new syringes (with no prescription) that a student gave me after the last class for titration supplies- the syringes sprawled over to Tom’s house because I was using a few of them for my B-12 injections. It’s another example of that blurry dividing line between my class activities and my personal life. Steal some of my titration supplies for prescription drug use, oh yeah baby.

I’ve got an open cardboard box full of socks with used syringes sitting on top. Of course, being from NYC, the sight of used syringes makes me think of drug abusers littering the public sidewalks with heroin syringes and so forth. My paranoid side thinks that if I get stopped by a cop if my van or brain act up on the drive, I’ll look like a gun-toting, heroin-shooting, oily-crap-collecting crazy person. And go straight to jail till it gets straightened out.

And, of course, mixed casually with all this questionable evidence of laws being broken, there’s a sandwich bad half full of unidentified unlabeled white powder floating around back there someplace. Magnesol.

This is becoming more of a blog about transitions than a blog about biodiesel. .

Tom’s moving out of his place this weekend. He’s been there for three years, I’ve been a big part of life here as well, usually like a 4th roommate, so it’s basically just like I’m moving as well. It’s a huge move. I’ll miss this house, I’ll miss the stability. It had really been my stable home for the last few years, not the other places where I’ve lived during that time. The house has been such a safe zone for me. Last year so much of that Twilight Zone ‘last hours of a plane flight’ time was spent in fantasizing about coming home and turning the key and walking in the front door.

It’s pretty exciting. I’m about to move, as well, and go on the road, and I feel like I’m jumping off a cliff into a completely new life. I’ll have barely any connection to the Bay Area after August 1.

Return time, unknown.

Now investigating language school in Guatemala to regain my Spanish, and looking into going off to work on a potable-water development project down there afterwards, 6 months from now. Where I’ll be between mid-October and then, I have no idea yet. Return time, unknown.

Brad, the other roommate who’s been here at Tom’s house since the beginning, is off to Europe for the summer, moving his stuff into storage, enjoying some freedom from the house/work routine he’s been on for years. Return time to normal life, unknown.

Tom’s about to spend a couple of months floating in and out of town, helping a cousin build a really interesting “tsunami-proof” house on the Oregon coast. He’s moving his stuff into storage and building an electronics lab at Zion Labs (ie to move his ‘business’ home office stuff from the house he’s giving up), staying with me part-time till I leave town, and generally exploring some less-plans-having freedom for the next few months (some of his paid work is somewhat place-independent). He’ll spend some time out on the road with me, is headed back to Africa at some point for more appropriate technology work this fall, and after many years of stability in the same town, is generally planning on floating as long as work allows it and until he decides on something more interesting and better. Return time, unknown.

We’ve been packing the house, and Tom and I have been building out the new office from raw space above another studio. For 10 days now the house has been piled with half-filled boxes while dusty old possessions no one’s seen for years have been resurfacing. We’ve been figuring out where to stash our possessions, what furniture and kitchenware to get rid of, and whether we can manage to stuff it all into our respective storage units. We’ve been all detangling our lives so as to go our separate ways. I’ve been watching the calendar count down to August 1 and continuing to feel my insane anxiety about how little I get done each day and how long the damn to-do list is while I deal with this unplanned-for bump in my schedule of Tom-moving-related things to do.

When I was 5 my family moved to America by way of a fairly complicated series of moves around Europe and even more moves around NYC before settling in the Jersey City projects.

The constant moving took a year and a half and I remember strongly this wistful looks around the old place the moment before leaving forever- and the feeling that we didn’t know what we were getting into next.

Next stop, America. By way of Rome. By way of Vienna. In the hope that the wheels of world events wouldn’t send us to Israel (most Russians emigrating from the USSR at that point in 1978 were either Jewish or, like us, they were pretending to be Jews. Probably the only time in history that non-Jews have intentionally pretended to be Jewish for political reasons, rather than the other way around).

We developed a ritual of ‘pausing’ and sitting for a moment just before leaving the last place, town, country, continent, forever. To make sure we honored all the good memories and paused to cement them firmly into a shimmering mental flavor called nostalgia. But, more importantly, to give ourselves a moment to contemplate the exciting unknowns ahead. Before jumping off the edge of the known world…

I am reminded of that feeling now, the ‘last looks’ around the house. Taking it in, trying to make sure I remember the good times and the good light and privacy and the intense times and the growth that happened here for me and the healing.

In a month I’ll be gone for points unknown. Return time, unknown.

Tom and I now have shops, plural. Not that we’ve split up our shop, that is, but we’ve rented a second shop for the summer. It’s getting out of control the number of landlords I have.

Our shop at Zion Labs (not it’s real name) is a nice, clean, indoor kind of a place run by a Serious Artist (ie a sculptor who actually has name recognition, not just someone making stuff for Burning Man only) who does large and very personality-filled sculpture which incidentally also make it’s appearance at Burning Man every year. Occasionally it sells, too- maybe that’s the distinction between Burning Man ‘art’ and Real Art? oops, I think I just insulted a whole buncha starving artist types.

Anyways, Tom and I have a tinkering shop at Zion Labs. I love Zion and my landlord there, Michael Zion (not his real name). It’s the nicest working shop environment I’ve ever had, and is getting nicer by the minute (like, seriously, they just installed a whirlpool bathtub in one of the bathrooms and a Japanese heated toilet seat. These men are Masters of eBay when it comes to electronic and plumbing gadgets). We just moved the old makeshift kitchen to a larger, sunlit space, and Zion Labs now has an awesome community room that will nearly rival my home kitchen when it’s done. I’m looking forward to cooking there more frequently.

Unfortunately, we can’t really make massive, nasty messes, such as running a grinder all day on Chinese Harbor Freight-derived pieces of lead-painted metal, or burning petro-liquids or even bio-liquids without disturbing the exalted peace at the studio.

Tom’s got a huge project to build a portable hot tub vehicle- it’s been on his Life List Of Things To Accomplish for years now and the pieces are finally in place. The project involved an enormous amount of demolition- he’s obsessed with making it be a self-powered electric vehicle (and , as he says, is that even legal- people in water inside an EV?) rather than a trailered system. The donor ‘trailer’ started life as a truck and will eventually at a later phase of the project become an electric vehicle. The engineering involved is really fun. The amount of grinding involved is not.

On my own life list was a very short two months of prep for tour (yikes, it’s so much less than two months now- I actually wrote most of this blog entry weeks ago) . I have the Turk Burner optimization project, which involves many sessions of burning liquids and smoky residue. I’m also working on my own metal-grinding and space-hogging albatross, the processor trailer system for the tour, which involved an immense amount of grinding and wirebrushing a few weeks ago.

We rented another space at NIMBY (yes, it’s real name) for the summer and have taken to making our messes there at odd hours.

NIMBY is an enormous warehouse along the lines of the shop we’d had at “Machine Shop” (also not it’s real name), where largely Burning Man artists and gear-heads rent shipping containers and make large stuff in the main space. We’ve staked out a corner of one bay that has a nice 5-ton bridge crane. It’s a tool I’ve been lusting over for about 6 years now. I can’t wait to build a large biodiesel processor there sometime- flipping a big tank around to weld on fittings should become very easy.

The Burning Man-dictated building season is in full swing. Our end of the shop is taken over by other beginners like ourselves- there’s a much nicer metal fabrication shop in another end of the building where the guys who seem to know what they’re doing are arrayed, and I go beg bandsaw use from them occasionally. We’re fumbling with grinders and sawzalls over in Beginners’ Bay.

There’s a guy building a Burning Man art car (yes, I do think that’s generally a silly concept), and a big group of giggly beer-drinking girls with their first little MIG welder and a bunch of shiny new equipment who are working their way through learning to weld by making some ‘trees’ of some sort for Burning Man (and seem to have no comprehension that Tom could possibly be doing his big project car for something other than Burning Man). It’s great to see a bunch of girls with beers spending their down time playing with tools while boyfriends stop by and stand around looking unskilled.

It’s really cute. NIMBY’s been generally male-dominated, sorta bikerish, grimy, and tough. It’s big fundraiser for a couple of years was scheduling a HUGE Fight Club ‘bash’:
http://www.sfbg.com/39/21/cover_fight.html

A few weeks ago I attended a much milder and cutesy Burning Man version of the same, over at NIMBY- a Mad Max themed party, complete with Thunderdome, in which combatants attached to bungee cords inside the Thunderdome fought it out- with foam clubs.

Most videos on the web of Death Guild Thunderdome seem to show big aggro guys trying to bash each other- whereas the reality was the combatants seem to spend time trying not to piss themselves laughing while swinging the soft foam bats and getting upended by the bungee cord action. While getting heckled by a few hundred costumed drunk freaks who’ve climbed over the dome and are trying to not fall off. It’s amazing how few people have died at Burning Man, by the way, considering.

The way the process works, by the way, is that they strap a couple of evenly-sized combatants into climbing harnesses (??), attach them to the bungees which still allow their feet to touch the ground but have an amazing ability to flip the fighter upside down at the exact wrong moment, and kinda throw them at each other.

There are a pair of staff guys who handle each fighter and have the ability to pull them apart if anything gets too intense. As intense as fighting with foam bats can get, that is, especially when you can’t control the ability to stay upright.

The fight starts with the guys pulling the fighters back to the ends of the Thunderdome

From where they release the people, who proceed to fly at each other and maybe even score a hit if they’re not giggling too hard to see the target.

Since the bungees seriously handicap your mobility, use of legs and wrestling is a bit more effective than the use of the foam bats:

Snook, the guy who runs NIMBY, is an amazing master of the waste stream. And he’s efficient at dispensing of the good stuff he runs across. He’ll do things like acquire 200 shipping containers and turn them around to new homes in a matter of days, without having to do any storage in the midst of the transaction.

He’s the exact opposite of Jim from the Machine Shop, the insane guy whom I called The Investor in this blog a couple of years ago- half of the art of handling the good stuff that moves around in the waste stream here, lies in the art of passing it along rather than storing it for years like Jim was doing. I thank my lucky stars pretty much every time I go into NIMBY or Zion shops, that I no longer have to deal with Jim’s hoarding and insane inefficiency. But that’s a whole other blog.

My main problem there is avoiding ‘taking’ anything Snook tries to pawn off on me. I get these nice tours of the latest acquisitions from him periodically, and always feel good at the end if I’ve avoided becoming an owner of some more ‘crap’- motors, pumps, plumbing, valves, and more. It’s like window shopping for tinkers.

In the Firefox browser, there’s a field in one of the upper toolbars that allows you to quick-search google, amazon, ebay, and other search engines. Google has an auto-complete feature whereby it suggests various words as you begin to type in a search term.

Tom googled me the other day as ‘girl mark’ and it turns up as a Firefox Google auto-complete. (I of course didn’t believe him and immediately looked it up on a public computer I’d never been on before, to make sure it’s not Google ‘remembering’ what search terms he’s used in the past).

Once you get past “girl ma” you get the choice of “girl mark biodiesel” or “girl mark". I guess that besides the fact that ‘girl mark’ is a weird enough search term, enough people have apparently looked me up that I’m institutionalized up there in Firefox (regular Google pages, the ones that come up when you just visit google.com, don’t pop up the same auto-complete terms but instead suggest ones you’ve looked up in the past)

15 more minutes of creepy fame… all for spending time online.

Even more amusingly, on the Google search results, the Biodiesel Homebrew Guide has been tagged with the Google tag.

The tag says that this page is about “petroleum".

“Reactor Mechanics and System Tricks” biodiesel homebrewing class

I’m trying to gauge interest for a new class format, for a one-day ’system tricks’ class for more advanced beginners who want to learn more in-depth information about homebrew equipment and see it in action going through all of it’s steps. This is a hands-on class where we will do all of the things we’re discussing, in a real , working setting.

This class is geared to people who already know how to make biodiesel, either in a lab-scale or one-liter setting, or for those who already homebrew but would like to compare notes with me on how I manage my system. This may become a two-day class at some point if I find that it needs that much time to run through all of the proposed syllabus listed below (two-day class would be a weekend activity)

I’m tentatively offering a new week-day class, sometime during the week of July 9th or July 23rd (one weekday of either week) in which we run actual full-size batches, in a real reactor at someone’s actual site, and try to run the class through every single step so as to discuss ‘tricks’ and tips on reactor mechanics. Ive been obsessing about how beginning biodieselers (and some advanced people) don’t tend to use secondary containment, tend to make more messes than they should, tend to gas themselves with methanol by draining glycerine unsafely, etc. I’d like to do this class as a way to help students overcome this aspect of the learning curve- the common equipment-based mistakes having to do with operating procedures. This class will probably be in Oakland or Berkeley or someplace nearby. I will announce the class on these lists when it’s finalized.

Let me know which days would work for you- a one-day class during the weekdays, somewhere between July 9-11 or July 24-27 is when this is likely to occur. If you can not do weekdays, let me know as well in case the weekend of July 28 becomes available for me.

Send all inquiries to classregistration@girlmark.com and put ‘equipment tricks class’ in the subject line.

The class will run 9-5 and will be $70 for the day.

This class is geared to people who already know how to make biodiesel, either in a lab-scale or one-liter setting or who already homebrew but would like to compare notes with me on how I manage my system. You may take this class after attending a regular homebrewing class taught by someone else as well as if you have learned how to make biodiesel on your own. We dont go into a lot of detail on titration and chemistry here so that’s the info you should have ‘down’ already on your own prior to taking this “system tricks” class.

*********************************************

I’ll try to write up a better description/syllabus in the next few days. What comes to mind is something like this:

Start a batch of fuel in a large Appleseed homebrew processor.
Discuss safe heating, tank fires, use of hydronic heating methods, and heat exchangers. Demonstrate heat exchanger-based Appleseed.
Discuss some electrical safety interconnects proposed for heating element control in ‘regular’ electric heaters.
Discuss tricks for measuring lye safely
Discuss tricks for measuring methanol safely
Discuss pumps for pumping methanol safely
Demonstrate air-powered pumps and discuss air compressor requirements and electrical consumption if using air pumps for reactor mixing.
Discuss materials compatibility with various fuel processes and chemicals used, and discuss where inappropriate plastics can still be used with fewer consequences.
Discuss sight tubes and sight glass sources, ways of using them, ways of installing them, what to look for in industrial parts catalogs
Demonstrate use of powered methanol/lye mixers that are not just passive carboy method. Discuss pros and cons of both types of systems.
Discuss methanol vapor release to atmosphere.
Discuss fire safety issues.

drain a batch of glycerine in another Appleseed (my processor trailer) and discuss how to avoid methanol vapor exposure during this process
discuss/demonstrate how to separate glycerine from biodiesel to minimize emulsions. Most beginner mistakes having to do with emulsion are actually a separation issue where the person inadvertently contaminates their wash tank with extra soap because they haven’t separated the glycerine from the biodiesel completely. There are some tests to ensure this is actually done.
Discuss standpipe separating tanks, and demonstrate several ways of designing them.
Discuss ways to minimize contamination with unwanted material.
Discuss various kinds of quick-connects and other ways to deal with the messes caused by hoses. Most spills and other hazards are probably due to homebrewers relying on hose rather than pipe.
Demonstrate the use of hard plumbing and ways of managing multiple valves
Demonstrate different methods of labeling the process and the steps, and demonstrate one system using a ‘protocol checklist’ to minimize confusion when operating multiple valves.

Transfer finished fuel from processor trailer to wash tanks and discuss washing equipment
Demonstrate several types of washing nozzles and important considerations
Discuss closed versus open wash tanks
Discuss venting and air displacement
Demonstrate use of non-siphoning overflow mistwash tank plumbing
Demonstrate use of sump pump to move water to a drain
Demonstrate soap test titration
Discuss emulsions (I will make one for us to play with)
Break emulsion with various ways
Discuss wash tank heating methods
Discuss water disposal and ways of separating oils and water and what happens when it is done with various methods
Discuss/demonstrate water neutralizing

Drain wash water from first wash and discuss “how you know when you’re finished with washing”
Go into more detail on emulsions and water retention
Demonstrate separation of water and biodiesel using various kinds of tanks
Discuss “white stuff” that isn’t emulsion
Discuss materials compatibility and water hardness issues with regards to washing
Discuss three different drying methods for getting water out of washed biodiesel
Discuss tests for dryness of finished biodiesel

Test some finished biodiesel for quality in various ways

When the batch that we’re making is finished processing, we can perform an 80%/20% two-stage base-base process and demonstrate various equipment methods required to make it easier
We will follow it with a 5% water prewash for minimizing soap in wash. There are many ways of handling this complex process (80/20 followed by 5%) and we’ll demonstrate and discuss several possible solutions to the unwanted complexity

We will burn some glycerine in a homemade glycerine burner and demonstrate ways of moving the heat safely to heat a batch of oil for another batch of biodiesel.

I’ll briefly discuss filtration though this isn’t terribly complex
We’ll discuss different hosing material and tricks for handling/wrangling lots of hose

We’ll demonstrate a ‘cubee handling’ system for minimizing the hassle involved in processing oil that comes in 5 gallon cubes
We’ll demonstrate straining of oil
We’ll discuss, possibly only theoretically as it cant be shown in a one-day class, the ‘heat and let settle’ method of dewatering wet oil
We’ll discuss fire safety if you choose to dewater oil using boiling temperatures.

To express interest in the class and certain dates for the class, please email me at classregistration@girlmark.com with ’system tricks class’ in the subject line.
Info on my other classes is at www.girlmark.com/tour

Mark

you know, like friction. The unseen stuff that keeps metal parts stuck when you can’t figure out what else is holding the damn thing together.

oooh, I’m getting so excited about the trip. I’m having an awesome down day because I just did a marathon work session the past few days, and got the three (currently) most difficult items on my to-do list completed. These things had been blocking my path to most of the rest of the 150-item to-do list.

I celebrated that night. Only 147 more challenging items to go on the to-do list before August 1, but at least it’s not 150.

I’ve had lots to write since then- but it hurts to type. This was supposed to be my typing and computer day.

Yesterday I was welding crazy repairs into a Heavy Metal Object (my extremely heavy duty Class IV hitch) and dropped it onto a middle finger yesterday when a swivel vise went swivel-y while I was loosening the Object without properly supporting it. I’m lucky I didn’t break it in the process.

A lot of bad words were immediately sworn. I need that middle finger for communicating with other bad drivers, don’tcha know?

I like to think of it as ‘I dropped a 150-item To-Do list onto my finger’.

The hitch was broken in a very bizarre way when I got the van- there was a an unusable 2″ square x 6″ long solid steel mount stuck in the receiver, and it’s been a mammoth task of figuring out how to get it out of there ever since. It’s defeated several very skilled mechanics and Big Metal Shit specialists, the type that do 4x4 fun and games in the middle of no-where and know how to get stuck metal fixed- and also defeated a body shop.

Last week we’d chained the mount to the building at my shop, and I floored the accelerator and drove the van away (after disabling airbags). trying to knock it’s stickshion loose. All that happened was that the building, a cavernous 25,000 square foot warehouse, made an incredibly loud BOOM. The piece stayed put. Eventually after some other macho men insisted on trying to fix it for me and failed, I cut it out with a grinder, bothered every tool-owning fabrication guy in the shop in the process, and eventually welded a new piece of receiver stock onto it. Man what a mess.

I keep expanding the tour schedule. I’m also considering adding a couple of weekday classes in Berkeley in July- I’m a bit sick of working weekends and want to try out small, week day classes where I demonstrate a different set of techniques than in my two-day lab classes (more info coming shortly). Let me know if you’re interested and what day might be good. These would be a hands-on-with-a-processor kinds of demos, not just lab work classes.

Looks like I might have a Vancouver class in late July, I haven’t taught abroad before and don’t know how that’ll go. Will have to mail workshop materials there, no way to cross the border with my class stuff and I doubt they’ll give me a work visa!

Below is some info on the Milwaukee class.

I also have a similar class in Lee NH that I just added, which will include a tour of some really nice farm-scale biodiesel equipment that Dorn Cox, Joe Pearson, and others have been working on for a year+ now. The project has also grown sunflower oil, and have been experimenting with a manual press for on-farm production of biofuels. Dorn toured some of the Argentina biodiesel-producing farmers a couple of years ago and some of his processor ideas are based on their process. If you’re farming on a smaller-scale this might be the class for you.

*************************************
I’ve added a few more classes to my tour schedule-

*Milwaukee, WI August 25-26* and Lee, New Hampshire (near Dover
NH) September 22-23

Also in the works is a Vancouver, Canada workshop in the end of
July, and a possible DC-area class in the fall. I’m looking for
more class locations in the Southeast in the late fall.

The Milwaukee class and the New Hampshire class are similar, with the
New Hampshire class having more information for farmers as I’m hosted by
Oyster River Biofuel Initiative and our host facility has been making
biodiesel for their farm and growing test plots of sunflower for oil.

**************

Some info on the Milwaukee class:

Swee of Futuregreen.net generously offered me space to
teach a workshop in Milwaukee- and we’ve agreed on August 25-26. It’ll
be my usual two day, hands-on biodiesel homebrewing class, which has
evolved a bit since the last Wisconsin classes I taught in 2004. Please
pre-register via my web site, we have limited space of course and need
to know who’s coming. Direct questions to me by email (
classregistration@girlmark.com ) rather than calling the store, as they
won’t be able to answer questions about the class.

At the end of the class, we will be building a few processors for
students who wish to buy themselves a b100supply.com kit of processor
parts- this is completely optional, and you can help the others build
their processors even if you don’t get your own kit parts.
www.b100supply.com is providing a discount on their parts kits for this
workshop.

More info is below:

Approximate schedule for Milwaukee class:
Saturday and Sunday, August 25-26, 10-4ish (probably 4:30 on Sunday,
realistically)

register at www.girlmark.com/tour

****************************************
some suggested reading:

Please take a look through www.biodieselcommunity.org for some info (and
photos) of what the process looks like.

www.b100supply.com also has a GREAT ‘biodiesel library’ with a lot of good
articles in it.

I’ll have copies of Biodiesel Homebrew Guide for sale at the class:
www.localb100.com/book.html and I"ll also have a few copies of Jennifer
Radtke’s book ‘Not a Gas Station’, which is about starting the Biofuel
Oasis commercial fueling station (see www.backyardbiodiesel.org for details) . Each of these is $15.

****************************************
Saturday:
10-noon- lecture: general biofuels introduction, SVO conversions and
diesel blending (ie DSE, etc) discussions, cold weather issues,
emissions, discussion of early biofuels research that has gotten us
where we are today with biodiesel, potential mechanical problems,
explanation of biodiesel chemistry and the basic process

noon-12:30 demonstration of the basic process

12:30-1:15 lunch

1:15-4 : students practice titration and make 1-liter batches, and we’ll
discuss the full-size processor I’m bringing on the trailer outside and
how it works.

During the basic practice you’ll practice oil water content testing,
blank titration, titration with a burette as well as cheaper equipment,
phenol red and turmeric titrations, really nasty oil as well as normal
oil, 5% glycerine remix prewash and two-stage 80/20 base process, along with
intentionally making mistakes for Sunday’s class.

If we get through the basic 1-liter batches quickly enough, I"ll start
the next day’s topics and demonstrations on Saturday afternoon.

Sunday:
10-12:30 lecture and demo: washing, biodiesel equipment, quality control
and quality testing discussion and demonstration, and a more detailed
discussion of quality problems that can affect vehicles.

12:30-1:15 lunch

1:15-2:15 -students do ‘open lab’ practice, with help from some
experienced biodieselers who are coming to visit- you can perform
quality tests, wash your test batches from the day before, make more
test batches with different oil and different variables if you wish, do
ethanol-based biodiesel, attempt to fix some of the ‘mistakes’ we’ll
intentionally make (ie emulsion and ‘glop’), and more . You can also
start on your processor if you wish to instead. Intermittent lecturing
will take place during the lab, on topics such as ethanol-based
biodiesel and alternative lab techniques

2:15-4 plumbing/techniques demo and processor building (and continuation
of open lab, with help available for either lab or processor build- you
can filter back and forth between activities).

Upcoming biodiesel and SVO workshops and events in Northern California:

June 16: Homebrewing workshop with Andrew Morris
June 20: Introductory biodiesel fundamentals workshop with Bill Michell
June 30-July 1: Homebrewing workshop and equipment build with Maria
‘Mark’ Alovert
July 5: Biofuels: Sustainability through Technology - The Californian
Model panel discussion at PG&E
July, Berkeley: possible weekday one-day hands-on processor demonstration and ’system tips’ class with Maria ‘Mark’ Alovert.

Please contact individual instructors for more information. Contact info
listed below.

*****************************************************

June 16, Oakland:

Hands-on Biodiesel Homebrewing
With Andrew Morris

In West Oakland, June 16 9:30a 5:30p $90
Including Lunch – Limit 6 Participants
Second person from the same household ½ price
To register: email morris1524@yahoo.com
This class is designed to give you the hands on experience you need to
begin making your own high quality fuel.

Topics Include: We will Demo & Practice
Basic Chemistry of Making Biodiesel
Oil Quality Testing - Free Fatty Acid Titration and
Quantitative Water Test
Calculations for Methanol and Catalyst Use
Fuel Quality Testing For Conversion
Washing Techniques
Separting Fuel From Glycerol and Water
Processor Operation
Avoiding & Breaking Emulsion
Processor Design & Building Tips
Basic Safety Guidlines

This class will combine lab, practical, theory and Q&A.
Email to hold a Space - I will send you my address and where to send
your check: email morris1524@yahoo.com
Recommended Resources:
http://www.biodieselcommunity.org
http://biodiesel.infopop.cc
http://www.biodieselpictures.com
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/biodieselbasics/
http://www.biodieselnow.com/

***********************************************************
June 30-July 1, Berkeley

Comprehensive Homebrew Biodiesel Class and equipment build with Maria
‘Mark’ Alovert
Biodiesel Homebrewing/Equipment Building Class with Maria ‘girl Mark’
Alovert of http://biodieselcommunity.org

Berkeley, CA

Saturday and Sunday, June 30-July 1
10-4

to register: see http://girlmark.com/tour

This class will build some www.B100supply.com
equipment

*************************

Biodiesel is a clean-burning diesel alternative made from any natural
oil or fat. It can be made easily in a backyard or garage environment.
In this class, you will learn how to make your own clean burning diesel
fuel alternative and how to build the processing equipment to make it at
home safely…

This is a comprehensive, hands-on workshop on making homebrew biodiesel
fuel out of waste restaurant fryer oil, which can usually be acquired
for ‘free’.
Most of the class focuses on the chemistry behind biodiesel homebrewing
and quality control, and we’ll be doing a lot of ‘lab’ work making test
batches, and variations on different formulas.

The feel of the class is a bit like the mad scientist version of “high
school chem lab” (hopefully without the spitballs and giggling)- you’ll
be doing hands-on lab exercises in small groups, which will teach you
how to make and troubleshoot your home batches- and we’ll be learning
the chemistry basics that underlie making good quality fuel for your
vehicle.

This is a fast-paced class, and I strongly recommend that you read this
website first: http://www.biodieselcommunity.org
to get a background for this subject.

Processor build:
At the end of the class, we will build biodiesel processors for students
who wish to buy parts ahead of time (deadline for kit orders: June 16).
If you don’t want to make your own processor you can still help build
the others’ systems. We will also discuss heat exchangers, solar thermal
heating of the process, some minimal methanol recovery information, and
other equipment topics.

Parts kits info: The optional parts kits are provided by
www.b100supply.com. They are offering a $50 discount to those who are
registered for the workshop (you’ll get an e-coupon that you can use at
the b100supply site). June 16 deadline is for b100supply only, the class
will accept students till we’re full. The past few Berkeley classes have
sold out so you may want to register early.

Optional book: I will also have for sale at the class, the Biodiesel
Homebrew Guide book: www.localb100.com/book.html

To register, please see the online registration at
http://www.girlmark.com/tour

***********************************************************
June 20, Menlo Park:
Biodiesel Fundamentals
at TechShop:
Wed, June 20, 7:30-9 pm
with Bill Michell

to register and for more information, please see Techshop website:
http://www.techshop.ws/take_classes.html?a=1&i=957339

In this class you will learn how to make any diesel car run on Waste
Vegetable Oil (WVO) or Biodiesel. WVO is free from most restaurants if
you offer to pick it up. The class covers Biodiesel fundamentals with a
focus on using Waste Vegetable Oil as a fuel. Educate yourself on the
simple modifications that can be made to any diesel engine which will
allow you to be free of foreign oil and gas gouging at the pump! After
this class students will be able to make the informed choice about
whether or not making diesel fuel from vegetable oil at home makes
sense. See a Mercedes- Benz 300 SDL running on free (Sushi) Waste
Vegetable Oil!

*************************************************************
July 5, San Francisco:*

*Biofuels: Sustainability through Technology - The Californian Model*

When: Thursday, July 05, 2007 12:00 PM-4:00 PM
Where: PG&E Energy Center, CR PEC Conference Center 851 Howard St. San
Francisco, CA

Panel discussion & Q/A about issues contributing to pollution by
transportation, as well as the latest technologies in both practical and
conceptual biofuel systems/products.

Part of the Overseas Research Project(ORP). ORP is a research project
carried out by approximately 40 Master’s degree Manufacturing
Engineering students in their final year at Cambridge University. The
research topic ‘Sustainability through Technology: the Californian
Model’, which observes the technological approach to environmental
sustainability, rather than lifestyle or habitual changes.

120 people

PEC Host: Robert Marcial 2.5177

Contact: Heath Blount 505-577-1810
heath.blount@gmail.com
San Francisco Biofuels Cooperative

*************************************
July, Berkeley:
possible weekday one-day hands-on processor demonstration class with
Maria ‘Mark’ Alovert.
$65

I am considering offering a one-day class during the week (all of my
weekends are full) in which I will show you around a ‘real’ biodiesel
processor site and will run the system through all the steps needed to
make biodiesel. This will include washing, separating glycerine, drying,
etc.

This class is designed for either beginner students who have done a lot
of reading, or advanced beginner students who have made test batches or
have made some biodiesel. The point of the class is to introduce you to
the tricks and tips for avoiding spills, making high quality fuel, safe
handling, avoiding emulsion, and other physical aspects of running your
biodiesel processor.

However, I suggest that you attend a ‘real’ lab class such as my or
Andrew Morris’ classes in June first so as to become comfortable with
the chemistry concepts behind homebrewing, or at least make some test
batches on your own first using the www.biodieselcommunity.org
instructions or those in my book at www.localb100.com/book.html

Please email me if you are interested in the class and let me know you
availability during the week of July 9th or July 23 (no weekends).

classregistration@girlmark.com
*************************************

There’s a song about traveling on The Road that I’ve been listening to over and over again, in Russian, by a Russian band I just discovered recently. The stupidly simple but poetic lyrics make me wish translation worked better from one language to the next; the nearly-hoarse, screaming singer longingly tongues the rolling R of the Russian word “roads” in a way that makes English R’s seem terribly inadequate for the craft of singing. The song running over and over again in my head makes me reflect on the universal human longing for movement and change and learning as I consider leaving the Bay Area for a while with my wrenches and my newly-healed hands and my new-found health, and spending a few months married to my rolling steel box and it’s finicky engine heart. As I pack to go on The Road for what may be months and months and think about my goals for what I want to learn on the way, I realized that I’m almost recreating a trip I did in 1994.

At the time, I’d just spent almost 5 years intensely studying traditional Appalachian music and the folklife associated with the athletic style I played and the ballad style I sang. I was a passionate devotee. The idea of doing anything else was nearly unthinkable. Yet hiding in the background was my upbringing in New York City, and a brief foray into the punk rock world, and scary abandoned places to explore and street life and community and the smug feeling of fitting solidly into a subculture that rejected the rest of the world.

In 1993 I tried a semester of community college, and made the mistake of taking a writing course in which all of the suppressed clash between my current rural existance in the bluegrass/old time community and the uber-urban punk rock lifestyle came to a head. I wrote a couple of semi-fictional stories grappling with sexuality issues and a certain self-destructiveness I’d witnessed in a number of people I’d loved way back when in my teenage dropout Lower East Side punk rock days.

I was in an informal chemistry study group in the little Southern community college- I spent lunches studying for our chemistry class with a group of Fundamentalist Christian kids, whom I secretly regarded as an anthropology project. I visited one guy’s Pentacostal church in the mountains where they spoke in tongues and essentially went into trances, discussed another girl’s life goals and unfulfilled wishes and financial and class realities, and when it came time to read each other our English class writing assignments I was highly amused that their projects consisted of essays about loving Jesus and mine consisted of semi-fictionalized stories about my first uncomfortable discovery at 17 that someone I respected was actually a heroin-addicted gay street prostitute struggling with his denial of both and the dance with death that those activities implied.

Somewhere that spring I broke up with my nice, somewhat timid boyfriend, said good-bye to the music I was pledged to. Worried a little about what lay ahead. And went on the road. The road had been calling. It was telling me to go visit Austin, TX- I’d just discovered classic country music and it’s various songs of longing, and I had the idea that there were other hipsters my age doing the retro music thing there that I might be able to play music with. The boyfriend had insisted all spring that there was no way I was going to make the trip, that the car would break down, that I didn’t have any money, that it was an unsafe idea. It’s a bad idea to tell a New York City girl that something is unsafe and she should be scared, especially when everyone else had been telling me to straighten up and keep working in factories to support that, and that at 22 I should be a responsible, boring sort of adult because there was something to be afraid of out there in the real world.

His lectures did eventually change my mind about Texas itself, but I left him that summer and went on the road with $30 and my very portable wholesale jewelry business and my car-doctoring wrenches and my ancient, fuel-efficient car, and put on thousands of miles seeing the country under my own power. I eventually parked the car at a friend’s place in Colorado and rode freight trains to Mexico, then tramped around Mexico all summer with a homemade burlap backpack (to deter theft of a perceived expensive item), got arrested/kidnapped by cops with another American girl, fought off various tweakers and glue huffers who tried to steal our stuff, slept on the streets, hung out with people whose political beliefs dictated a harsh, idealistic lifestyle, rode more freight trains, got better at Spanish, fell in love with Mexico City, and returned to the USA never to feel fear of people again. I thank the road daily for that loss of fear. A few months later I found myself in the midst of a tight-knit community of urban homesteaders in NYC, found my place in life, said good-bye to the idea of stability, and became everything I am as a result of that experience. I think I’ve managed to do some good in the process.

In some ways I feel like I’m recreating the feeling now. I was sick for about 7 years. I nearly lost use of my hands last year. Everything has just come back, just as it was in 1999, like I get a second chance at all this. I feel like I just got a new lease on life, like I’m reborn, like I can do anything I want, be whomever I want. I’m reconsidering everything. Occasionally I’m not even sure if I want to be girl Mark, the biodiesel advocate= there are so many other identities I’ve been and they’ve been waiting for me to get better ever since the 90’s.

I’m getting the van together and looking at maps and distances and thinking about the long, hot drives through August in the Midwest. I’ll be packing a bunch of audiobooks for the drive time, and trying to do some formal studying in the process. I’m structuring the drives with plenty of down time, hoping to spend it studying various things in preparation for going back to school. I’m looking forward to dusty coffeehouses in podunk Midwestern towns and seeing some new state parks and learning a bit more about America and about myself.

I desperately need to write a blog entry today but I have about 8 items to do in the next 8 hours, most of them physical rather than at the computer, and all of them scattered and taking me ‘all over town’. I barely have time to check email and get class updates up on my site. It’s been like this for weeks now, and the to-do list for the next few days looks just as bad.

I don’t know anyone else with 150 items on their immediate to-do list. I gave up on keeping The List typed up on my computer and PDA and have de-evolved back to a dedicated notebook and a pencil.

On the other hand, I have energy to do all of that.

I’m getting ready to head out in the van for three months. I’m getting very excited about it- I’m feeling well finally, and I haven’t been out on my own like this since 2004 (short trips in-state, and trips with Tom, don’t count). Three months is a very, very long time to be in a small RV (though in ‘04 I did the trip for two months, in the front seat of a pickup truck…)

Figuring out how to cram everything into the van will be a challenge- in ‘04 I had the entire truckbed as well as the trailer, and I"m still trying to figure out where to store the extra fuel tanks and other heavy-but-messies I’ll be using.

I spent the weekend in the Sierras at a friend’s Memorial Day Weekend party, after a sobering drive that started with passing a gruesome motorcycle accident involving someone’s body parts scattered all over the road.

The cabin is offgrid and up a dirt road, an inholding in the national forest. The steep dirt driveway really separated the men from the boys among us- past a certain point it was only passable by Ford 4x4 trucks owned by other homesteaders, while all of us city people with 2WD vans and anyone with small front wheel drive cars parked way down below and had our own little mini-encampment.

The trip was partially intended for me to figure out what I"m going to need for camping in the van. In between hikes I spent a lot of time sitting in it sketching out what the layout will be and making my to-do list for what I"ll need to do before I leave for Colorado in July, and it was incredibly helpful to see just what happens when sun beats down on it and so forth (actually, not much happens even in full sun- it’s really well insulated and comfortable for a dark-colored vehicle).

The next few weeks, just like the last few weeks, will be a blur of welding, testing, attaching, fixing, installing… Im putting in a locking differential so the next dirt road won’t be as difficult, putting up roof racks and building a shade structure that can mount on it if camping, finishing my trailer, rebuilding another vehicle’s engine (yes, one of these items is not like the others!), and about 139 more items that menace me from the pages of the to-do list.

Incidentally I’ve been working with a materials scientist on a Turk Burner optimization project, but that’ll have to be described in another blog.

Oh, and I have a Pennsylvania biodiesel class scheduled now, in September, in Chambersburg and Carlisle. There’s an advanced class involved. Check it out at www.girlmark.com/tour

I’m doing another teaching tour all over the country, with a few Advanced Topics classes interspersed with the ‘regular’ ones I teach.

Winters, CA, June 9
Berkeley, CA, June 30-July 1 (last Bay Area class until October)
Seminary (near Hattiesburg), Mississippi July 21-22
Traverse City, MI (regular class, no experience required)
Saginaw, MI August 16-17 (regular class, no experience required)
Saginaw, MI August 18-19 (Advanced Topics Class, must have prior class or other experience)
Austin, TX October 6-7 (regular class, no experience required)
Ft Worth TX Oct 14-15 (Advanced Topics Class, must have prior class or prior experience)

There are a couple of tentative ones I’m waiting to hear about, as well:
possible Portland Oregon July 28-29
August or September: Chambersburg, Pennsylvania regular and advanced classes
probable Fort Worth, TX October 12-13 (regular class), to be confirmed
late October or November: Berkeley Ca Advanced Topics class

For details on these, please see www.girlmark.com/tour

I handed off the Nice Van for some routine maintenance belt replacements to my friend Bill, who’s been working on my vehicles for the past year while I didnt’ have a functioning right hand. Everything went smoothly and he had the belts and squeaky pulley replaced in a few days in his off time from his regular mechanic job.

Until… some old lady coming out of the Buddhist temple across the street backed into the open door while Bill was hanging out of the vehicle, and came close to ripping Bill in half. Not to mention that my pretty van’s drivers’ side door is now destroyed.

arghhh……….

I had a fantastic class with the beginners’ section of the Boot Camp I’m doing this week. We had a small group (unlike the damn advanced class which is completely filled to the gills) .

The beginners’ class actually had a decent ratio of women to men- something like 1/3 of the class were women. Usually the ratio is something like 1 woman to 29 men, or 0:30, or something equally bad. The equipment section of the class was pretty much dominated (in a good way) by a woman with multiple sclerosis who used to be a plumber and directed the proceedings with skill.

There were also a pile of guys from the Alternative Fuels class at Santa Rosa Junior College- I’ve met their teacher, Mark Armstrong, in the distant past, and he regaled us with stories about bad fuel of all types, rescues of people with Bay Area Biofuels goo stuck on their fuel filters, and assorted other technical fun and games. Another woman in the class used to be one of the BABF customers, and didn’t have any problems on the same crappy fuel, which meant that we got to really delve into what can or can’t (probably) happen with quality/offspec fuel and your vehicle, which is a major interest of mine these days. It was great having several people who’d experienced this stuff first-hand to illustrate the points I was trying to make.

We had a Fuelmeister owner who in some ways was right down there with the total beginners (scary) since the FM folks sell you such an atrocious understanding of the science of biodiesel along with their overpriced piece of crap machine. We set him straight.

We had a friend of Anton’s- Anton Berteaux is a moderator of our local NorCal biodiesel list, Burnveggies, and he’s a total caveman as far as his biodiesel production technique, doing things that he learned ‘from the bad old days’. He’s the infamous ‘dangle a heating element wired to a cut-off extension cord’ method of heating oil, works with an open reactor, etc. When we discussed this in class (anton’s friend knew better than to do these things of course) Anton became some what of the butt of the safety jokes. Sorry, friend Anton.

I got another sample of Bay Area Biofuels goo dregs for my offspec fuel project- the stuff is cloudy and has white things floating in it. I was really excited to meet a woman from Marin who’s organizing a couple of interesting eco events I’d like to present/table at- I usually don’t get excited about Earth Day type events, or music-festivals-with-informational-tabling anymore, but she’s got a really unique new perspective on organizing events that fits into my vision of useful Skillshares and so forth.

Changes:

This week is a rush of elation and feelings of change. I just got done with a semi-revision of the book last week, which has been consuming all of my remaining brainpower for the past two months. I’m caught up on many of the most pressing backlogged emails. I’d been organizing this beekeeping gettogether and it happened successfully last week, so that’s not on my plate anymore either. It’s weird not having to work on the computer all of a sudden. All of this coincides with the end of the weird mercury chelation backfire and of my getting my energy back.

Exiting the world of Book Editing coincided with another change that compounds the feeling that I’ve rejoined the Outside World and am no longer focused only on things at my desk and inside my house - The Boyfriend took off for Africa for a few weeks (for work) on the day I got done with The Book, which sharply delineated the cut-off point between my ‘month off’ at home in January, and the start of a whole new life of actually getting outside the house this week, having to see other people in order to feel social, etc. I

was just mentally climbing out of my computer when he was starting to mentally climb into his suitcases for the trip- I suddenly had free time and he was slave to the schedule all of a sudden. And I’ve had this feeling that I’m back in the physical world after my Book Editing Hell experience, and I barely remember how to function in the real world now.

Down the street, two of the Biofuel Oasis ladies are having their own Intensive Course (a class on how to start a biodiesel filling station). We talked quite a bit before their class, when I was starting prep for Mark’s Week In Hell. It’s a weird comforting feeling that this teaching thing, and the organizing stress of it, is going on elsewhere in my neighborhood at the same time. It’s an antidote to that feeling of not having enough peers that I sometimes experience.

Today was recovery day- man, do I love to sleep in my amazingly comfy bed and boy am I in love with white down comforters and whomever invented them. Tonight began what’s known as Mark’s Week In Hell- I have a huge amount of prep to do for the advanced class this weekend, as folks are coming from way out of town for it. I have a large stack of new lab equipment to get running, and a bunch of welding up of things to do before the weekend.

I’m going to do some major work on the processor trailer- there’s room to get it into the shop this week, so I’m painting and re-decking it in time for the class. It rotted pretty heavily on the Rustbucket Tour of 2004. I’ve got some major replumbing of a system to do for the latest and greatest Appleseed system.

Since I’ve been sick and inured for the past year (luckily the hand injury finally went away), I’ve really ‘lost it’ as far as basic strength and stamina goes, which really affects things when it comes to working in the shop. I’ve never, ever experienced strength inadequacies before.

It gets tiring to go move things around or unload my truck after class. My muscles have simply atrophied in the past couple of years, I gained a lot of weight, and for the past year I haven’t done much welding or muscling around of heavy stuff. I can’t do pull-ups anymore at all, which is really alarming as I’ve always thought of myself as very athletic.

I used to say, when people asked me how I as a fairly small woman can do construction, that “I’ve never met a board I couldn’t lift"- as there’s nothing in renovation carpentry that requires huge muscles. It’s really disturbing to suddenly encounter a world I can’t lift. I am finally feeling well enough to go to the gym again- my motivation has certainly returned as I’ve been feeling better the last week or so.

I’ve got visitors this week/weekend- Specnaz is coming from out of town as are several other biodieselers I know from the conferences or from my travels.

I’m trying to find housing for someone coming to the Advanced Class, we’re trying to talk Graydon Blair into coming to town for part of the Advanced Class as he’s in California briefly, I’m writing up a proposal for farm plant stuff, trying to wrangle the dates of my spring tour. I’m trying to keep up with some of my old friends whom I’ve been neglecting- my best friend is heading to Palestine with his ex-South African girlfriend, to start shooting a documentary about Israeli apartheid, and we had to catch up before they take off for the impending war zone in the region.

Somewhere in the midst of this I’m supposed to move- our house is on the market, will probably sell while I"m out of town, and Jennifer Radtke and her roommate/landlord asked me to move in to their mini-urban-ranch near my shop.

After the class on Sunday I hung out with one of the Oasis ladies and tried to convince her to come work on her homebrew processor at my shop while I work on the trailer, then made my way to a hot tub party thrown by people I don’t know- I’m on Tribe, a social networking site- think Myspace but for freaks/hippies/Burning Man folks- and the monthly hot tub soak party is kind of a tradition that networks through that site. Climbing into a super-deep hot tub full of warm water and interesting chatty strangers was a great way to get biodiesel off my mind right after the class.

There were some serious talkers at the party and I used my super ninja warrior mind skills to get them to talk about themselves so much that no one asked me what I do for a living. It’s not like I was being a wallflower- I gave quite a good impression of being a funny, outgoing person- but I managed to change the subject every time people started asking me about myself. Its a successful social evening when biodiesel never comes up. Jennifer Radtke would be so jealous if she knew what I just did.

I think I’m really good at becoming invisible when there’s a talker around and I, for some reason, don’t want to talk about biodiesel. Evasion maneuvers. Tom was amazed once when he witnessed a long conversation where a guy kept trying to ask me about myself and my motivation and my projects, and I kept redirecting the conversation. The guy with all the biodiesel questions for me would get out on tangents talking all about HIS own interests in biodiesel- and I managed to duck out of all of his questions about what it is that I do in it just by redirecting the conversation to him. Psychology is fun).

I got home and wrote more proposal, and more class advertising, and, and, and… It’s insane how much I did in the past 24 hours. My to-do list is just as varied as my to-done list this week.

I wrote about this already, but the mercury removal process and it was a resounding disaster and the doctor yanked me off of it with a late-night phone call after reading an email I sent about what was happening. Glad I"m doing this under a doctor’s supervision.

I wasn’t doing anything particularly unusual or ‘woo’- just standard chelation drugs that are used when somebody has high metals in their body due to industrial exposure.

Anyway, the process completely floored me- I was barely awake for about four days while taking the drug, then took 10 days or more to even remotely recover my half-normal energy.

I’m starting to wonder whether my really serious Lyme crash at the beginning of January was actually due to Lyme disease or whether it was a reaction to the heavy metals test that I got done right then- here’s a somewhat hysteria laden website that discusses the crash and the same drug that was used in my test (I wasn’t actually chelating with DMPS). I’m back to normal, just in time for the insane classes I’m doing in the next two weekends. I’m looking forward to getting out of the house!

The doctor pulled me off the chelation stuff and I’m back to a holding pattern of “repairing my metabolism” and trying a bunch of other natural things in the hopes that it will go smoother next time. I’m probably not do take another chance on it until I have some more free time to “check out” for a week.

It’s fairly common for people with Lyme disease to have high mercury toxicity, and supposedly there is evidence that the Lyme bacterium sequesters mercury as part of its immune-suppression strategy. I haven’t actually read any studies that support this, but it’s a common observation by people who treat Lyme and other chronic illnesses. Either we get extra sick with the Lyme as a result of having this toxicity to begin with, or the Lyme suppresses our ability to normally eliminate toxic metals.

Either way, I know exactly where the stuff came from. Drat! I absolutely love sushi, and for the past few years have eaten and made a lot of it, including the supposedly dangerous tuna. In fact, it’s been a great comfort food at times when I’ve been really ill in the last years-my last two boyfriends both made sushi quite frequently and I’ve woken up out of a Lyme fog quite a number of times to someone bringing me some lovingly prepared methylmercury sushi to bed. Goddammit that society’s poisoned the damn fish!

I am conducting a research project on biodiesel quality and am seeking samples of any poor quality or offspec biodiesel that is known to have caused vehicle problems, along with a short email interview in which I will ask some details about what kind of vehicle trouble you experienced with this fuel.

The fuel can be commercial or homemade, although I am especially interested in poor quality commercial biodiesel, because one shipment is likely to have caused problems for multiple users, and multiple instances of mechanical trouble caused by one batch of fuel may make it easier to find the exact cause of the problem. If you have purchased commercial fuel that caused problems and can help identify other customers in your area who purchased the same ‘bad’ fuel I would like to interview them as well for this project.

If you did not keep a sample of your fuel but experienced problems that may be due to quality, I am interested in any information you have about how the fuel behaved, what problems it caused, and how you deduced that the problems were caused by bad fuel.

In the past year a National Renewable Energy Laboratories study on commercial biodiesel found that a large percentage of the fuel sampled did not meet ASTM specifications for biodiesel quality, and in the past two years there have been several high-profile cases of fleets who recieved offspec or contaminated biodiesel and experienced fuel system or engine problems.

Quality control is still poorly enforced in this rapidly-growing industry and in the past year some interesting research has come to light about the exact mechanisms by which offspec fuel can cause trouble. Some of these theories are still speculative and I am interested in real-world examples of fuel system or engine trouble along with actual samples of bad fuel, so as to compare different forms of contamination.

The results of this survey and any data from fuel samples collected will be published on the Web this summer.

Please forward this announcement to anyone who might have info for the study.

Please contact me via email at alovert@b100.org

Localizing Biodiesel: A Biodiesel Co-ops Conference
July 13-15, 2007
Colorado School of Mines
Golden, CO
www.b100.org

The second Biodiesel Co-ops Conference is slowly taking shape. We’re expanding to three full days- Friday morning through Sunday night, July 13-15.

We’re working on some other infrastructure arrangements to make it easier for people to attend.

For updated information, such as announcements when registration opens, please sign up for our low-volume email announcements list at www.groups.yahoo.com/group/biodieselconference

If you would like to help organize the event please sign up at our organizers’ list at www.groups.yahoo.com/group/coopconference

More information will be at our website soon: http://www.b100.org

This is a technical conference for volunteer/advocacy groups, small-scale producers, farmers, ‘homebrew’ producers, and educators, and a strategy conference for other local-scale biodiesel advocates. The event presents biodiesel groups and co-ops from a ‘case studies’ perspective, telling in their own words the real-world challenges that biodiesel advocates have faced. The technical side of the event includes detailed discussion of topics such as quality control, organizing volunteers, setting goals for volunteer groups, methanol recovery, funding sources for educational groups, safety in production, side streams disposal, and equipment design.

Attendees are encouraged to learn how to make biodiesel at the event- we run ‘remedial biodiesel’ test-batch classes in the lab, where you can get your hands on the actual process, and some attendees are bringing process equipment to display. We build in a lot of ‘down time’ for mingling and conversations, so as to provide experienced biodiesel producers and advocates with time for off-line networking. Meals and dorm rooms are available, with the tourist downtown of Golden and some hiking trails just blocks away from the conference site. There is a networking party on-site on Saturday night.

Some of the presentations from last year’s conference are located at
http://www.b100.org/presentations
some photos of the event are located here: utahbiodieselsupply.com

Conference presentation themes (or ‘tracks’) will include:

Case Studies
Distribution
Education & Advocacy Groups
Homebrewing Biodiesel & The Law
Biodiesel Feedstocks

Strategies For Community-based Biodiesel Groups:

In recent years, biodiesel has become an attractive option for individuals seeking a renewable alternative to petroleum. However, what many see as a fuel with great potential for imminent development continues to elude many American consumers. The greater biodiesel industry targets fleet customers rather than passenger car drivers, or focuses on selling low-level blends of biodiesel in petro-diesel fuel rather than pure biodiesel (B100).

Often, would-be users of B100 have no choice other than to take matters into their own hands at the neighborhood level; organizing as cooperatives, small businesses, nonprofit organizations, or simply hobbyist clubs. Although a decentralized, cooperative model of fuel distribution is an exciting prospect for many people, actually making it work in today’s economy has proved difficult.

Learn what different groups are doing to bring biodiesel to their communities and how they have overcome some of the challenges faced. This conference presents speakers from many different types of biodiesel groups and small biodiesel businesses. Sessions will be question-and-answer and discussion-based, covering the nitty-gritty details of how these groups have operated from both a technical, equipment, and organizational standpoint.

In panel discussions, we will present ‘case studies’ from many different types of biofuels groups, including in-depth analyses of the strategies they used, some of which that have been successful, others of which may have struggled, failed, and evolved.

This is an exciting opportunity to learn about the ‘grassroots’ biodiesel movement in the US, and how you can get involved in developing a successful cooperative biodiesel movement in your own community!

The conference will include optional dormatory housing and on-campus meals, and we will strive to set a low cost for the registration fee.

We hope to see you at the event or on the organizing committee,

Maria ‘Mark’ Alovert
Graydon Blair
John Bush
Jon Meuser

In other news, we’ve been making progress on the 2007 Biodiesel Co-ops Conference. I’m writing up some literature/website updates for it, and remembering how INTENSELY fun and fantastically useful it was. It’ll be even better this year since we’re holding it at the same place, and know our way around the college organization now, and have a better vision of how the event should run. Our core committee worked very well together and we’re starting to conference-call, group-email, figure out structure and vision and all that jazz. I love getting a nice long head start on things like this.

For the past month I’ve been working my butt off trying to update parts of my book that are sorely out of date. Homebrewing technology has gotten much more efficient in the last few years, and I haven’t done a major update in a long time other than correcting some numbers now and again without running a ‘new edition’. I have articles in the last edition that are from 2002 or earlier.

Writing is like pulling teeth sometimes. I’m absolutely amazed at how long it takes to phrase something on paper compared to explaining it in front of a class. For instance, it’s 4:30 in the morning right now- I’ve been up all night, having slept all day- and I have just spent two hours on an overview of washing, a subject that I usually cover in class in about 30 minutes. I guess a small amount of hand waving and terrible sketches with whiteboard marker actually goes a long way. I think I would have been a good Italian, judging by how much I rely on talking with my hands.

In other news, the damn thing is just about done. I thought I was done a few days ago, but the absence of updated washing and drying started glared at me when I started layout. I think I’ll be done with it tonight, that is, if the latte I just made, at 4:30 in the morning, does right by me. On the one hand, I hate the editing marathon that’s part of this process. On the other hand, I feel such as sense of accomplishment every time the damn thing’s done. I’ve gotten so little ‘accomplished’ lately while dealing with Health that this should boost my sense of self-worth a bit.

In the past month, everything has been constantly interrupted by my health battle- I have been quietly raging, feeling like I’m watching the world pass me by. I was supposed to be building things, sewing things, wiring things, building up a new bicycle, and otherwise enjoying being home, but it’s all been shelved by the damn Lyme bugs for the past month.

As I’ve said multiple times this month in the blog, I started out in late December with a major Lyme crash, spent about 10 days crawling through hell clutching my pills, trying to get better, was in fantastic shape for about 2 1/2 weeks. I felt so great that I went out dancing with Jennifer Radke last weekend- this initiated a major setback for a few days. I recovered from that mini-crash just in time to experience a whole new level of Hell with mercury chelation. I lost a few days this week not being able to get out of bed, because I’ve finally started the drugs to get mercury out of my system. It’s kicked my ass- I literally have been so tired that I’ve been unable to focus on reading for more than five minutes without slipping into sleep. Then I slip off into sleep and get soaked in sweat- that’s a good thing while detoxing, but I don’t have the energy to walk 1/2 a mile to the gym and do the sweating in the sauna.

Luckily, falling asleep is at least easy, since I don’t really get out of bed in the first place. I’d hate to imagine what this is like for someone who still has a job or kids to take care of!

The metals chelation program also means that I have to eat weird-extremely low-fat diet for a few days, eat a lot of raw foods, and take other supplements for the detox process constantly. I had no idea I could get such bad cravings for avocado and eggs-me and low-fat really don’t get along. Good thing I’m not awake very much to experience this or to watch The Boyfriend eat normal food. He brings me food with the thinnest, homeopathic slivers of avocado on it and I pitch a mock fit like a cranky 4-year old (with the sailor’s mouth of a Girl Mark).

Luckily, me having a class in Houston coincided with the ‘feeling great’ phase of things, and I think I have a pretty good handle on how to continue the improvement (the mercury detox is once every two weeks for a few months, oh how fun- I hope it gets easier than this!).

One major positive note is that I was in a lot of pain for about a month, which in the last week has gone away COMPLETELY with the use of herbs. I’m just about at my wits’ end with boredom, too- , what I really need right now is a social life, so that I can think about something other than biodiesel, my book, and my immune system, but my energy level is so bad that I can’t really go out and have a social life.

Biodiesel Beginners and Advanced classes: Biodiesel Boot Camp

I’m teaching biodiesel homebrewing during two weekends in Febuary. You
can take either one or both weekends’ classes.

Locations: both of these are in Berkeley, CA-

Beginner class: Feb 17-18
Dwight Way near Sacramento Ave, hours:10-4
possible repeat of this class to take place in Oakland on Feb 23-24 -
email me if interested, I can only offer it if I get a minimum of 5
people in the class.

Advanced class: Feb 24-25
Ashby Ave near San Pablo, hours: 9-5

Each class is $120, register at www.girlmark.com/tour

if interested in the Thur-Fri session of the beginner class, please
email me at classregistration@girlmark.com

**********************
Feb 17-18: two-day class for beginners, no previous experience
necessary. This is similar to the classes I normally teach every few weeks.
10-4 both days, Berkeley (Dwight Way near Sacramento Ave)
may be repeated in Oakland on Feb 22-23

The beginners’ class includes hands-on biodiesel chemistry, and an
opportunity to build an Appleseed biodiesel processor if you want to buy
a B100supply.com kit of parts for one. The class will include an
introduction to equipment design, quality testing, quality control, the
scientific process, common pitfalls, recovery from emulsions, the
factors that influence ‘conversion’, drawbacks and advantages of
biodiesel, and discussions of biodiesel versus solvent thinning or SVO
technologies. You will make some common ‘engineered failures’ and learn
what they mean. Basic safety practices are stressed.

You may use this basic class as a prerequisite for attending the
advanced class the following weekend.

***********************

Feb 24-25: Advanced Class:
Two-day advanced class covering in great detail many new things that I
(and others) don’t normally teach.

I will NOT be offering this class very frequently as there is limited
interest in advanced topics.

I am also offering this class in Saginaw, MI in June and in
Chambersburg, PA in May or June (dates to be announced at my website)

************************
Advanced class details:

For the advanced class, I’d like you to have some experience (see end of
post for prerequisites). If you are new to biodiesel you can certainly
use the beginner class the prior weekend as a prerequisite.
The advanced class is longer than the regular class- 9-5 instead of 10-4.

The advanced class includes:
quality control in much more detail than ‘regular’ beginners’ class
analysis of real-world problems with offspec biodiesel
acid-base biodiesel process, for making biodiesel out of high-FFA oil
advanced topics in dewatering
testing for soap and what it is useful for
methanol recovery and equipment design
testing recovered methanol for purity
waterless washing with Amberlite and Magnesol
slightly larger-scale equipment design (for co-ops or small farms, etc)
Treating wash water and glycerine for disposal
testing wash water and glycerine, real-world test results related to
biodegradability
in-depth disposal/sidestreams discussion
burning glycerine safely for energy
hydronic applications for biodiesel and wash water heating
More advanced discussion of safety and disaster preparation and
prevention scenarios for larger-scale processor systems, discussion of
regulatory topics for non-commercial producers larger than homebrew.
Solar applications for reducing energy inputs in production
very through discussion/demonstration of several different options in
washing, including drawbacks and advantages of them

********************

No prerequisites for Beginners class Feb 17-18- no experience necessary,
come on down

********************
Prerequisites for advanced class:
Advanced Class Feb 24-25: Prior experience required. I’m taking the
unusual step of asking that you guys put a LOT of time into prep for
this class if you are not already a homebrewer, and ask that you not
come if you can not take the time to prepare. I want to make sure it’s a
high-quality discussion for advanced students (some of whom are flying
in from out of town), and am restricting attendance by experience, for
this reason.

this class is restricted to:
either:
1)-folks who are already homebrewing (see caveat at end of post about
sources of information)

2)-folks with a LOT of experience with research AND making multiple
1-liter test batches (and it’s OK if you get that experience between now
and the class time, I would like you to have about 5-6 sessions of
making a liter batch, washing it, and testing it under your belt-and to
bring these batches in, so we can “grade your homework"- to get started
now see www.biodieselcommunity.org)
3)-folks who don’t homebrew but have taken a previous hands-on class
with one of the following instructors, or a class from somebody else who
teaches from the biodieselcommunity.org ‘curriculum’ and keeps up with
recent developments in homebrewing in the past year:
myself, Jennifer Radtke, Kalib Kersch, “BioLyle” Rudensey, John Bush,
Piedmont Biofuels folks, Matt Steiman
note: If you have only attended a class but not homebrewed, and it’s
been a while, I would like you to brush up by making a test batch or two
and trying to wash it to completion so you can bring it to class Feb 24th.

4) students attending the Biofuel Oasis advanced course the previous
week (those people only, may also attend just Day 1 of the beginners
class, since they can’t come to both days because of our schedules
conflicting)

Note: Please note that if you primarily work from information from
journeytoforever.org or From the Fryer To The Fuel Tank or from a manual
from Fuelmeister or a similar plastic processor or plans you bought on
eBay, AND if you do not regularly read the quality testing/quality
control side of the Infopop/Yahoo Biodiesel/Yahoo
Biodieselbasics/Biodieselnow homebrewing forums, you may have a lot of
inaccurate information to unlearn.
I very much invite you to attend but I’d like you to do some extra
reading first to catch you up on what’s wrong with those sources.
B100supply.com (quality pages and ‘best of the forums’ section), and
biodieselcommunity.org are good places to start, and
biodiesel.infopop.cc has exceedingly good information these days in the
various forums.

To sign up, please see www.girlmark.com/tour

I had a dream this morning about the DIY SKillshare Conference, an event I helped organize for three years.

I’d moved to California in 2000, having already started the Skillshare fires going- I had found an organizing committee on a prior visit of mine a few months before I actually moved here, and set a date for the event- and it was an awesome way to move to a new town with a bang. The event was a four-day extravaganza of do-it-yourself workshops on practical skills topics, and brought several hundred people to town for classes as varied as biodiesel, greywater, medical topics, methane digesters, making DIY Sex Toys, food-related topics, as well as a few mini-workshops on stuff like Bust Your Nuts (breaking fasterners loose), knot tying, and Using A Circ Saw Safely. I LOVE being overbusy and this was a fantastic challenge. At the last Skillshare I ran a four-day/four-hours/day biodiesel course, with several shorter classes that I taught in the afternoons. I think the effects of the whole conference percolated throughout the West Coast anarchist scene for a few years.

Damn, I want to do this again.

I had a nice discussion on Friday with Dann, one of The Crucible folks about this- he was around for the last Skillshare, which we did at the Crucible shortly before they moved out of Berkeley to Oakland. Dann wrote a fantasy Tribe.net post a few years ago suggesting a transformation of Burning Man into Learning Man, a Skillshare-type event. Im not sure if Skillshare is relevant anymore in light of Makers’ Faire and also anarchist Skillshare knockoffs, but dammit, I want to do a gathering like that again.

As of this weekend it’s been a year since I"ve been doing the touring biodiesel class roadshow. In the beginning of December I slowed it down, and am still trying to mostly stay at home, as a year of constant flying all around the country every 10 days wreaked havoc on my social life. Of course just as I write this I’m planning more classes for this spring. Ugh.

Mark

upcoming dates in Satanica’s Diabolical Cooking Show includes:

Berkeley Biodiesel Beginners class: Feb 17-18
Berkeley Advanced class: Feb 24-25
Seattle, WA, March 17-18
Phoenix, AZ Apr 14-15
For more info:
www.girlmark.com/tour

Holy cats, I just got my blood test results for immune system issues. I’ve got a CD-57 killer cell count of 23. This is a diagnostic test that looks at something in the immune system that’s depressed by Lyme and not much else.

‘Normal’ is 200. I wonder how bad it was before all the antibiotics.

Eek.

I’m actually posting about this because it’s incredibly useful as a diagnostic for Lyme, and few doctors know about it, and I occasionally hear from blog readers that they’ve got family members in the same boat as I was in. CD-57 is one of the ways to measure the progress of antibiotic treatment for Lyme and minimise the risk of relapse due to quitting antibiotics too soon.

see here:

http://www.lymenet.org/drbguide200509.pdf

It’s been less than three weeks since I started to take the Buhner herbal protocol to deal with my Lyme relapse.

Today, I actually felt 100% normal again. I don’t expect that this means that I am ‘completely better’ - based on how other patients respond to this treatment protocol, I’m predicting a few relapses of shorter duration, and I’m guessing it’ll be a year of this- but it’s absolutely amazing to me that this terrible disease can be managed without the antibiotics.

The Buhner herbal protocol works well in conjunction with antibiotics, but at the moment I’m just trying to aim for symptom management without bringing out the chemical pharmaceuticals- it’d certainly be easier on the side effects.

There’s actually a pretty substantial amount of evidence that certain powerful herbs such as the ones I’m taking work better than antibiotics, or better than other pharmaceutical drugs, for some pretty serious illnesses, including some drug-resistant bacteria, many viruses, and some parasites.

For example, one of the herbs I’ve been taking has been shown to improve outcomes in HIV treatment- it makes AZT work better than either AZT or the herb alone- and another one of the herbs I’m taking works wonders on chloroquine-resistant malaria.

Another simple herb that I’m taking for Lyme and potentially for bartonella- a tea that I sometimes take for ordinary flu- was successfully used to save lives during the 1918 flu pandemic by MD’s who used botanical medicine- at a time when ‘The Regulars’, the medical tradition which comprised the AMA at the turn of the century- were busy treating the pandemic flu by making people drink mercury ("calomel"). America got rid of the botanical MD’s through a variety of means when the mercury-prescribers started the AMA and left the botanical doctors out of it for political reasons (thank God they eventually stopped using mercury as a drug)

Pandemic flu, in case you’ve been under a rock this past year, is a virulent outbreak of extremely serious flu, similar to what we’re going to get once bird flu hits on a large scale and Tamilflu fails. It’s the stuff that kills perfectly healthy people in their 20’s, not just the elderly and the immune compromised. It sweeps through human populations every few decades, such as the bird flu version floating around Asia at the moment threatening to erupt into the virulent form and hit the US. Tamilflu is notoriously ineffective and it seems to be the ONLY tool in the box at the moment in the US. We’re screwed when this thing flares up again. The next time around.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading about historical uses of herbal medicine by the 19th century American physicians known as the Eclectics (that’s where the pandemic flu info came from). I’ve been researching pandemic flu as part of general disaster preparedness group I"m in, and absolutely nothing I’m finding says that we’re prepared for the next big one- and we’ve lost much of the diagnostic knowledge to tackle it as the Eclectics did (their complex diagnostic methods resembled the pulse readings of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and they prescribed different medicine for different patients based on types of symptoms rather than just which infectious organism they were afflicted by).

There are some aspects of health care that the mainstream medical establishment is great at- sewing people back together- but in this country we’re only using half the tools in the box by focusing only on pharmaceutical, single-constituent drugs, ignoring nutrition and stress and immune support, and wasting some of our most powerful drugs, particularly antibiotics. We’ve abused them to the point of uselessness, such as the cases of drug-resistant bacteria caused by overuse of antibiotics and the use of antibiotics in factory farming of livestock. It’s not that I want to leave medical treatment to the current population of herbalists only- but I feel a sense of loss that we’re working with one hand tied behind our backs by focusing on single-constituent pharmaceuticals only, when research and evidence shows that infectious diseases are better tackled with a multipronged approach such as that found in the complex compounds of medicinal herbs.

The more I learn about health , the more concerned I am about the coming “fire next time” in the face of emerging infectious diseases.

I suspect we’re going to be going back to botanical medicine on some scale before too long. There’s fairly good evidence that bacteria don’t develop antibiotic resistance to the incredibly complex mix of compounds in these herbs, and a lot of evidence that they include tools for dealing with viruses that we don’t have perfect drugs for yet either. Having seen how well antibiotics work on this disabling illness, I’m furious that we’re wasting them so frivolously.

This made my week:
http://www.giantmicrobes.com/
(there’s a Lyme spirochete in there, although I think my favorites are the Calamities: Ebola, Flesh Eating Bacteria, Black Death, Typhoid, and Mad Cow)

Someone pointed out that her friends bought her the spirochete for Christmas, and she had to restrain herself from buying a bunch of lymphocytes to go after the spirochete.

I haven’t done anything with biodiesel in the past couple of weeks because I’ve been fighting like crazy to get Lyme Disease under control.

I got off my antibiotics around Thanksgiving, spent a month feeling 100% cured, then got slammed rather rapidly a month later. It started with body pains and quickly degenerated to sleeping 13 hours a day and not having energy to go anywhere, exercise, cook, fix things that are broken, or work at the computer. I also picked up new symptoms I didn’t have before, which disturbingly are symptoms of Bartonella, a common tick-borne disease that’s a co-infection in many Lyme patients. I hadn’t tested for coinfections before because I didn’t have symptoms and the tests are notoriously ineffective.

This time around, I decided to experiment. I had about a month before I need to function again, and really didn’t have to do anything until the Houston class, as a matter of fact.

I had just spent a month trying to get over the side effects of antibiotics (ie digestive stuff), so when I got sick again I ignored the antibiotics that I have sitting in the medicine cabinet, and instead went whole hog on the herbal treatment from Stephen Buhner’s book Healing Lyme.

I quickly got a huge energy rush, which I think came from the Eleuthero Ginseng (ie siberian ginseng)- I felt high for several days, kinda uncomfortably- though my pain and other symptoms kept swinging back and forth.

I added a new herb, that (among other things helpful for Lyme) is a treatment for Bartonella- and immediately felt even worse for two days, like I’d been run over by a truck. There’s a theory among Lyme doctors that Lyme Disease can cause the Jarsch-Herxheimer Reaction- a worsening of symptoms when large die-offs of bacteria occur- so this added to my co-infection fears. “Herxes” are a difficult thing to diagnose and evaluate because several different things can cause you to feel bad- treatment failures, a herx, or a side effect in some cases. Often experiencing a ‘herx’ gives people (or doctors) some feedback on a treatment actually working.

I added some herbs for lymph system clearing and instead got swollen lymph nodes. Obviously, a lot has been wrong all along that needs more attention and more time with the generally slow-acting herbs.

I spent a lot of time at home, reading about tick-borne diseases, reading about the immune system, and looking at the clock to see if it was time to take the pills yet.

I got my toxic metals challenge results- and have high mercury somewhere. That’s a long, 6 month+ process of chelating the mercury out- you don’t want to do it quickly or it can’t be excreted and just moves around redistributing to other parts of your body, so I spent an hour on the phone with my doctor planning out how that process is going to take place.

There was an amusing side note to the dreaded metals test- the doctor told me I also tested extremely high in bismuth, which he hadn’t heard of before- he sounded worried and said he’d have to research what makes that happen and how to get rid of it. Then I pointed out that I’d just had Pepto-Bismol that day, which is of course where the bismuth came from.

After about 10 days of religious pill-swallowing, the stronger herbs kicked in and my symptoms became managable again.

I’ve been in good shape for a week now and am rushing around catching up on all the ‘deferred maintenance’ stuff. I’ll be getting the Bartonella test next week, and will decide what to do based on the test results, the results of some immune system killer cell testing I had last week, and on whether I continue to have managable symptoms using just the herbs.

The mercury chelation stuff is going to be expensive- not just the chelators, but all the liver support supplements I’m trying to take to make sure the mercury actually heads out rather than knocking around my system somewhere.

Assuming I can still keep feeling semi-decent, I may decide to experiment with just herbal treatment for a few months- the herbs sometimes seem to work better than the antibiotics, and I already know I had multiple treatment failures with the antibiotics.

I have the luxury of not having to go to a job at the moment, so taking the winter to ‘experiment’ with health seems do-able this time whereas I couldn’t have afforded it last summer.

note: no RSVP needed, just show up:

Algae Bioenergy and local biofuels efforts presentation and lecture
Tuesday, January 9th, 6-9 pm
at Artists’ Television Access, 992 Valencia Street (at 21st), San Francisco
admission free, donations accepted

for more information: classregistration@girlmark.com
transit directions and info: http://www.atasite.org/about/
(please don’t call ATA, they wont’ be able to answer questions about the
talk as we’re just renting from them)

Speakers:
Karri Ving and/or Ben Jordan, San Francisco Biofuels Co-op (http://sfbiofuels.org/)
will present about the SF co-op and City of San Francisco biodiesel initiatives

Kari Lemons of Biodiesel Council of California (http://biodieselcouncil.org/) will present about the BCC’s statewide efforts to support sustainable feedstock production in California

featured speaker: algae researcher Jon Meuser, Ph.D. Candidate - Division of Environmental Science and Engineering, Colorado School of Mines , presenting about algae as a bioenergy feedstock:

Jon’s talk description:

Our society’s inevitable transition to real-time solar energy will
require a symposium of technologies that capture solar energy and
transform it into useable forms, including biofuels. Many biofuels
depend on residues of existing industries like agriculture or forestry
and are generally geographically dependent. However, major
displacement of fossil fuels will require the development of
fuel-specific crops suitable to many regions. Biodiesel is a
renewable, easily mobilized biofuel high in solar-derived energy
density that already represents about 1% of the U.S. diesel market.
Total displacement of the petrodiesel market by biodiesel will require
increases in oil availability not possible with traditional
agricultural crops or byproducts of existing industries. It is
estimated that algae can produce 100x more oil per acre than soy. As
current technical barriers are overcome, biodiesel from algae and
other non-traditional crops will likely alleviate the problem of
feedstock availability and global dependence on petrodiesel.

speaker bio:

A native of California’s central valley, Jonathan Meuser is currently
a graduate student at the Colorado School of Mines (CSM) in Golden,
Colorado studying biological fuel production and identifying organisms
with ideal properties for fuel production. His current research
focuses on the natural biodiversity of photosynthetic fuel production
by algae, including hydrogen and lipids. When he can get out of the
lab, Jon also enjoys teaching the fine art of biodiesel homebrewing
with his mobile biodiesel processor and is a co-organizer of the
Biodiesel Coops Conference (http://www.b100.org) held in July at CSM .

For more information about biodiesel algae, see topics in the
biodieselnow forum: http://www.biodieselnow.com/forums/13/ShowForum.aspx

for more information about this event: classregistration@girlmark.com
**** NO need to RSVP **

ack, I spoke too soon about the Lyme symptoms. I got clobbered today with the exhaustion again. I couldn’t even drive back from the doctor’s office today without pulling over on the side of the road and going to sleep for 2 hours.

Hmmm, what to do, what to do. I have most of January free, so I’m probably going to stay off the antiotics and bombard it with ‘the other stuff’ for a few weeks, and see if I can get it under control without bringing out the antibiotics side effects.

In other news, I’m going in for a session with an IV today- a mercury (and other metals) challenge test. The’ll put me on an IV and inject chelators, chemicals that bind mercury, lead, and other nasty metals that aren’t supposed to be in my body but probably are, then I get a urinalysis to see how much mercury/lead/etc comes out due to the chelating agents.

I’m quite freaked out about it- I did breathe/drink New Jersey for a whole lot of years growing up. I was always aware that our poisonous air and tap water and ghetto food could be poisoning me. I lived downwind of some really intense, grandfathered-in, under-regulated heavy industry, and spent a good chunk of my childhood aware of it, and scared. Today is something like the moment of truth when it comes to that fear.

The point is to figure out why it is I got so sick with Lyme to begin with, and to help figure out how to clear up my remaining Lyme-related problems. My doctor subscribes to the theory that metals, mold, allergies, or other immune system-wreckers have something to do with why some patients get so ill when infected with Lyme, and some don’t. It makes sense, since some people clear Lyme just fine without antibiotics and some don’t , and some people respond to short-term antibiotics and some (like me) don’t.

I’m not scared easily but the thought of what I might learn is flat-out terrifying.

Last night I was out at a Christmas Tree burn, AKA a ‘Loser Christmas’ or ‘Orphan Christmas’ party where we were burning dozens of newly thrown-out Christmas trees in a 300-gallon burn barrel while the THERM crew (I think) ran some sculpture that produced rhythmic stacatto propane explosions laced with color-producing chemicals.

I was being social- I haven’t made it to a Christmas or New Year’s party in years due to the health problems. I was hanging out with various drunken motherless orphan freaks when the spririt came down and told me to make plans to go to Slab City for New Year’s.

It’s a squatter encampment on an abandoned military base in Southern California:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slab_City

The spirit that touched me was in the form of the SPAZ crew, a bunch of ex-roommates of mine from the warehouse on the railroad tracks where I lived in ‘02, who’ve been doing the hippie bus thing for a while (they’re actually not at all hippies- electronic music raver types with a serious DIY bent, but who cares about distinctions?).

I’m not sure what we’re doing in Slab City but there’ll be a few hundred freaks (and apparently tons of retirees camping nearby, weird idea!) for New Year’s, drinking and cooking and doing music, and I haven’t done anything for New Year’s or gone anywhere for anything unrelated to work in quite a while.

Getting out to a gathering is kinda exciting- part of getting over Lyme, and having the energy to get out and be social. Of course the people might turn out to be total idiots. SPAZ is a fun bunch but they’re not “my people". They’re a really eclectic mix of freaky kids with some really intelligent minds among them, and a real family feel to their crew- and a few of them with screws loose as a result of a bit too much drugs or other oddities. I was always amazed at how much the ‘intelligent’ ones managed to tolerate the loose screw people, through thick and thin.

I moved in with them in 2002, to a warehouse of 14 people (one toilet- which actually wasn’t a problem, somehow), because I was drawn to all the creativity and their ability to work together and stick together through thick and thin, which I think they picked up from doing a lot of traveling and doing their own Rainbow Gathering-style, Burning Man-style (they’d roll in their graves to see that comparison!) festival in the woods every summer. I eventually got way, way too sick to live there- I didnt’ know it was ‘just’ Lyme at that point, which was frightening- and moved away (to live with a boyfriend who offered to take care of me) because of this, accompanied by much crying on my part, feeling like I was losing my ability to fend for myself.

Tonight meeting back up with some of the kids was a bit of a cathartic feeling, since I"m doing so much better. About a year ago a bunch of them sent several busloads of volunteers to Louisiana to do Katrina rebuild, and I gave them tools and money and made 150 gallons of fuel for their trip, and I’m hoping to re-start some of the friendships I let slip when I got so ill 4 years ago.

We’ve had about 3 small earthquakes in the past two days, originating about 2 miles from my house, near the Hayward Fault. Everyone’s a bit on edge wondering if this is a precursor to The Big One, or just tension-relieving slippage (which would be nice as it puts The Big One a bit further off in time…)

This morning, one hit while I was deeply asleep after some bad dream about shooting bad guys with a shiny stainless steel gun- in the dream I was shooting with the wrong hand and had started to wonder about it… Last night’s unfortunately timed espresso didn’t help my dreams.

The quake was tiny - our washing machine and the passing trains make more of a racket than the quake. Yet I managed to leap out of bed and was pulling my street clothes on before I actually awoke. When we got a small quake the night before, The Boyfriend had an equally automatic, instinctive reaction- leaping out of his seat to save our roommate’s wobbling bottle of whiskey from atop the shelf where every other, cheaper glass container was wobbling equally.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed, but I seem to put Lyme Disease into remission with just 6 months of treatment. I got off the antibiotics a few weeks ago and once the azithromycin side effects went away, I realized that I feel ‘back to normal’ for the first time.

I’ve been really sick for about 6 years, though what I had wasn’t nearly as bad as what many people with long-term Lyme experience- many of whom end up in wheelchairs or dead of heart disorders brought about by Lyme. In my case, I spent 6 years with extreme exhaustion, feeling exactly like I had the flu (minus the sinus or respiratory symptoms of flu)- extreme exhaustion, sore neck from what was probably Lyme meningitis, roving joint pains, burning sensation on skin, inability to concentrate, a very flu-like feeling of sore eyes, a need to sleep 12 or more hours a day, interlaced with total insomnia occasionally. Ick.

I started antibiotic treatment for Lyme in late April and by Thanksgiving I seem to have gotten back to a 100% ‘normal’ level of functioning, something I haven’t felt in 6 years. It’s fairly unusual for long-term Lymies to respond to antibiotics as quickly as I did, which I credit partially to the vast amount of detoxifying and immune support herbs and drugs that I took at the same time as the antibiotics and the anti-Lyme herbs.

My lyme-literate medical doctor suggested I stay off the antibiotics for a few months and see if anything comes back (with Lyme Disease, it’s not likely to result in a real setback if it does). I’ll be continuing to take the herbal Buhner Protocol for quite a while to come, and there are a couple of blood tests that we’re doing so as to be able to monitor the status of the part of my immune system affected by Lyme.

I wrote up my experience here at this Lyme Disease forum:

http://flash.lymenet.org/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=050189

(note: some terminology:
Buhner Protocol/Buhner herbs :
A treatment regimen described by Stephen Harrold Buhner in the book Healing Lyme. This book is an excellent primer on Lyme Disease or associated tick-borne illnesses, even if you’re not planning on treating the disease herbally (wikipedia.com also has a good primer on Lyme Disease these days).

The herbs in the Buhner book include ones used traditionally in malaria treatment, others studied for their effect on spirochetal bacteria such as gum disease, syphilis, and various tropical relapsing fevers, and immune support herbs that affect the parts of the immune sustem that are impacted by Lyme. Read some of the reader reviews at Amazon for more info on what the book covers:
http://www.amazon.com/Healing-Lyme-Prevention-Borreliosis-Coinfections/dp/0970869630

LLMD= lyme literate medical doctor

CDC Guidelines= the centers for disease control reporting guidelines for Lyme Disease, which prescribe an inadequately short course of antibiotics for controlling Lyme Disease, which are unfortunately responsible for many patients being under-treated today, including my own experience with my original Lyme infection

coinfections= many Lyme patients also have babesia or bartonella or ehrlichia infection, which is difficult to eradicate with antibiotics and produces AWFUL symptoms even worse than Lyme, which luckily I don’t seem to have experienced

brainfog= a common Lyme symptom, meaning an inability to concentrate. It feels exactly like what you feel when you have the flu

Also, we haven’t made an official announcement yet, but the Biodiesel Co-ops Conference is scheduled for the same weekend next summer- mid-July (sorry I dont’ have the calendar dates yet). We’re still waiting for a bit of additional confirmation but it looks like it’s definitely happening at the same location- Colorado School of Mines in Golden, CO.

see http://b100.org for info on last year’s conference, and some presentations from last year

Advanced biodiesel homebrewing class

Feb 24-25, Berkeley, CA, $120

To register: www.girlmark.com/tour

This two-day class presents advanced biodiesel production techniques for those who are already proficient at basic transesterification, or those who have already taken a one- or two-day hands-on class from me or another teacher working from the http://biodieselcommunity.org ‘curriculum’ (such as Jennifer Radtke, John Bush, Steve Fugate, “BioLyle” Rudensey, Piedmont Biofuels, Matt Steiman, and others)

In addition to presenting some of the more ‘advanced’ techniques, this class focuses on teaching better quality control and safer practices, with a focus on the scientific process that goes along with better troubleshooting. We focus on better understanding the variables that affect biodiesel quality, and how to design experiments and troubleshooting protocols to isolate those variables when something goes wrong with your production quality.

Topics covered:

quality control, two-stage acid-base and 80/20 base-base processes, other processes for free fatty acid reduction and quality improvements, advanced dewatering options, some discussion of methanol recovery, ethanol for biodiesel production, advanced equipment topics such as solar heating, larger batches, ‘balance of system’ equipment tricks to make your processing neater, magnesol, etc. There is a hands-on lab component to this class which covers setting up careful experiments, as well as covering advanced topics in testing- soap tests, soap neutralisation, testing recovered methanol for purity and various methods of increasing purity of methanol or ethanol, dealing with unknown strengths of methoxide or other common mistakes, safer mixing of KOH and methanol, fire safety, glycerine acidulation and purification, glycerine burning for process heat, proper composting tricks, better handling of wash water.

There will be some pre-requisite reading required for the class (about 50 pages).

The Biodiesel Homebrew Guide Version 11 should be available shortly and will include some of the material to be covered in the class. This book will be available for sale at the class for $15 or online at www.localb100.com/book.html

Other advanced workshops offered by others:

My class is strictly about small-scale production and does not cover activist topics (such as ‘how to start a co-op’) or business topics (such as permitting). For activist biodiesel presentations, please attend the July 2007 Biodiesel Co-ops Conference in Colorado (http://b100.org should have information soon), and for permitting and larger-scale production topics, please see the Iowa State University course at http://www.me.iastate.edu/biodiesel .

This Berkeley class is also scheduled to follow an unrelated five-day Intensive course taught by owners of the Biofuel Oasis fueling station, called ‘How to Start Your Own Biodiesel Station’ . For more information about the Oasis distribution class, please see www.backyardbiodiesel.org/classes.html. The Oasis Intensive is a separate project, please apply to the two classes separately. For info on my advanced production class, please see www.girlmark.com/tour

I’m doing somewhat of a survey, trying to figure out if there’s interest in an advanced topics homebrewing class, just for people who are no longer beginners. This class will most likely be in Berkeley, CA.

I’m also considering a 4-day class- the first two days being my normal beginners class, followed by two days of the proposed new ‘advanced’ class. The second half of this proposed two-day class would be open to folks who no longer need the first two-day beginners’ portion.

Please weigh in if youre interested, over at INfopop:

http://biodiesel.infopop.cc/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/419605551/m/8671046871?r=8671046871

A couple of days with old friends in Florida at the end of my three week outing to the East Coast turned my world upside down and inside out. I got home last night and I’m not sure I’m really back on dry land yet. My brain is still stuck in tour mode and my subconscious is still wondering what time I need to be at that goddamn airport or where tonight’s motel is. Thank God it’s over, it’s been literally months of instability, and it’s all over, and my life is mine again, all mine, mine, mine.

The timeline is that I left in early August, taught classes and traveled till mid September, got back home just in time to move out of my house on Oct 15th, which was a ‘just in time’ to prepare for the November trip. I got a month+ sublet near the airport, far from where everything else I do is located, which just added to the feeling of disconnectedness. Yesterday I got back from three long weeks on the road, the last outing on my 11-month touring phase, and, again, I cant believe it’s all over. I swear, I’ve been saying for years on this blog that all I really want out of life is a desk, and the stint in the sublet followed by this wonderful but way-too-long East Coast trip was a nasty disruption in my stable relationship to a desk.

So now that I’m back, I’m moving in with The Boyfriend this week, as soon as another roommate clears out completely and a massive roommate shuffling/re-painting/moving of stuff takes place, which means I soon get to set up a proper home office again, and not in the middle of my bedroom for that matter. And in the midst of this major change I’m not really back from orbit and feel like I’m still not really there because it’s been so many weeks of instability and floating and traveling. I’ve shut off voicemail and told everyone I"d be back in contact and working on projects again on the 15th.

It’s also been almost a year that I’ve been almost constantly on the road. I had a dysfunctional injured hand most of that time so teaching was a job that made sense. Now that I can type again I’m dropping the crazy travel and going back to consulting and a few other biodiesel tricks I have up my sleeve.

So, this last weekend in Florida was the last of the traveling classes for a while- I’m teaching in Houston at the end of January and am talking to folks about a class in Seattle sometime later in the winter, but otherwise I’m done with the ridiculous amount of traveling and flying for the moment. I"m hoping that the next installment of ‘traveling to teach elsewhere’ will take place in The Van, not via airports, and not till the end of the spring, which of course means that I get to take a desk on the road with me and can function better.

Let me repeat- I’ve been ‘touring’ for almost a year, where I’ve barely seen my home life and couldn’t sit still long enough to do anything but teach. For a while last winter/spring I was going out every 10 days, sometimes for 2 weeks at a time, with just a few days at home in between. Fuck I hope I never do THAT foolishness again.

I’m still out in orbit somewhere, not quite back to reality, I haven’t plugged into my so-called normal Bay Area life and I’m still spinning in the stories from the last week in Florida. Some funny things happened here at home today, as I try and attempt my splashdown back in the Bay Area and reacquaint myself with stability, home, and Having a Life.

The Boyfriend and I went grocery shopping this evening, and the mundane act of being in a grocery store shopping was so alien, like I"d forgotten what it is that Im supposed to eat. I found myself staring at everything in the store like I was seeing it for the first time. I know there are some poor souls out there who find themselves feeling lost and confused when they enter a grocery store, but I’m a major foodie and therefore this shouldn’t be my problem.

Later on, we were talking about cooking a large batch of stew that should last us till Tuesday or Wednesday, and I realized that somewhere in the back of my head, some part of me was already automatically leafing through an internal calendar, trying to remember if I’d still be in town then to eat it then. No, no , no, I’m back, I’m home, I’m not going anywhere. I’m in town. I’m done.

When you cross the Georgia/Florida state line , I believe you leave the South and re-enter New Jersey, which you may have left 800 miles ago, just north of the Mason-Dixon line.

At the invisible cultural line between Georgia and Florida, they stop putting sugar into the iced tea. (For those unfortunate enough to live outside the South, Sweet Tea is an important cultural innovation which the South ought to share with the rest of the country- iced tea was absolutely nasty until the Southerners discovered that you could make it into a syrup to flavor ice with.) Italians and Jews appear in large numbers, which means real Italian restaurants and real bagel shops. Fried chicken diminishes in prominence, and fried seafood takes it’s place as the state’s official Deepfried Breaded Food Item. Bizarrely, the New Jersey accent re-appears with it’s absurd lack of r’s and the substitution of short a’s for that vowel which the rest of the country thinks should be pronounced as ’short O’. Both Jersey and Florida share a similarly deranged degree of sprawl and development, with ‘dead malls’ (now housing discount stores where the anchor supermarket used to be, for instance) encircled by the newer, larger, outer ring of recent malls. There is a similar Springsteenish back-country rot that’s mostly unseen from the interstate.

But, the weather… I hit I-95 on Thursday, and turned on my ex-band’s recent music (which happens to be full of New Jersey references), and felt a certain euphoria that only overtakes me when I’m on the road and the weather changes for the better. I’m suddenly realizing that I really miss being a snowbird- several times I’ve moved to Tucson for part of the winter, and at the beginning of the 90’s I spent two winters in New Orleans- I think it’s time to try something like that again next winter.

My friend Lu had a great comment about cold and traveling- that your energy balance and ‘food miles’ get much better if you just leave the cold places and hitchhike south for the winter instead of trying to heat your house and spending all winter eating food grown thousands of miles away because it’s too cold to grow a modern diet in the winter where you live.

I can’t say I have the ‘out of season food’ problem where I live in NorCal, but we still can’t grow oranges or avocadoes as well as the Floridians can, not to mention bananas, pineapples, or other subtropical goodies.

Lu has a tendency to shut down the house and hitchike/bum his way to the Carribean (he’s a sailor) or Central America in the winter. Lu’s a crotchety, opinionated young fart from New England who can’t stand cold- as evidence, he once said that all he wants in a girlfriend is “that she own a sleeping bag that zips to his so he can be warm while camping".

When we expressed incredulity that his standards could possibly be that low, he related his experience attending Harvard and living in an unheated basement room in Boston in the winter- ‘I would always try to get a girlfriend starting in November, so that I had someone to warm my bed at night, or who had a room that actually had heat’.

My smartass friends and I turned this story into the phrase ‘November Girlfriend’, meaning someone who gets dated out of convenience, which is a direct correlary to the concept ‘what’s a punk rock guy without a girlfriend? HOMELESS’.

Lu’s joked about calculating the energy balance of hitchiking south for the winter. I’m starting to think of going to a good, local avocado diet someplace warm next winter, someplace subtropical, myself.

I’m in the Piedmont Biofuels Biodually truck, heading down to Florida. By complete coincidence, both Piedmont and I are teaching unrelated biodiesel homebrewing classes down there this weekend, which means that me and Matt Rudolf and two of the interns are driving Clean Tech, the Piedmont educational trailer, down there. It’s at least an 8 hour drive to Jacksonville and I’m picking up a rental car and taking several hours more to get down to Ft Lauderdale, just north of Miami.

The Biodually is a nice IDI Ford truck the Piedmont co-op recently bought, dually wheels and a cavernous crew cab- the days of True Confessions of the Janky Dodge are over for them. Clean Tech is quite heavy and this thing seems like a safer handling vehicle to tow it with.

I’m doing a conspicuous display of technology by getting online in the back seat (using a Treo and PDANet to get my laptop online) - when the South Carolina section of I-95 allows me, that is. I haven’t seen Interstate highways this bumpy in 10 years.

Matt’s also in the back seat and I"m watching his laptop screen bounce rhyhmically back and forth. Emily can’t even read a book because we’re being thrown around so badly. Hooray for touch typing. Matt’s trying to decipher the new central american biodiesel standard that’s in the process of being devised, and I’m hiding in headphones, trying to get as much Stephan Grappeli and Django Reinhardt stuck into my head before the Christmas carols that will be blared at every store in the next month drive me nuts.

I have one more week of this traveling bullshit and then I"m heading home. I get quite a bit of free time in Florida, actually, between the end of the class and the show I"m going to. I’m considering driving to Key West on Monday and exploring this old rock quarry that used to be on Sugarloaf Key when I last visited a dozen years ago, or figure out some way to go sailing that day or something tourist-like.

Today I just couldn’t drag myself out of bed for very long. I"m still at Lyle and Tami’s place and Rachel from Piedmont Biofuels came over for dinner tonight, and halfway through the after-dinner beers and kitchen table conversation I had to drag all of them away from the kitchen table so I could go lay down on the nearby couch and try to continue the socializing from there. It’s really amazing- I cant’ make the tiredness go away even with coffee, and I feel like I"ve been up for days or something in spite of having gotten plenty of sleep.

I’ve been absolutely exhausted for about two months now, was assuming it was just burnout, or that it had to do with fighting off a flu that had swept through my boyfriend’s household in the beginning of November (somehow I breathed the germs in for two weeks while he was deathly sick with it and I never got it, but it sure felt like fighting the bug). I was certainly quite ill with the East Coast version of flu last week, and then had an intense weekend of high-energy requirements for my class- maybe I’m just having adrenaline drop after Sunday’s otherworldly performance high.

I’ve been on antibiotics for Lyme Disease for 6 months now and am about to stop (I think) when I get back home. Quite by chance, when I showed up in North Carolina, Tami and Lyle’s kids had just started coming down with what looked like whooping cough and the family was on their way to Canada for the weekend, so their doctor prescribed the kids the same kind and dose of antibiotic that I’m on in case they turned out to have the disease. When they turned out to not have this terrible illness, Tami gave me the antibiotics to add to my own stash.

It was a different brand of generic than I’ve been taking. I looked at the paperwork that came with it- which was much more thorough than the Costco side effects writeup I’d been getting- and realized that ‘fatigue’ was listed as a side effect. So now I"m wondering if that’s what my problem has been for the past couple of months? Azithromycin generally doesn’t have many side effects. I went on it in August after a couple of months on Doxycycline made me turn into a sunburnt albino in spite of my normally sunburn-resistant olive skin, and I got sick of puking all the time, but I I’ve felt a little toxic ever since I started on the Azithromycin.

It’s so tricky following the Lyme issues. I’m planning on getting off antibiotics and getting onto the herbal treatments that have been working for a lot of patients (for some introductory information on this, see the book Healing Lyme by Stephen Buchner)- but now I’m out in the middle of no-where wondering if I should quit the drugs now, since I have to be functional next week for the drive to Florida and another two classes next weekend. Argghhh…

You heard me, biofuels social life. As in, there’s no such thing. At least not by normal standards- sitting around with homebrewers and talking about clogged bag filters and which brand of purple degreaser works best doesn’t count.

Now that I’ve set you straight, I did spend the evening here in North Carolina socializing with Leif and having beers with Matt. Not that that’s a social life or anything- me and Matt’s talk at the bar included a discussion of castor bean (as in castor oil) toxicity and the harvesting/processing methods for making palm oil, biodiesel/SVO in Cuba (please tell me it’s happening there?), and the mixing problems with 1,000 gallon batches.

But this evening’s theme was also about our collective lack of social life due to our involvement in biofuels, and coping strategies for dealing with this.

The guys discussed the fact that Leif had once dated a girl who somehow remained completely illiterate about biodiesel throughout the relationship - Matt was amazed that Leif could keep his mouth shut about biodiesel at home, or something like that.

I pointed out that I have strict rules about ‘no talking about biodiesel in bed’ or ‘no talking about biodiesel after 8′, because my last two long-term relationships were with other homebrewers, one of whom was also insanely obsessed with the subject, and there had to be some sort of rule so I could still feel like a normal person occasionally and not the full-time clogged-bag-filter-discusser that I actually am. I do get upset and enforce the rule by getting violent on the offender if he mentions the stuff.

We pondered whether it’s healthier to have boundaries like this or not, and how it is that some people in the scene seem to feel no need to turn off the biodiesel discussion. Jennifer Radtke for example doesn’t seem to ever get self-conscious about talking about biodiesel at the inappropriate time (I dont know about what she has to say about it after hours, maybe she dates non-biodieselers and it’s a nonissue after the rest of us leave and go home ). I’m acutely self-conscious about it when it comes up at inappropriate times, like when you’re supposed to be ‘having a life’ and all.

Matt’s been working the Piedmont Biofuels ‘executive director’ job, which means he’s on-site all day long keeping the co-op/educational program going, training interns, and otherwise stuck in small-town Pittsboro, far beyond full-time. He’s in a unique, intense position and asked me last week if I knew any other full-timer biodiesel co-op employees that he can compare coping strategies with. We actually compared notes on who I know in southeast biodiesel activism that I consider a friend and a peer- I really like Rob Del Bueno from Southern Alliance for Clean Energy in Atlanta, and the Blue Ridge Biofuels kids, both of whom I feel a real connection with both biodiesell-ey and socially. Matt really relates to a small producer friend, Frankie from Pogoil in DC (Frankie’s really great). Of course I come to Piedmont Biofuels for a social-life-in-biodiesel fix- they all understand what my life is like, and I come away feeling recharged and like I’m not totally crazy for living this thing full-time.

We met at the General Store cafe for lunch today and the subject of lack of social life came up. Pittsboro looks to me like it’s about to get a hip social scene for people our age (Leif claims that’s misleading).

Right now it’s a true paradise for the 40something back-to-the-land white ex-hippie crowd (see The Boyfriend’s impression of it a couple of blog entries back)- and the college sustainable/organic agriculture program attracts lots of ernest 19-year-olds, but it seems a bit lonely for people in between- Leif for example lives in hip Carrboro 20 minutes away and commutes down to P’boro, and manages to have a balanced social life as a result- and Matt and I talked about how to attract a social scene here to complete the Piedmont monopoly on well-rounded working environments (hot damn, you should see the amazing eco-industrial park they’ve built- it’s an incredible workplace).

I suggested that what the town needed was a good commune- an Ecovillage or something. Turns out they’d already thought of that- apparently the Piedmont Biofuels real estate empire tried to buy some property near the Piedmont Industrial site but lost it to a developer. (it would actually have worked perfectly for the Ecovillage concept, as there are sustainable dream jobs next door at the spectacular Piedmont Industrial eco-industrial park and the site is walking distance from town, unlike the Piedmont co-op/farm site). I suggested buying a large house in town and creating a simpler group household for the Piedmont Biofuels intern/employee set. Any takers, anyone? I’m not planning on moving back to NC, myself, but if I was, I’d think Pittsboro’s eco-local economy to be a a damn fine little corner of it. If Pittsboro had had this project back when I was leaving Asheville to find meaningful activist projects, I would have come here in a heartbeat.

I’m on the road for three more weeks, then heading home in time to move. The extended trip out of town is the vestiges of a planned tour that I’d aborted a while back, when, during the planning stage, too many possible schedules ran into conflicts with the holidays- leaving me with this strange three weekends in the Southeast.

I just taught a weekend in South Carolina last week, got sick with the flu so a week flew by in between classes, then taught in North Carolina yesterday and today with Matt Rudolf of Piedmont Biofuels- we billed the class as a small-size farm system class, and managed the most elaborate 2-day workshop I’ve ever pulled off. Up next I’m working on some methanol recovery fun-and-games at Piedmont’s co-op system and in three days Matt and I are jumping in a truck and driving 12 hours to Florida, where by coincidence, both of us are teaching unrelated workshops in various parts of the state (mine’s in Ft Lauderdale on Dec 1 and Dec 2-3) . After the Ft Lauderdale class I hang out in Fla for a few more days and go see my ex-band (from NYC) play in Orlando or somewhere like that. So I’m traveling with all these suitcases full of lab gear, some tools, mechanic coveralls for when I do some plumbing or welding over at Piedmont Biofuels, and a really sexy red dress for going dancing in at the end of the trip.

I’m simultaneously dreading all the driving and waiting and couch-surfing, and excited to actually get my full 2 weeks here in the Carolinas (though the flu took up like 5 days of it). I come here to North Carolina a lot, and it’s usually a whirlwind trip of flying in to RDU, running to Piedmont Biofuels for lunchtime gossip, followed by a 5-hour drive to another town or state to teach. I keep a big pile of teaching supplies in Lyle’s pole barn, which makes the classes around here really easy- come to Lyle’s, scrape the wasps and spiders off the tubs of titration kits and labware, throw them in the rental car, drive… and drive, and drive, somewhere else.

Theoretically I"m taking a break from flying to class locations for a while. I’m not sure how well this break will actually work out since I am already talking to folks in Seattle and Phoenix about other classes this spring, but I am burnt to a crisp on the traveling and really need a few months at home.

I have a few biodiesel homebrewing classes coming up soon:

Clemson area, South Carolina:
November 18 and 19th - two separate classes on biodiesel homebrewing and biodiesel equipment building. YOu can still get processor parts from me to build a processor in the Sunday class. Contact me at classregistration@girlmark.com for details

Pittsboro, NC, with Matt Rudolf of Piedmont Biofuels- we scheduled this two-day class during Thanksgiving weekend, oops. It’s on Nov 25-26 and covers SMALL farm-scale production (we have nothing too useful to report about oilseed processing, by the way, but we’ll tell you lots about making biodiesel)

Ft Lauderdale, FL:
Dec 1 one-day slightly condensed version of the regular weekend class
Dec 2-3 comprehensive biodiesel homebrewing class with an equipment build at the end

For more info, see www.girlmark.com/tour

Here’s a ‘trip report’ Tom wrote about his part of the trip:

Organic Farms, Biodiesel, and Local Production

My girlfriend and I did a 4000 mile roadtrip over 14 days in September,
and still trying to actually see things and visit with people. Mark

bought a new van in Boston - a 1998 Savana, same year and model as mine
- and needed to bring it back to the West coast, so I flew out there to
accompany her back. We had talked about heading on a scenic trip through
Canada, but then we changed it around to visit a bunch of farms and
biodiesel plants spread across the nation. Biodiesel activism is her
thing, and she has spend literally thousands of hours talking with
people online about everything even tangentially associated with
biodiesel. As a result, everywhere we went, people enthusiastically
gave us tours of their farms and plants, as well as invited us to their
dinner tables.

First stop: New Hampshire, and Tuckaway/Sheltering Rock Farm. It’s
about a 220 acre organic farm, with a desire to become a CSA (community
support agriculture, people that deliver those “veggie boxes") in the
next couple of years, but for now, they just grow enough for several
farmers markets, and have a very large field for horses. Fresh corn and
blueberries - yum!

Dorn Cox, the son of the owner, is in his mid-30’s and is growing about
4 acres of sunflowers as a pilot project with UNH to see just how much
oil can be crushed out of the seeds, after which the oil can be made
into biodiesel and used to power all the farm equipment. Dorn spent
some time down in Argentina, where many farmers have been growing oil
crops (like soybeans) in order to power their farm equipment, with the
remainder being fed to cattle. Down there, they’ve figured out that if
you set aside about 10% of your land to grow oil crops, you should have
about enough to get by, regardless of the number of acres you have.
Oddly enough, this is about the same percentage as used to be set aside
to grow feed crops for oxen and horses. The more things change, …

Farmers and biodiesel make lots of sense. By separating themselves from
the vagaries of the oil markets, they can quote prices on next year’s
harvest without worrying that they’ll lose it all to rising fuel costs.
Even if they have to pay tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of
dollars to build a plant, the farmers seem to think it’s worth it even
if they don’t save any money over diesel – just knowing exactly what
their costs will be next year for fuel gives them a significant
competitive advantage over other farmers, as they don’t have to quote
high prices just in case fuel is expensive next year.

Also, almost all farm equipment is already diesel, and so can run
biodiesel without modification (though, occasionally, there are
incompatible seals or fuel hoses, which need to be eventually replaced,
but biodiesel works in _all_ diesel engines without modification).
Finally, farmers know how to weld, plumb, and do all the other tasks
needed to set up a small-scale plant, unlike most hippies that just
heard about this “biodiesel stuff, can I make it myself and save money?”
(quick answer: no, it rarely makes economic sense on a micro scale, like
for your VW bus).

Why don’t they just buy futures, and hedge against rising prices with
the markets? After all, that’s what they’re for, right? Well, turns
out you can get crude oil futures into 2011, but futures for crude oil
refined into gasoline is only offered months in advance, not years.
Check it out: gasoline futures are only offered to January 2007
http ://sites3.barchart.com/pl/vsn/quote.htx?sym=HUV6&mode=i
… and diesel, which is tied to home heating oil, can only be hedged to
March 2008:
http ://sites3.barchart.com/pl/vsn/quote.htx?sym=HOV6&mode=i

Also, even if you buy crude oil futures every year to 2011, tying up
significant capital on the margin, what if fuel is $120/barrel at that
time? Can you pass the farm onto your offspring with a fighting chance
of staying afloat? Farmers are very long term thinkers, maybe not
10,000 years, but certainly thinking a few decades in advance, and tying
the viability of your farm to a volatile commodity like oil is a bad
proposition in the long run. More than being just a known value,
running your own plant also puts an upper limit on fuel expenses
(something I should have mentioned in the first place).

And finally… a 2M gallon biodiesel plant can fit onto about 1/2 acre,
about the size of The Shipyard, complete with space for loading and
unloading tankers and a gas pump. It’s a pretty simple chemical plant,
maybe a dozen 2000-20000 gallon tanks, so there’s not much complexity or
much to worry about breaking except pumps (which farmers are all too
familiar with already). In the big scheme of things, we’re not talking
about that much effort to make & run a plant in the big scheme of things.

Anyway, back to the farm. Dorn got this cool 1940’s combine that you
tow behind a tractor, and it cuts the heads off the sunflowers, crushes
them, separates the parts through several filters, spins them to get rid
off the chaff, and then someone bags a steady stream of sunflower seeds
that come out of a little nozzle. It was like a Rube Goldberg piece of
equipment on wheels that saved millions of hours when it was first
introduced (which was shortly before this pieces was made, as it was
about 60 years old, but still works). Farm equipment is cool.

Mark and I also read “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” on the trip, and damn if
it hasn’t changed the way we both think about food. Dorn has been
talking to Joel Salatin’s, the
“Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer” that is
highlighted in the book, and they’re going to be modeling their CSA
after Salatin’s farm. Cool stuff, and a highly recommended book that is
so well written I think/hope will change our society (well, it already
has with Whole Foods buying more local produce already, but I think
it’ll change a lot more than that). One quote from Salatin about
selling produce/meat straight to consumers: “don’t you find it odd that
people will put more work into choosing their mechanic or house
contractor than they will into choosing the person who grows their food?”

We spent about 4 days in New Hampshire, hanging out on the farm, before
heading down to Pittsboro, North Carolina. There’s a whole alternative
community down there that is amazingly self-sufficient. I’m not sure
how many people there are in this community, but probably a few hundred
hard-core members, and thousands of more loosely affiliated people.

First off, a signifant number - perhaps half? - of these people have
diesel vehicles and get their fuel from Piedmont Biofuels. Piedmont
Biofuels has been distributing biodiesel to the area for years, but is
about two weeks from the opening of a 1 million gallon/year biodiesel
plant so they’ll be distributed their own biodiesel rather than
bulk-purchased biodiesel. At this size, that’s about two 8000 gallon
tanks of feedstock oil (mostly soybean oil, crushed from soybeans used
for cattle feed) arriving each week. On the output side, they have a
network of 500 gallon fuel tanks spread throughout a 100 mile radius so
that people don’t have to drive far to refuel. Given that fuel is one
of the major costs (including home heating oil, which can be replaced
with biodiesel), just keeping everyone’s fuel costs “in the family” is
really cool.

Lyle Estill, a co-owner of the company (and the guy we were staying
with), is a former homebrewer that has scaled up his operation by
getting almost $1M in funding to make this fully-permitted plant,
complete with 20,000 gallon tanks, explosion proof pumps and wiring.,
750 kw genny, etc. It really raises the bar in my mind as to what’s
possible for us “common folks” can do, separate from the petroleum
industry and their easy access to capital. He also wrote a book about
the startings of the homebrew biodiesel movement, “Biodiesel Power",
which I haven’t read but I hear is in it’s fourth printing, and girl
Mark is prominently featured (to her embarassment - she’s shy about how
many people recognize her and what she’s written, which happened many
times during the trip).

Also, Lyle’s wife, Tami, started a co-op that looks like a small gourmet
grocery store, but carries exclusively organic food, and something like
20% of the food is locally produced. Not just a little produce, beer,
and soap, but whole sections of foods that were manufactured locally.
They got about 1000 people to loan them money to start to co-op, and
they’re been running for about 6 months and are just at the break-even
point. Not the cheapest, but all the profits from the store stays
local, and even more of the community’s expenditures stay local.

Fuel and food distribution is the start, then there’s the deli/coffee
shop, the farmers, the solar contractors, the mechanics, the carpenters,
the body workers… it really is almost a self-sufficient community,
with people actively trying to make it more self-sufficient. Forget the
global economy, bringing it local is the future. I couldn’t help but
think of this as the left’s answer to the mega-churches of the midwest,
now all we need is day care and schools.

What about the economies of scale? Keeping as many products & services
local is sure to be less efficient, and if done on a global scale, might
it actually be bad for the global environment due to the
inefficiencies? For many products, I wholeheartedly agree -
semiconductor manufacturing the best example of economies of mega-scale,
but this also puts the world at global risk whenever a plant goes down
(fire, natural distaster, political reasons, etc). Even so, I keep
hoping it will be possible to make, say, 10,000 transistor microchips in
your shop someday, powered no doubt by the Mr. Fusion home reactor.

But there are economic reasons for bringing manufacturing more local,
foremost being fuel costs. Shipping goods and products is costly, and
manufacturing locally from locally (or regionally) grown products avoids
most of these costs. There are 149 refineries in the US, and this means
that each gas tanker has to drive a long way for each delivery, and each
supertanker has to go a long way to deliver the crude (~2% of crude oil
is burned in transit to refinery).

In homebrew biodiesel, making 30 gallons at a time (very common) is
nonsense economically, and really a hobby like making soap or
hand-churning butter. A 2M gallon per year plant, however, can support
the transportation & heating fuel needs of about 3000 people at current
rates (13M barrels/day for US, 300M people in the US, is 664
gallons/year/person, including all commercial and industrial fuel usage).

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/petroleum_supply_annual/psa_volume1/current/pdf/table_03.pdf

http ://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb0105.html

I think this is probably more like 10,000 people supported by a 2M
gallon per year plant, as consumption will drop as oil prices stay at
$70/barrel or even increase, and things like insulating your house and
buying a new efficient vehicle are cheaper than fueling your 15mpg land
yacht. The new TDI diesel vehicles get 40+ mpg with no performance
drop. This is why 50% of european vehicles are diesel and rising fast
(high sulfur content in US fuel has inhibited penetration here, but
low-sulfur diesel will be at all pumps in the US at the end of the year,
paving the way (ha ha) for more diesel vehicles). And full-size
diesel-electric hybrids are getting about 80 mpg… but I digress…

At that scale and efficiency, biodiesel starts to make sense… a small
community can support itself, and the capital costs aren’t ridiculous
(about $1/gallon yearly production capacity is the industry rule of
thumb, or $100/person). Perhaps 10M gallon/year makes even more sense,
but clearly a 2M gallon/year plant is already financially viable, no
donations required.

But that’s biodiesel as a 100% solution, something it is not - it just
doesn’t scale, as there’s not enough land available for oil crops,
though developing marginal land for rotating oil crops is being explored
(and almost all excess waste oil is already being utilized, mostly for
non-biofuel uses). There’s only 1.5 acres of arable land per person in
the US, which if even 20% is set aside, is only enough for 50
gallons/person/year, or maybe 10% of current needs (that’s based on 160
gallons/acre, which may be high or low depending on the acre, and
there’s no good data for scaled oil production). I like to think of
biodiesel as a 5% solution, not good for everything, but a good start.

But there’s also another dynamic at work, that of centralized control
vs. decentralized. Centralized control is a libertarian bane, giving
control to people that you may not want to trust or rely upon, and is an
issue for both the left and the right. Put another way, what price are
you paying for that efficiency of scale? Keeping operations small -
say, 200 people max - also keeps humans from being part of a faceless
mass working for a multinational company. I’ll pay 10% more ($3.50
instead of $3.20/gallon currently) for biodiesel instead of petrodiesel
to keep everything local, and it won’t affect my standard of living. In
fact, it’ll be at least partially offset from all the positive effects
(carbon neutral for better air, good wages for plant employees (kind of
like fair trade coffee), fewer speed-addicted truck drivers and highway
repaving projects, perhaps fewer wars and resulting deficits under a
republican president, etc).

I think it’s becoming more than a feel-good, consciousness-raising
experiment, but rather a real part of the worldwide energy equation, no
longer “alternative", but actually real. Seeing a 20,000 gallon tank
full of fuel - almost a lifetime of fuel for me - being made every month
by a 4 person company was sure eye opening. That’s a damn fine economic
scale already.

Onwards with the road trip… then there was Blue Ridge Biofuels, 10
guys with little business experience who built a 250,000 gallon/year
plant from mostly salvaged parts and almost zero capital in Asheville,
NC. They also have a strong local following, with people pulling up to
their biodiesel pump: an old tanker truck with rotted tires and weeds
growing around it, “parked” out front with a fuel dispenser pump
attached. They get most of their waste vegetable oil from local
restaurants, but when we showed up, they were really happy that they had
gotten a contract to get all of the fryer oil from artery-clogging food
at the NC State Fair, almost 4000 gallons for one week. They were also
proud of a used 8000 gallon steel tank lying in front of their facility,
retail price >$20,000, purchased for $500 but with the standard salvage
problem that they had to figure out how to get it home. They started
out as a fuel co-op, moved into distribution and waste oil collection,
and then have made a progressively larger biodiesel processing system
piece-by-piece. Amazingly, they are 100% legal and permitted, too.

Then there was another 500,000 gallon plant at an unnamed location
between NC and NV. Two guys run the whole operation, and tankers of
chicken fat come in, tankers of biodiesel go out. Yawn… it’s boring
if you just buy your feedstock and sell the result in bulk - it’s the
integration in the community of these inputs and outputs that’s
interesting to me - but wondering how many chicken remains it takes to
make a tanker (8000 gallons) of chicken fat was kind of gross to think
about. They did have a gas chromatagraph, which was cool as they could
do all their own ASTM fuel testing, but more tanks and pumps are only so
interesting to even a geek like me.

Final stop was Minden, NV, where Bentley Biofuels is making about 30,000
gallons of biodiesel a month, most of which (250,000 gallons/year) is
used on their huge ~5000 acre farm. About 5 years ago, Mr. Bently, a
conservative businessman who seemingly owns half of Minden, said crude
oil was going to be $100/barrel (it was at $17 then, $70 now), and he
wanted to use biofuels for everything on the farm. So, being the
hard-headed octagenarian he is, he hired a team to figure out how to do
it for a couple of years, and then in 6 months, the plant went from
groundbreaking to full operation. Wow. The whole plant is
profesionally made, and has a whole different feel from the scaled-up
homebrewer’s operations (he put in about $2M for a 1M gallon plant, $1M
more than Piedmont and ~$1.95M more than Blue Ridge, and it shows).
Cool stuff, and right in our backyard, though there’s talk of several
plants in Marin that could make & provide biodiesel to the bay area
(Biofuel Oasis in Berkeley currently buys railroad tankers of fuel from
the big ag farmers in the midwest).

Bently is completely supplied by used fryer grease collected from local
restaurants, and they’re looking into growing their own oil crops, too.
No one really considers used oil from fried foods “sustainable", as you
really can’t live off fried food - eww - and there’s only enough waste
fryer oil to supply about 2% of U.S. cars, though there’s not very good
data on used vegatable oils. They tried planting a few acres of
soybeans for oil last year, which didn’t work very well. Making
biodiesel is easy and well understood: pressing various seeds and
products into oil is still a challenge. Unless that vegatable oil you
buy in the store is marked “cold pressed", it was almost certainly
recovered using hexane extraction, where a vat of seeds is mashed and
washed with hexane (a component of gasoline) to dissolve all the oils,
then the oil skimmed & heated to remove the hexane. Double eww, and not
a process that’s good for a small scale plant. Anyway, they are going
to try mustard seed next season, as well as try using waste wood chips
to grow algae and harvest oil from the algea (which I don’t understand
at all, but I guess is possible, and they just hired someone to start
working on it).

Whew, that was a long trip. There’s lots of work going on around
biofuels, and it’s this interesting combination of left and right: the
hippies with their planet-saving eco-sustainability, and right-wing
rednecks that don’t want to give their money to sheikhs in the mid-east,
they’ll make their own damn fuel, or buy American-made fuel, thank you
very much. Seeing both groups doing the same “right” thing for the
world is really neat to see, for whatever the reasons. If humans can
get to the point where we aren’t using up supplies stockpiled by the
planet over millions of years, and not significantly impacting the
global or local environments, well, maybe we’ll be a little less doomed
as a species.

Tom

PS: as always, wikipedia has the detailed scoop on biodiesel
http ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel if you want more info
and here’s more about hexane extraction
www.alaffia.com/ingredients/oil_extraction.php

It’s been a hell of a kicker of a three months, pulling me in circles round the country till I was burned out, burnt to a crisp. I moved somewhere between 5,000 driven miles and about 10,000 additional flying miles.

In the beginning of August, I flew out to the East Coast to pick up that van. In the middle of August I had two workshops, one of which I had to fly to from the East Coast. In between the two classes I drove up to Dorn’s family farm in New Hampshire, and spent a week trying to provision the van for a crosscountry trip, while being kinda sick with what seems to be the last of my Lyme Disease weirdness (I’m now on Month 6 of ($300 a month antibiotics and herbs , and it seems to have gotten rid of the last of the Lyme exhaustion/pain now, it’ll be time to celebrate pretty soon).

I flew to St Louis, lost my luggage before the class when my flight got delayed/re-routed, bought supplies the morning of the class and winged the whole thing successfuly, slept through Maud’s exquisitely planned afterparty (man that woman knows how to organize a biofuels event!), managed to get a some social time in with Luther Gulseth and Terry De Simone whom we know from the forums, taught the other half of the class, flew back to Boston. Drove to New Hampshire that night and picked up The Boyfriend from another airport, who took two weeks off work to fly out East to drive the van crosscountry with me. We spent a few days at Dorn’s farm waiting for the sunflower harvest to happen (weather actually delayed it beyond our departure date). In the meantime, I welded up a semi-folding bedframe for the van and we worked a bit on the large farm demo processor Dorn and some of the U of New Hampshire folks are building, while Tom set up his portable electronics-design work and got some billable hours in.

Tom and I got in the van and drove south. We stopped in Rhode Island to have dinner with our friends from New Mexico (!), left that night for an all-night drive to meet some kind of deadline in Lyle’s schedule in North Carolina a half day later.

That’s right, we were heading to California from Boston by way of North Carolina, which isn’t anywhere along the way. I chickened out and we didn’t go through New York City, my hometown, as planned. That’s right, for all the talk I do back home in California about how much I miss New York, I drove right by and didn’t even stop for pizza. I saw my home neighborhood (in Jersey City) from the highway as we drove past at 2 am, the industrial smokestacks behind my childhood home belching in the fog, backlit by massive sodium lights. It’s exactly the part of New Jersey- that nasty stretch between Newark and the Lincoln Tunnel on the truck route US Hwy 9- that makes people rant about New Jersey being the armpit of the country. I pointed out the window and told Tom that I grew up in Hell. It really looked like a modern version of Hell. He looked out through the fog and said, now it makes sense why you care about clean air so much.

My reunion with New York City has to wait for later this year.

We took a 1800 mile detour to go visit the gap in Lyle’s schedule, and Piedmont Biofuels. They were pulling their hair out at that point- trying to get their plant ready for it’s Grand Opening later that month (which actually happened before First Fuel managed to get out of their system- the whole process is detailed in Lyle’s blog, as usual: http://energy.biofuels.coop/2006/10/20/first-fuel/ .)

Anyway, when we passed through in early September, Lyle was just about climbing the walls. I’ve never seen him that distraught- it was really disturbing. It looked like he was losing his mind. We did the usual late night kitchen table gossip session, Lyle trying to drag us into a discussion of The Big Picture and me complaining that I was bored of The Big Picture and could he please tell me some gossip instead? -and every once in a while he’d start talking about the state of their plant, get this terrified gibbering look on his face, and just about break down crying. I’ve seen a lot of small business people sacrifice everything to get business off the ground, but I"ve never seen anyone look like they were under that much pressure.

We drove to Asheville and hung out with my good friend Colleen, whom I’ve been trying to entice to move to California for years. Everything had been going great with that plan, till she woke up half-paralised one day, which led to a diagnosis of MS. We spent a couple of days over there plotting her move anyway. She’s a former high-class athlete, one of the more active people I know, and the thought of this disease striking someone like that in the prime of life makes me really grateful that ALL I’ve dealt with was a few years lost to Lyme.

Tom and I also dropped in on Blue Ridge Biofuels, some of whom I’ve been becoming good buddies with (I’ve gone to NC a LOT in the last year). They’ve been pumping out ASTM biodiesel from their really simple small producer plant for a few months, and I"ve really enjoyed seeing their progress finally come to fruition (I"m sure Piedmont will be having the same success soon, their process is just more public than is usual in industry, for better or for worse). I basically dropped in on the Blue Ridge boys without calling, and it was really pleasant seeing people look genuinely happy to see me - it’s been great making friends in the course of all this biofuels stuff in the last few years.

By now vacation was shaping up to mean me dragging poor Tom along on the Girl Mark’s Friends Plant Tour (which I’d been completely nervous to drag him along on- thinking it would be boring to spend vacation talking about biodiesel)- we’d looked at Dorn’s place, another reactor at the UNH campus, the Piedmont co-op site, the Piedmont Industrial-in-progress site, and now BRB’s successful small producer/medium distributor operation (they only make part of the fuel they distribute while they’re gearing up for financing a larger plant). I’ve got to admit we did do some non-biodiesel-specific geeky things - went on a museum visit while in New Hampshire- an Industrial Revolution mill museum in Manchester, NH. It’s great dating someone else interested in the nuts and bolts and gears and history of industry.

To add insult to injury, not only was my Friday-afternoon-before-my-class flight delayed, but they (Northwest Airlines) lost my luggage.

My class teaching props were all in the lost luggage (sorry, the new TSA War On Liquids wouldn’t let me take a vial of pHlip test in my carry-on… just kidding).

I got to St Louis on Saturday morning and got to spend a frantic hour in Wal-Mart, re-assembling everything that didn’t make it to Missouri with me, and we started class on time anyway.

Luckily I had just ordered some new credit-card-sized scales from B100supply, and had him ship the scales to St Louis for the class, so I didn’t get stuck without a scale!

Other than scales, I was able to find everything else at Wal-Mart/Lowes, and, also very fortunately, I had previously asked Maud to loan me some of the non-walmart items (like graduated cylinders) that I normally bring. Even more luckily, we’d asked the students to bring their own safety glasses, which I normally provide myself, and which I couldn’t have easily found that many pairs of at the hardware store.

I’ve taught some other classes in the past where we would have been screwed if all this stuff didnt’ arrive.

It really is mind boggling how much time I spent up in the air last spring and winter. There was about five months where I just didn’t have a life because I was in another part of the country every weekend, or, at best, every 10 days. I didn’t feel too much remorse about charging people a decent amount of money for the workshops (they used to be sliding scale), because there was just no way for me to do absolutely anything else with my life while keeping that kind of travel schedule. Even when I was home for a week or 10 days in between, it was indescribably disorienting.

Ever since I did the truck tour in 2004, what I’ve really wished for has been… a desk. With me at all times. I think I mentioned the mythical mobile desk in the beginning of the blog, when I was first contemplating the tour- I almost bought a van-based short bus at that point, and the image that drove that fantasy was the idea that I would have my very comfortable desk along, and even a bed. In that order of importance.

Instead, I drove the truck I’d already had, which was fine because I really didn’t have any money to start with when I went on tour that time (having been particularly ill that year). I spent two months sleeping in the front seat of the single cab ‘83 Ford and dreaming about that damn portable desk that I can drag along with me in a van of the future.

Well, right now, I am on tour, I have a van, and am in fact sitting at a desk. Unfortunately, the desk comes to me in the form of a hotel room. In the middle of Anywhere, USA.

I have a class in St. Louis tomorrow, and there was no way to make everyone’s schedule work so that the class happened during my drive home- so I’m doing a last hurrah of unpleasant airline flying. Oh wait, that’s wishful thinking. I’ll to be flying right back out to East Coast in September, drat.

Anyway, today I fought traffic to the airport in Boston, leaving the van in the Northeast while I visit Airline Limbo again… and… a storm delayed everything leaving Boston so they couldn’t get me to St Louis tonight.

I got to spend the night in Detroit. Which, from what I can tell here at the hotel, may as well be Houston, Texas, or Charlotte, North Carolina, or the general vicinity of Southgate Mall, Anytown, USA, because I only got as far as the airport hotels strip that’s sandwiched between the off airport parking and the car rentals, out the middle of no-man’s-land, and there’s no sense that I am in any place with a discernible geography or climate..

I’m so happy that I managed to get done with the flying tour this spring before the new airline security rules kicked in. Right now getting through check-in and then security takes twice as long because everybody’s checking things that would previously have been carryon luggage, so that their shaving cream doesn’t get confiscated, and then after waiting in that queue, you get to wait even longer because apparently the security guys have to stop every brown person on the flight (I swear this happened tonight in Boston) and search them which slows down the line even further.

I, and I’m sure, everyone else shuffling in line around me, feel this sense of hopeless rage at how senseless all of this is -I’ve minimally read some Internet punditry about the chemistry involved in the liquid bomb plot, and, although I’m not a chemist, it seems pretty far-fetched that there would be able to concoct this stuff in a bathroom of a jetliner (one of the paranoid government conspiracy sites claims it takes hours of dehydrating the solvents out of the explosive after mixing it up, under controlled conditions, while chilling the mixture and raising a royal stench, before it’s actually usable as directed. Maybe I"m just passing an internet rumor without checking it out- at all- first, take this with a grain of Google).

And what that has to do with me not being able to bring my water bottle on board, or, worse yet, carry onboard a decent coffee from the Starbucks (that’s located inside the airport security perimeter, inside search zone)…

An overzealous gate attendant confiscated an empty (and lid-less) coffee cup that I was holding while boarding in Oakland a week after the bomb scare. All of this adds to the nasty wastefulness of airline travel, of course. The airport gate areas are stuffed with half drunk plastic bottles of water discarded in every corner, in fact, in Boston, the trash cans were absolutely overflowing with them tonight- since you’re not allowed to take anything they bought inside the gate area onto the plane. I didn’t know yuppies carried their own reusable water bottles around, until I got to see what happens when you couldn’t have those.

It’s funny, I spent a lot of time earlier today thinking about how happy I am to get the van, and about the desk, and about how much fun touring in the van will be compared to flying, and about how much I detest hotel rooms. And, a few hours later I end up in another one. The detestation came flooding back the moment I opened the hotel room door and smelled that nasty old chemical-ly carpet/regurgitated HVAC stale air odor. And this isn’t even a particularly old or cheap hotel, they just all smell like vacuum cleaner exhaust to me.

I went for a long walk to stretch my legs-basically ‘doing laps’ in this maze of industrial parks and truck yards behind the hotels, trying to get some exercise, thinking about all the different places I’ve slept in while traveling in the distant past, in the other life. I’ve slept relatively OK in abandoned buildings, under freeway overpasses, in freight train yards, on freight train grainers, inside boxcars, down in the hole on plenty of 48’s, and on the floor of a few train engines, behind bushes, on rooftops, in drainage culverts, in dozens of other people’s cars while hitchhiking, on the street, and of course in the front seat of my own car probably hundreds of times over the past 18 years. And just about all of this is psychologically preferable in some ways to shelling out the money to sleep in a crappy motel.

Also, I finally put up the next tour dates and their registration links at the website. I have a few more spots in the Chambersburg, Pennsylvania class, and I will also be speaking at the really cool renewable energy conference that they’re organizing there at Wilson College. That is all in mid-September.

Then I’ll be going out on the road in late November or early December, and going to the Southeast again. It should put me in Florida in December, at which I’m very excited about. It’s such a nice time to be there, weatherwise. That is, if hurricanes aren’t hitting.

Biodiesel Classes: www.girlmark.com/tour

Chambersburg, PA, September 17 and 18th,
Chambersburg PA ‘Life After Cheap Oil’ conference, Sept 15-16
Clemson, South Carolina, November 18 and 19th
Pittsboro NC, November 25-26
Ft Lauderdale, FL, December 1
Ft Lauderdale, FL, December 2-3

I got myself a new vehicle- a 1998 GMC Savana, same year as the boyfriend’s van, the problematic one that I drove across the country exactly two summers ago at the beginning of this blog. My new van is a passenger model, his was the more common cargo version.

Mine:

His: (before the stomper truck modifications)

I expect to have the same fun with Check Engine Light codes and transmission issues and touchy finicky fuel system sensors. These engines have many known drawbacks, but I’m getting it (and not another 1990s van) for one reason over a comparable 1990’s Ford Powerstroke- fuel economy is marginally better. I would imagine that emissions would be better also, just because it consumes much less fuel, although I haven’t looked at any numbers to compare.

My old van was a great deal, but it’s from 1987, and going down the road I can definitely smell french fries inside the vehicle. I started to get paranoid about what it meant to be getting gassed by exhaust particulates like that- diesel, or vegetable oil based, I would prefer not to smell it at all. It was really faint, and I think few people would even notice, but it’s just that 1980s van thing.

The GMC’s on the other hand, barely have an odor even when running on petroleum diesel. There been so many times over the past two years been so jealous of Tom’s 1998 van for all these reasons. And now I have one of my very own.

This one’s really high mileage, and I had to go out to the East Coast to get it. Supposedly it’s got a rebuilt engine, I’m hoping to track down the previous owner while I’m here and confirm that actually the case. I’m not holding my breath, there are absolute no mechanical records with this thing.

I bought it at the beginning of the summer, and spent a couple months, try to figure out how it was going to get to California. I really don’t need it in California, the whole point of this vehicle is to do a couple of East Coast tours, and to have it serve as an RV so my life would take less of a beating while traveling for the classes. I was originally going to register the paperwork in California, then mail the plates to someone in Boston who was going to borrow it until I went on a tour.

And bureaucracy set in. It turns out that Massachusetts does not give temporary plates or trip permits. In California refuses to register anything from out-of-state without actually doing a physical VIN inspection first. Oops. Stuck between a rock and a hard place. Both states said ’surely the other state can do something, my hands are tied’. I really didn’t want to spend money on getting it towed out on a car carrier, just to register it, and promptly drive it right back.

And, of course, in the middle of the summer when I was trying to figure this out, I had a conference organized, and the van was the last thing on my mind at that point. At one point, a really good friend of mine who has been my partner in mystery illness (we got sick at the same time, and years later got diagnosed with chronic Lyme at the same exact time independently of each other and by different doctors - absolutely freaking weird), was moving cross country to Massachusetts, and we were trying to arrange how she could pick me up after the conference so that we could do a long gimpy drive to the East Coast and process everything we’ve learned in the past few years of being sick. That would’ve been a really good growth opportunity I think. Unfortunately, her schedule with school orientation didn’t allow her to wait till after the conference to get me, but the idea of definitely put the bug in my ear about driving across country for fun this time.

So I scheduled some classes for a month later, and gritted my teeth in anticipation of the new, stricter airport security hell, and flew out to teach in Boston, register it in another state, and then drive the vehicle back. I was able to convince the boyfriend to fly out and make a vacation of the drive back. Which is something I’ve been wanting to do the whole time we been together- a longish road trip. We’re going to start out in New England, then go down to the southeast, then try to ignore the Midwest on our way back.

I must say I’m so incredibly excited about having this thing. The fact that we have ‘his and hers vans’ (they’re the same year model) is really awesome- he hasn’t really converted his to an RV yet, although that’s the ultimate goal, and I’ll be starting on that this fall. So are passing these great e-mails back and forth (he’s not out here on the East Coast yet) talking about power systems, and auxiliary fuel tanks, and security, and making folding beds and counter space, and how best to arrange things. It’s going to be so fun doing the full conversion. Ultimately, it’s still not the vehicle and I want, but I can’t afford the Sprinter that I want.

The boyfriend has spent the last two years getting his van converted to four-wheel-drive (it can be done piece by piece, so it hasn’t been on blocks the whole time or anything). It started as a somewhat modest project, but he paid a mechanic/off-road enthusiast friend of his to do the work, and the friend has been trying to get into the business of doing these conversions and other custom four-wheel-drive work for a while now. In the process, the friend convinced Tom to let him turn the vehicle into a showcase project for the friend’s skills. At this point, it looks like a big monster redneck truck, cargo van edition- giant stomper Big Mud Tires, a lot more lift than Tom would have wanted originally, and all kinds of burly he-man suspension metal showing. And it’s now something like 10 feet tall. Tom is one of the most unassuming, non-show-offish guys you’ll meet, and the fact that he now drives his giant vehicle that turns heads left and right, really cracks me up. He doesn’t seem too comfortable with it. We were driving around the ghetto right before I left and guys were pointing and smiling (not as in laughing at, but as in really impressed, and smiling). It’s pretty funny.

Some of the Powerpoint presentations from the event are now up at the conference website:
http://www.b100.org/presentations/

Also, Jennifer Radtke and I spent several hours eating chocolate cake last week and writing a web page of advice on biodiesel co-ops, based on our experience together in Berkeley Biodiesel Coop, and Team Canola, our not-so-famous homebrew ‘cell’ a few years back, and her experience with Biofuel Oasis.

This page should be up at http://b100.org soon as I get it typed up.

It’s a month later and I"m finally recovering from the Local Biodiesel conference. Here are some other people’s writeups about it:

PICTURES:
Bob Armantrout’s Pictures:
http://www.troutsfarm.com/Biodiesel/BiodieselConference.htm

Graydon Blair’s Pictures:
http://www.utahbiodieselsupply.com/photos/events/denverconference06/

BLOGS:
Bob’s Writup:
http://troutsfarm.com/blog/comments.php?id=145_0_1_0_C

Piedmont’s Writeup
http://energy.biofuels.coop/2006/07/21/coop-conference/

Graydon’s Writeup:
http://www.utahbiodieselsupply.com/blog/2006/07/biodies…nference-report.html

David Erickson’s Writeup:
http://climateprotectioncampaign.typepad.com/cpc/2006/0…esel_confe.html#more

Lyle “BioLyle” Rudensey’s Writeup:
http://biolyle.blogspot.com/2006/07/biodiesel-coops-conference.html

Conference was fantastic.
Graydon put up some of his photos online: http://www.utahbiodieselsupply.com/photos/events/denverconference06/
I started converting the rideboard to a post-conference discussion forum: www.b100.org/rideboard

more of a reportback is coming

For sale
Diesel Cargo Van
1987 Ford E-350 (one ton)
6.9 L Diesel engine, automatic transmission
148,400 miles
$3400

This is a standard E-350 cargo van formerly owned by an insulation
company. It’s mechanically in great shape- non-smoking engine, good
tires, good transmission, etc. It has a ladder rack on the roof and a
bulkhead divider separating the passengers from the cargo area for
lockability. Bulkhead has a small door for access (you can remove the
bulkhead easilly also).

The inside of the vehicle is heavily insulated with rubber (neoprene?)
insulation that works really well to keep heat and noise down. There’s
an ugly plywood floor on top of the normal metal ribbed floor. Passenger
compartment (ie front seats area) is in good shape except for an ugly
drivers’ seat that wants a seat cover.

The good:
engine is in fantastic shape for it’s age.
recent injection pump timing, doesn’t smoke at all
solid transmission
starts instantly in the morning- glow plugs, compression, fuel system
are all obviously good
ladder rack
bulkhead divider for security
recent alignment
brand new tires
reliable
insulated
cassette player
Nothing particularly leaky (really rare for a Ford diesel this age!)
Almost a year left on current registration
good body
Heavy duty receiver hitch

the bad:
heat and AC don’t work
drivers’ seat has torn upholstery
the speakers need replacing
Sliding door lock doesn’t work (I will fix this before selling)

generally somewhat ugly interior, though more because of old age and
normal work use, rather than due to anything being broken. Most of the
‘ugliness’ is in the cargo compartment (the insulation has this white
covering that’s worn off in places)- the front seat area isn’t
particularly abused. there’s one small dent near one bumper, but body
and paint is in good shape otherwise. Bumpers are in good shape. No rust.

There’s not really anything wrong with this vehicle, I’m selling because
I bought a much newer cargo van. It’s been running on biodiesel for a year.

I’ll be showing this van after July 18th, please email for an
appointment and PLEASE be patient with responses- I’m answering emails
while out of town for a week.

email: girlmark_list_email@localb100.com

I went to this great event at Biofuel Oasis today.

The Oasis, our local worker-owned biodiesel distribution co-op, has been running a series of events every Monday night in June called Driving Still Sucks. The events all promoted different aspects of alternatives to driving.

The ladies at Oasis started this project because they got sick of hearing customers talk about the fact that now that they’re on biodiesel it was all perfectly OK and there was no guilt associated with driving.

Somewhere around that time this phenomenon was happening, somebody in the press did a write up about Berkeley Biodiesel Collective, and somewhere in the usual mistranslation that the press does, the biodieselers were quoted as saying that the collective’s unofficial motto is Driving Still Sucks. Everybody in the collective found that absolutely charming and adopted it fully afterwards, even though it was of course not really true at the time of the interview.

The Driving Still Sucks series included the following events:

Monday June 12, 5 - 8 PM: Everything You Wanted to Know about Biodiesel but Were Afraid to Ask:
which included “answers to burning questions about biodiesel” (they must’ve had the mystical answer to “what do you do with the glycerine” printed up in giant letters in the back)

Monday June 19, 5 - 8 PM: Rearrange Your Life to Drive Less: Creative Strategies
* City CarShare
* Public Transportation & Bike options
* Telecommuting: How to convince your boss to let you work from home
* Live near where you work, Work near where you live: Drive l day per week!
* Yummy food and drink

And tonight’s event focused on “Do It Yourself". What this meant was that the speakers were primarily from the city gardening and farming community, and there was a cute potluck of tasty treats from people’s gardens, and homemade alcohols, at the end of which the Oasis collective toasted their newest full worker-owner members, two women who’d just passed the truck driving examination and would start doing Oasis fuel deliveries locally.

Urban farming really means a lot in our area. I recently heard about someone who was moving here from the East Coast to get a job as a school gardens instructor, which is one of those typically wonderful Berkeley progressive institutions that you take for granted until you find out that someone has moved from East Coast to come do it. The school garden programs movement is just one small aspect of the powerful urban farming movement in this town (considering the price of real estate here, it’s a challenging thing to do, by the way). In fact, there are several food businesses which have grown out of the school gardens and use gardening movement-it’s entirely possible to eat fresh produce all year round and for all of its have come from one quarter mile away, grown by teenagers in one of the programs.

Anyway, Jennifer solicited me to come talk about beekeeping. Jennifer, who knew that I’m not crazy about going to biodiesel 101 events around here anymore (I’m sick of talking about beginning homebrewing and ‘have I heard of diesel secret’ at the moment), suggested that I could even be anonymous.

Jennifer and I have this kind of funny thing going on about the oasis. My boyfriend lives around the corner from the oasis, which means that I’m constantly stopping by when I need to find Jennifer and she’s too busy to return phone calls. Unfortunately for me, the Oasis sometimes has a fairly large crowd of customers hanging around, including the types that are there just to talk people’s head off, and I"m always wary of the possibility of getting ensnared by one of the talkers.

I was over there one day when Jennifer was off shift, and she was trying very hard to escape her own customers as well, while someone else was actually working the shift. We’re having some intense conversation in front of a few customers who seemed interested in chatting, and she kept announcing to everyone in the room that she was offshift and trying to leave. That was either wishful thinking or some kind of superstitious warding off of the evil eye. Anyway, as we were on our way out the door, the person was actually working the shift called out, “Bye, Jennifer, Bye, Mark". At that point a chatty customer turned around and said,"wait, is your name girl Mark"? Jennifer and I shot a glance at each other, and I turned around with an obviously lying tone of voice and said “no, I have no idea what you mean!", and we ran out the door laughing. Ever since then, it’s always this joke with her about not mentioning me by name when I’m at the Oasis in front of customers.

Anyway, the event tonight meant that I showed up with a small empty beehive to show and tell, and a jar full of honey, and there right in front of the oasis was Jim, who has goats in North Berkeley, along with a small portable pen with two adult nannies and several adorable baby goats. Someone else was there to talk about keeping chickens in the city, someone else was talking about water systems and recycling gray water, Chris Schein had a truck full of plants for sale, there is a natural plaster and nontoxic painting company with some inspiring speakers telling us all about getting petroleum out of the inside of your house and cutting down on indoor air pollution, and I fit right in. I got up in front of everybody, announced loudly that my name was Stellar (an actual nickname from the past), and said something like ‘I don’t know anything about this biofuel stuff but I’m here to talk about bees’, which solicited laughter from the one third of the audience who was in on the joke. It was awesome thing to do public speaking about something completely unrelated to biodiesel homebrewing for once. I

I think we’re almost ready to test out the GC’s. Actually, only one of them. One has the wrong motherboard to run the type of injector that’s needed for the biodiesel test- we got the injector, and will eventually find a motherboard (the type to sorta upgrade an HP 5980 to a Series II I think) for cheap, but till then, one’s going to run school experiments at Concrete Community College and one might be ready to set up for biodiesel analysis there.

We’ve been working on it about once a month or once every six weeks, and it’s taken forever to find all the little piddly parts. I’m piecing it out and its still cheap, but it definitely would have been too complicated for me to figure out without professional help.

And the little missing stuff is a pain to track down on a budget- for instance, we’ve had an FID detector since the beginning but finding the needle valve and o-ring that allows you to run the make-up gas that’s needed for the biodiesel analysis means spending about $150 for two tiny and relatively simple (but proprietary) parts.

Anyway, on Thursday we’re going back into the machines and trying to actually see if the dang thing works. We seem to have all the plumbing at last.

I’m just coming down off of several weeks of hell and mental anguish that revolved around finishing up the farm biodiesel plant design. I got commissioned to design a system for some farmers, exactly what I’ve been wanting to do all year. We have decided to put together a really tiny little pilot plant, with the idea being that it would be mobile, and that the farmers could sell it off when they wanted to upscale. There were a variety of reasons why ‘tiny little’ made sense for them, although it was not what they ultimately intend to install.

I decided to change everything around 100% after what I learned on my last trip out of town. I’d gone out to Asheville to teach a class and to do some consulting for Blue Ridge Biofuels. They have designed a teeny little pilot plant very similar to one of my designs, which I think means that I get to leapfrog that teeny little pilot plant stage in the pursuit of our farm plant, as they have one on-line exactly like what I would have built. BRB were having some very minor problems, which we were able to troubleshoot pretty quickly, and I learned a tremendous amount from seeing the thing in action. I have a few friends in the small producer world right now who all have similar size little systems, all of which were set to go online this summer, and being able collaborate amongst ourselves has been phenomenally helpful. I actually modified my theoretical system when I met Rob Del Bueno and talked about systems earlier this winter, bringing mine more in line with what he’s building, so that we can collaborate over troubleshooting if problems come up. of course the other side of that is that if the designs turn out to be mistakes, then we have two people with the same problem in their plant, and the same problematic equipment to replace- it’s kind of an ‘all eggs in one basket’ approach.

I’ve been thinking about codifying the sort of informal friendly collaboration that I’ve been involved in, into a farm-scale plant listserve- no one who is in the process of building a system seems to want talk about their progress in public, partially because of the regulatory/code compliance issues involved, and partially because they don’t want to look foolish if they make mistakes, so unfortunately there’s not a very detailed public discussion going on, even though the technology involved is very simple and there aren’t the major issues with competitive disadvantage that exist with larger systems that use proprietary technologies.

I decided that there is no reason for me to put another tiny little plant into the world.

I’d assigned myself a series of different design constraints, and spent a couple of weeks designing two different kinds of plants that fit those differing constraints.

One of the design constraints was that I wanted to make sure the system fit inside of a shipping container. That’s what Rob has done as well. In fact, I think there are an awful lot of theoretical plants sketched out on Whiteboards out there in the world, all designed around fitting the process equipment inside of a shipping container, and plunking the shipping container down next to a tank farm full of oil. Mine is no different. Shipping containers are fantastic little portable buildings, but they have extremely limited dimensions which makes a plant an interesting design challenge. Of course with a big enough tank farm and continuous process technology (not something I’m interested in tackling), you can squeeze a million gallons a year out of one of these things, but that requires a few million dollars also.

I stared at graph paper for weeks trying to figure out how to squeeze the maximum gallons out of a 40 foot shipping container using commonly available equipment. I came up with a rough estimate of a theoretical 250,000 gallons a year, still pilot plant sized but large enough for the niche projects I"m interested in. Next project is seen how well it works in reality.

Biodiesel Community Conference:
July 14-16, 2006
Golden, Colorado
Colorado School of Mines

The grassroots biodiesel community’s summer conference this year focuses on biodiesel co-ops, biodiesel groups, grassroots biodiesel education efforts, and the technical details of all of the above. Well even tell you what pump we use, and what our bylaws and volunteer motivation efforts have looked like.

History:
In the past three years the American “small-scale biodiesel” activist community has been organizing winter conferences (all preceding the meetings of the National Biodiesel Board’s annual winter convention). Different groups have organized these grassroots events with the focus being on educating biodiesel consumers and activists working with or within the biodiesel industry, and encouraging us to act as watchdogs over biodiesel sustainability.

Local Biodiesel: A Biodiesel Co-ops Conference

This summer conference in Colorado ignores the larger industry issues and focuses instead on the nitty-gritty details of how the grassroots biodiesel groups accomplish their work.

There is no single answer to “How do I start a biodiesel coop” so we instead gather members of several successful biodiesel groups into one room to tell the story of how THEY started and run their biodiesel efforts, and what they’d do differently with hindsight.

The conference is primarily an opportunity for discussion, networking, and story-sharing. We’ll talk about what pump we use. We’ll talk about wrangling volunteers, brokering truckloads of commercial fuel, disposing of glycerine, dealing with frozen fuel lines and cold reactors, organizing educational events for your community, staying motivated as an organization, recovering methanol, and, most importantly, we’ll talk about it WITH you, not at you.

The conference is centered around networking and discussion, rather than dry speeches, and there will be a tremendous amount of organized networking.

We’re organizing ‘discussion tables’ by topic at lunch and breakfast (imagine your favorite online biodiesel discussion forums- live), and the official presentations leave a lot of time for discussion/question and answer with the audience. We’ll leave room for regional networking opportunities so people from the same area can brainstorm ideas on working together. Bring your photos and equipment to show off.

People are coming from South Africa, Colorado, all corners of the USA, Canada, and elsewhere. There is dorm housing available so you can camp out and talk late into the night with fellow conference attendees, and two meals a day are included in the registration fee. We have a rideboard to encourage ridesharing and so that you can find others from your area who are coming.

List of speakers and topics:

-Methanol recovery for homebrewers (Maud Essen and Terry Zeman, St Louis Biofuels Club, Missouri)

-Disposal of Sidestreams: Wash Water, Magnesol, and Glycerine (Matt Rudolph, Piedmont Biofuels Cooperative, North Carolina)

-Cold Weather Strategies for Biodiesel Users (panel discussion)

-Biodiesel Distribution Experiences (panel discussion including Kai Curry of Biodiesel Blue Distribution, Minnesota, and members of Biofuel Oasis, California)

-Gas Chromatography Testing of Biodiesel (Bob Armantrout, Rocky Mountain Biodiesel)

-Excise Tax and Legal Issues Affecting Small-scale Production of biodiesel (panel discussions)

-Biodiesel Calculator and Batch Tracking Software demo (Rick Harrison, Omaha PSD Club)

-Magnesol and other washing alternatives (presenter TBA)

-Putting Together a Biodiesel Educational Event (panel discussion)

-Teaching Homebrew Classes (Jennifer Radtke and Maria ‘Mark’ Alovert and other presenters TBA)

-Quality Testing and Quality Control factors (Maria ‘Mark’ Alovert, Biodieselcommunity.org)

-Involving Women In Your Biodiesel Group (Maria ‘Mark’ Alovert, Biodieselcommunity.org)

-Oil Collection Strategies (presenter TBA)

-Feedstock and competion for WVO- Co-op strategies? (presenter TBA)

-Working with Volunteers (Matt Rudolph, Piedmont Biofuels Cooperative, and others)

-Case Studies presentations from biodiesel educational, homebrewing, and distribution co-ops and groups :

NW Biofuels Network (Washington),
St Louis Biofuels Club (St Louis, MO),
Berkeley Biodiesel Collective (California),
Breathable Bus Coalition (Washington),
Alameda Biodiesel Coop (California),
Boulder Biodiesel (CO),
Wilson College biodiesel group (Pennsylvania),
Yoderville Biodiesel Coop (Iowa),
Austin Biodiesel Coop (Texas)
Biofuel Oasis (California)
Utah Biodiesel Coop (Utah)

-In addition to the formal presentations, we’ll have some mini-workshops and lunchtime ‘discussion tables’ to assist in networking (for example, cafeteria tables labeled by region or specific topics, so you can meet others from your region or area of interest)

For more information, final schedule (to be released July 1), and to register, please see http://b100.org

Registration Info:
$60 for conference registration, includes breakfast and lunch Saturday/Sunday. Friday night’s Biodiesel 101 presentation and networking party is free and open to the public.

Saturday networking party: $5 donation requested

Dorm rooms: $22 a night, available Friday night through Monday morning. The dorm rooms are gender-segregated at Colorado School of Mines, so we unfortunately can’t accommodate couples.

Final Conference schedule will be posted July 1 at http://b100.org.
Hours:
Friday, July 14: Biodiesel 101 Presentation, 6 pm
Satuday and Sunday, July 15-16: Breakfast and mini-discussions: 8-10 am, conference presentations 10am-5:30 pm
Saturday night networking party: 7-10 (check website for updates on exact hours)

Registration deadline is June 30! Please check http://b100.org for updates or possible late registration.

Rideshare board: www.b100.org/rideboard

To contact us, please email conference@b100.org

Resources:
US-based biodiesel co-ops
http://www.b100.org/coops
Biodiesel Power: a book about Piedmont Biofuels in Pittsboro NC:
http://biofuels.coop/book.shtml
The Biodiesel Blogs: a view of the day-to-day in grassroots biodiesel:
http://www.biofuels.coop/aggregator/
Online Biodiesel Resources listing: educational websites:
http://www.biodieselcommunity.org/onlineresources/
Biodiesel online course from Iowa State University:
http://www.me.iastate.edu/biodiesel/Pages/biodiesel1.html
Biodiesel Handling and Use Guidelines- NREL (.pdf)
http://www.nrel.gov/vehiclesandfuels/npbf/pdfs/39451.pdf

Homebrewing Biodiesel:
http://biodieselcommunity.org and http://biodiesel.infopop.cc
Biodiesel Library:
http://www.b100supply.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=category.display&category_id=12&CFID=366554&CFTOKEN=85585064

Theoretically my tour is over.

I’m here at home, with nothing scheduled. I have a lot of possibilities for classes coming up, but none of them are super soon.

HALLELUIJAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It was an insane, completely frantic five months. I was rarely at home for more than two weeks. In February and March I was gone almost the entire month. And as I’ve already said, all of that involved getting on planes every few days.

The day that I updated my web page with the words ‘my spring tour is over’ (a few weeks after the grueling SLC classes) I e-mailed Graydon with this great sense of ecstasy.

Biodiesel Conference:
Right now things are about to get insane again because the biodiesel co-ops conference is coming up. (www.b100.org) We have a fantastic lineup (previous post). I have the feeling that the whole thing is going to be a bit like biodiesel sleep-away camp for geeks. The co-op conference gets to use some of the dorm rooms at the college that is hosting us, which means that people will be hanging around for hours after the event chatting. A very important point of the conference is to promote networking, for people to get to know each other, for them to share ideas and for projects to cross-pollinate. Also, we are including breakfast and lunch in the conference registration costs, which means that in addition to eating cafeteria food at an engineering school, will probably set up specific discussion tables to encourage further networking. For example, you can come to the conference and eat breakfast at the Southwest Regional Biodiesel table, move on to catch the discussion at the ‘glycerine disposal’ discussion table at lunch, and maybe even muster up the courage to facilitate the ‘get rich quick with a commercial biodiesel plant’ discussion table the following morning. Just kidding about the getting rich quick.

Local Biodiesel: A Biodiesel Co-ops Conference, July 14-16, Golden, Colorado

Colorado School of Mines
www.b100.org

Topics to be presented include the following:

-Methanol recovery for homebrewers
(Maud Essen and Terri Zeman, St Louis Biofuels Club, Missouri)

-Disposal of Sidestreams: Wash Water, Magnesol, and Glycerine
(Matt Rudolph, Piedmont Biofuels Cooperative, North Carolina)

-Cold Weather Strategies for Biodiesel Users (panel discussion)

-Biodiesel Distribution Experiences
(panel discussion including Kai Curry of Biodiesel Blue Distribution, Minnesota, and members of Biofuel Oasis, California)

-Gas Chromatography Testing of Biodiesel
(Bob Armantrout, Rocky Mountain Biodiesel)

-Excise Tax and Legal Issues Affecting Small-scale Production of biodiesel (panel discussions)

-Biodiesel Calculator and Batch Tracking Software demo
(Rick Harrison, http://omahametropsd.org/bdcalc/Index.htm )

-Magnesol and other washing alternatives (presenter TBA)

-Quality Testing and Quality Control factors
(Maria ‘Mark’ Alovert, www.biodieselcommunity.org)

-Involving Women In Your Biodiesel Group
(Maria ‘Mark’ Alovert, www.biodieselcommunity.org)

-Oil Collection Strategies (presenter TBA)

-Feedstock and competion for WVO- Co-op strategies ? (presenter TBA)

-Working with Volunteers (Matt Rudolph, Piedmont Biofuels Cooperative, and others)

-Case Studies presentations from biodiesel educational, homebrewing, and distribution co-ops and groups :

NW Biofuels Network (Washington),
St Louis Biofuels Club (St Louis, MO),
Berkeley Biodiesel Collective (California),
Breathable Bus Coalition (Washington),
Alameda Biodiesel Coop (California),
Boulder Biodiesel (CO),
Wilson College biodiesel group (Pennsylvania),
Yoderville Biodiesel Coop (Iowa),
Austin Biodiesel Coop (Texas)
Biofuel Oasis (California)

-other presentations and participants to be announced

-In addition to the formal presentations, we’ll have some mini-workshops and lunchtime ‘discussion tables’ to assist in networking (for example, cafeteria tables labeled by region or specific topics, so you can meet others from your region or area of interest)

Conference logistics:
Price:
$60 registration, includes breakfast and lunch on the 15th and 16th

We still have a few dorm room accommodations available for $22 per night.

To register for the conference please see www.b100.org.

To connect with others from your area who are traveling to the conference please see www.b100.org/rideboard
(Golden, CO, is near Denver)

Speakers:
if you would like to do a presentation at this event, or facilitate a discussion/panel/lunch table discussion, please email us.

contact info: conference@b100.org

Eventually everybody from the class drifted away, and even Graydon got up off the floor, regained his senses, cleaned up with me and took all the liquids and the consolidated glop to be disposed of. I had use of the space till that evening, and my brain was in no mood to go anywhere. Again, it just amazes me how tiring it is keeping track of 34 brains and intensely following just who understands what (they must be just as tired following everything I"m saying!), and trying to think on my feet, how I should rephrase it when it doesn’t make sense to them.

After class I enter limbo where I can barely function, the thought of getting up off the floor is agonizing, and the little observer in the back of my head is amazed that I’m still alive when my brain mostly resembles an exhausted blob of Jell-O..

Several cups of caffeine later, I can usually clean up from the class.

After Graydon left and I no longer had to formulate sentences, I came to my senses, mindlessly played with lab supplies for while, spending a couple of hours sorting everything for the New Hampshire class, packed everything up to mail, and was finally out of there 12 hours after class had started.

Then I went to the airport and picked up the boyfriend.

Tom and I had planned a short camping vacation in Utah. This is one of the trips where I had two classes back-to-back on consecutive weekends in opposite sides of the country. Considering how exhausting a day and a half long class was, this wasn’t a terribly good start to this trip.

At this point, I’m so jealous of my time that I prefer to do to cross-country trips on two consecutive weekends, and fly home for three days in between. It’s actually worth my time to do that, rather than spend a week on the road with two classes at either end. When I spend 12 days out to teach two classes, it often feels like the Jell-O brain never goes away the entire time-hotels, airports, waah. waah, waah. It sometimes feels like stepping into some kind of sci-fi alternate universe for while.

But Utah is a world famously gorgeous place, and we wanted to do a brief scouting trip, checking it out for longer future camping expeditions. Tom used to live in Salt Lake when he was a very different person, so we floated around town the next day investigating his memory lane. Just walking around downtown with Tom on Saturday night made me very happy after the Jell-O brain finally went away, as it was finally a break from the class routine. Like, I was not rushing off to Wal-Mart to do something related to supplies for the next class. Again,waah, waah, waah, I can’t really complain about traveling to teach, no one’s holding a gun to my head to do it. I think tons of people would give anything to be me right now and do exactly this for a living.

Our first stop was supposed to be Zion National Park, and we had originally kicked around the idea of doing a tremendous amount of driving for four days, checking out the North Rim of the Grand Canyon for a day, then some other national parks on the way north. The idea had been scouting sites for a camping trip that Tom is gonna do later this summer. Luckily, we came to our senses and nixed several of the destinations before investing too much time on the road.

The whole concept of a vacation is completely bizarre to me. When I was growing up, no one in my family went on vacation.

was a little bit concerned that it wouldn’t feel like a break at all, considering that it’s happening right in the middle of my-traveling job work week, and my traveling job does involve quite a bit of driving around between the classes.. I think I was worried that we’ve spent a lot of time in stores, getting outfitted, and that there’d be too much time on the interstate, or in chain stores, as we were flying in with insufficient supplies for some of what we want to do..

Too many parts of the US no longer have a local flavor- 10 years ago, car traveling involved stopping at flea markets, little tiny local junk shops, eating in little diners and shoot in the bull with the locals (well okay that was the East Coast. They don’t have diners on the West Coast). Local flavor is mostly gone though. I think on this trip I realized, from the lack of junk shops in what would otherwise have been a prime cheap-rent territory for this activity, that the junk shops have all moved to eBay. Granted, that means that I sure enjoy my online time, browsing junk from across the country at 2 a.m. unfortunately, there’s an awful lot of conversation that’s missing with the demise of the flea markets and the goods’ move to the Internet. Not to mention that the prices have gone way up.

I was very pleasantly surprised to the couple of localism experiences in the next day and half. Before we left Salt Lake, we picked up some food at what we thought was going to be a health food store, but which turned out to be a weird gourmet imports store called liberty Heights market. It was amazing. They seemed like they had a direct line to some granny back in the old country (Italy, Spain, etc.). It’s kind of telling that shopping there was what made me finally realize I was on vacation, rather than at work on the trip. This was definitely a place that is not found at a local mall near you. It’s kind of pathetic that my expectations are so low that merely finding a unique local store is enough to make me feel like I"m having a good vacation experience. You know, it’s that lack of social life thing. I don’t even think about actual interesting, human interactions that I might have been having on vacation, having somehow turned into a tourist in the strip malls and big box stores.

Along the same lines, we accidentally stumbled into a really bizarre little motel in a tiny old West town called beaver city. Eagles roost motel was composed of these teeny little casitas which were brought there in the 1930s after the Hoover dam was completed several hundred miles away. They had been housing for the workers at the time. They came equipped with a tiny little garage, which were sized just right for some guests Harley, no way anyone’s truck or SUV could even begin to fit. I wasn’t sure what Tom would think-the place could be viewed as either very charming or really run down. Again, the fact it is not a Styrofoam Motel 6 turned the whole thing into entertainment. It really helps that the proprietor, a biker guy whose wife ran the attached antique store, was exceedingly nice, obviously loved his quirky little business, and was just a downright character. Asked us how long we were staying, and told us that they sometimes have campfires and sit around singing songs with guitars with some of the residents who rent efficiencies there in the summer. And we figured all that out in about 5 minutes while he was showing us around. He initially had walked up to us while we were pointing and laughing at this bizarre messed up electrical situation on the outside of the office-there was basically romex and conduit chasing each other around complete circle, not attached to anything anymore. He used the opportunity to point out the 1930s heritage of the place and tell us the whole story of the Hoover dam workers. It was obvious of the plumbing was put in prior to any concerns about water conservation-it was the a most powerful shower I’ve had in a long time, Kinda like playing in the fire hydrant on a hot day. Anyway, it seems like the perfect place in the middle of nowhere to go spend a few weeks writing.

Well, the rest of the vacation was cut short. We got to Zion, got a campground, went on a great hike. I had a “recovery from Lyme” milestone, on the hike, when I realized that there’s no way I could’ve enjoyed it or even had the energy to do it three weeks earlier, especially obvious when we found ourselves running the last part of the trail Zion is a park, which means that you park outside the place, or get a campground, then write a free shuttle bus from one trailhead to another, with various amenities (this keeps thousands of idling cars out of the park, a very good thing in my opinion). It was a perfect place to go for me, as I’m still very unsure of my energy, and haven’t been able to go camping in two years. We had dinner at the kind of fancy lodge there- and Tom must have somehow picked up food poisoning. Climbing Angels Landing the next day was out of the question, when he unexpectedly started throwing up. He thought he’d be alright, went back to the campground to rest, and sent me on my way to do some of the other trails on my own. By the time I got back to camp three hours later, he’d been unable to keep water down, and was so dehydrated that he couldn’t even move his hands properly anymore from loss of electrolytes. I threw everything in the van and drove to a random town in southern Utah to drag him into the emergency room for rehydration via IV. I’ve never actually seen anyone turned quite that shade of green before.

I just got back from a two-week trip to teach two classes, with some bumming around in between. As usual, I walked my house and my heart just melts-I haven’t devoted any blog time in awhile to the house, but it is just a spectacular place to live, and being there makes me regularly feel awash with ecstasy. It’s the best group household I"ve ever lived in.

I flew out two weeks ago to teach a class in Salt Lake City which Graydon had set up. We actually scheduled two separate classes rather than the usual two-day weekend, partially so as not to interfere with Graydon’s Sunday church activities, and because of avoiding Sunday we didn’t have two full days to teach since most students couldnt’ take a Friday off. Friday evening was an equipment building session, and Saturday was a daytime homebrewing class in which I tried to squeeze in everything I normally do in 1 1/2 days. People came from really far away for these classes. I guess I haven’t done as many of them out West as I have in the East side of the country.

One guy flew in from New Zealand (yes, just to come to the class). I’ve had Canadians come to the classes in the US before, but never someone who’s had sat on a plane
for days and days (or whatever it takes to get here from there).

The facility was an amazing prop building warehouse belonging to the Utah Opera. The set crew were working in one of the other warehouse rooms on Saturday, and it looked like they had the dream job. They were workign their magic in an incredible shop full of wood tools and a small metal working shop. It made me happy to see well-funded artists doing amazing things with tools (there were a few props laying around, and it’s amazing what set builders can do to transform a little bit of plaster and kitty litter and paint into something that looks exactly like a rock wall from a distance. The building was about four stories tall, which was all an undivided single story with the ceiling four stories above you and a huge, sparkly clean gantry crane way up there. It made for interesting acoustics. One of the guys from the Utah Biodiesel Coop works at the Opera and helped arrange this shop access originally.

Anyway, we got access to the space about two hours before the 5:30 class. The first thing we did was make giant signs that said “stay away". Actually they said “doors open at 5:15,” we plastered them on all the doors so as to chase the early birds away. This was kind of good, because the early birds started showing up right about two hours prior to the class, right on cue. I could see them stumbling out of their trucks, coffee cup in hand, carrying stacks of paper that they printed off the Internet.

I don’t know what the deal is, but at every one of my classes, about 5% of the students show up 2-3 hours early, and then want to hang around. This includes classes that start at 9:30 in the morning-there are always several overly caffeinated, chatty, middle-aged men circling the place like sharks at 7 a.m. wanting desperately to know what you do with the glycerin and have we heard about the credit card reactor (is it an old age and insomnia thing?). Lately I’ve started sending out e-mails that included “don’t be super early", but people seem to be ignoring that. Note to self: next e-mail for a 9:30 class will say “don’t be any earlier than 9:15″.

It seems that if one of my hosts happens to be there (which usually means they’re setting up the facilities for the class), the guy with the coffee cup zeroes in on the host and corners him. For some reason the earlybird often comes prepared with a copy of Mike Briggs’ algae paper printed from the Internet. I shudder to think about what Mike himself gets to deal with.

My hosts are usually way too friendly to tell the guy with a coffee cup to leave them alone (even though they are busy setting up for class, a fact that’s usually lost on the early guy). I usually have to play “rescue the nice guy” and chase the Caffeinated Ones away. This reminds me of growing up in an apartment building- the gossipy neighbor lady across the hallway would always find an excuse to get my mom over there and trap her for an hour talking her head off- after a while, my mom and I worked out a plan- after 10 minutes if she didnt extricate herself, I would go over to the gossipy neighbors and claim that there was a phone call for mom. It became a lot more difficult to play this game after our phone got disconnected.

Anyway, for this class they were three of us setting up-me, Graydon, and Terry Reist, who flew out there from California and has offered to be one of my interns, and who started the internship by coming to help with the class (which was hugely appreciated). We had a sort of strategy huddle where I tipped them off to the impending arrival of the inevitable early birds; this meant that when the earlybird showed up on cue 10 minutes later, Graydon and Terry were pretty good at extricating themselves. Closing and locking the doors helped too.

Graydon had provided processor kits for that Friday equipment class, which meant that there was a huge line of them, neatly lined up with people’s names on them. He also had a table in the back with a lot of other gizmos that he sells. As people started arriving, he said, “watch these 56-year-old men giggle like babies when they see all the stuff". Which is basically what happened in a few cases.

I’ve started providing a table of snack food at classes, which I think makes sitting through the lectures will bit more fun. College professors should do that. There’s nothing wrong with munching a celery stick while contemplating molarity and normality. This particular class was an evening session that ran through dinnertime, so the food breaks gave it kind of an informal feel to parts of it that I always like about the Friday evening classes. Graydon co-taught, which was, as usual with my co-teachers, perfect fun - tag-teaming the information.

We stayed there until about 1030 in the evening, finishing up some of the more stubborn reactors. Most people stayed at the same hotel, which Graydon had thoughtfully found for us, which means that when I stumbled down to the hotel’s continental breakfast at 7 in the morning there were random conversations about diesel cogeneration and oil sources floating in from opposite sides of the lobby and for once I wasn’t imagining it.

Saturday’s class went by in a long blur. It was the homebrewing/chemistry class, and almost everybody had gone to the equipment class the day before. Frankly, I don’t remember all that much about it because it was absolutely exhausting.

It’s useful to do these classes in a two-day session, because sometimes it takes about a day for some of the concepts to really sink in for those who have not been in school in quite a while, so Day 2 is usually a lot easier than Day 1. I think that the work that goes into teaching these classes is only about 1/3 lecture, and the other 2/3 is all about trying to track who is understanding what, and more important, who is not understanding what, and why they are not understanding it. It feels to me like teaching is all about tracking 30+ people’s brain processes very intently for eight hours at a time, and a my job is to shepherd the ideas around when they’re having trouble finding their way. I remember almost losing my voice couple times, at which point it was really helpful having Graydon there to toss the class to.

Again I met several people who were farmers and were beginning to work on biodiesel systems for their land. The ones that were particularly of interest to me were some folks from Oregon whose economics were just shoving them into becoming organic farmers. Basically, the cost of fertilizer had gone so skyhigh, that they were kinda being forced to go into biodynamic farming with its heavy composting and other soil building techniques.

That class ended in late afternoon, and after everybody had finally left, Graydon and I must’ve looked absolutely exhausted. There was a point at which he was laying on the floor, moaning, and I was in the other corner having a really hard time getting out of my chair to go pack up after the class. It was pathetic. Sometimes, I really wish I just had a couch during or after these classes. I swear, I could lecture quite well from a couch.

Ive continued teaching all over the place - phew! it’s intense. In Febuary and March I was gone almost every weekend. Every class sells out, and that was in mid-winter before the gas prices rose again. I keep pretending that I"ll slow down and go to only teaching one class a month, but I"m now finding myself responding to all the “do you ever teach in ____(insert name of small town here)” emails with a “no, but if you find me a location to rent I"d be glad to organize a class". It seems now that it doesnt matter where I go, people are interested in biodiesel and therefore the classes sell out, so teaching in the middle of nowhere seems just as interesting as teaching in a city.

Incidentally John Bush of Boulderbiodiesel.com is a great workshop teacher also (he cotaught the Denver class) and he’s looking for jobs teaching biodiesel workshops this summer. I highly recommend hiring him. He’ll go to places that I won’t (like Canada, which I dont’ feel like messing with) and he’s less busy than I. At the Denver class there were times when I sat back and let him answer the audience questions, and marveled at how identical the answers he gave were to what I would have said. He really knows the chemistry and engineering end of it better than most homebrewers.

You can find him through john@boulderbiodiesel.com and pitch your teaching/consulting proposals to him.

I recently started adding weekday classes to accommodate the overflow from the sold out weekend ones. I’m squeezing the chemistry instruction/practice into one day, taking out the equipment class portion altogether, and removing the 2+ hours of ‘basics’ info that we normally discuss in class (ie cold weather problems, why use biodiesel, filter changes and rubber/plastic degradation emissions, feedstock crops, etc) .

We did one of these the Monday after Easter at Ron Cascio’s fantastic house in Paradise (otherwise known as Berlin, Maryland, an idyllic little 200+ year old small town on the Eastern Shore). We added the class two weeks before and it was full to the gills also. A huge contingent of people who didnt’ seem at all similar to each other but somehow knew each other drove up from a farming community in Virginia and smartalecked each other into learning titration.

I added another one of these to my Lee, New Hampshire class- here’s a shameless ad:

class: may 19th 10-5, $60
to sign up, go to www.girlmark.com/tour2006.html
Mike Briggs and Dorn Cox of the Oyster River Biofuels Initiative, a really impressive co-op/educational group near Dover, are promising to co-teach (or at least to be there). It should be fun. This is your chance to see the reactor that Mike talks about on biodieselnow, and support their coop’s educational work.

In other news,

-I’ve been working with Graydon Blair and John Bush and several other people on organizing the biodiesel co-op conference in mid July. The web site is www.b100.org. The conference is in Golden, which is near Denver, at Colorado School of Mines, July 14-16.

-I finally went to the doctor again about whatever the hell’s killing me. Which is probably Lyme disease, since I had it about seven years ago, and got extremely sick a year and half later, and still test positive for. The doctor is someone from the biodiesel community, who found me through Yokayo Biofuels (I think he’s on their board?). When I got to the doctor’s office’ parking lot, I could tell which one was the biofueling doctor’s car cause it was a 1980s Mercedes with something leaking out from underneath, just like all of ours. And that wasn’t even his SVO vehicle.

I got a pretty intense round of prescription drugs for Lyme, as well as for some of its other effects. I’m taking four drugs, of which three cause nausea as a side effect, fun stuff. I don’t know how long it takes for the classic Lyme die-off reaction to start happening when you treat with antibiotics, but something’s making me pretty miserable right now also. I also asked for a prescription for Provigil, which is a ‘wakefullness promoter’ that’s helping me squeeze more than my usual 12 waking hours out of a day. For the last 8 months, I’ve been uncontrollably falling over like a rock at 5 p.m., and would spend the next several hours either sleeping till 10 pm or fighting it with caffeine, which of course would wreak havoc with my sleep pattern later.

Provigil is fantastically expensive, somewhat of a scary unknown (they don’t know why it works) and the effect still feels like several of the things that I don’t like about caffeine- it seems to me that it’s even easier to get distracted while on it (someone was joking that one “needs to get pointed in the right direction” prior to taking a drug like this if you’re going to do work involving concentration- interestingly, some patients report the exact opposite effect- intensified concentration), but right at the moment it works a lot better than the caffeine did at managing the inexplicable ‘falling over’ effect without as many side effects. I found that 50 mg is a dose I dont notice as jitteriness or unnatural talkativeness, but works well to make me functional through the Lyme brainfog.

It’s FAR easier to get to sleep when needed on this stuff than on caffeine- if I remember at 10 pm that I need to start being tired, the wakefullness vanishes like a light switch getting turned off.

Well obviously it’s been forever since I’ve posted anything to the blog. I had quite a saga with torn ligaments in my right hand, something that started back in September, and has been bothering me ever since. Spent some time a cast, and spent some time trying not to use the computer at all, which is incredibly difficult for me. Spent quite a bit of time freaking out thinking that I was going to have to get surgery. Eek.

Today I made somewhat of a stride forward in the GC saga.

We picked up the machines in December, we being me and Concrete Community College (and also Piedmont biofuels, to whom I shipped one). The school and I got one each. There are also several parts machines, which we’ve been vigorously stripping and trading off for the parts we actually need. gas chromatographs are set up for different kinds of tests, with differing kinds of equipment. My impression is that the setup that we use for biodiesel is fairly rare in the world of GC testing. So here’s what has happened so far:

we picked up the gas chromatographs with mostly wrong detectors and completely wrong injectors for $1000 each. (We knew exactly what we are getting, and the chances of finding one of these with the correct injector for biodiesel are quite slim) The base units that we’ve purchased are 1980s HP 5980’s. There were actually two FID detectors on one of the machines, so me and the college each got one. The chemist at the college who’s spearheading this project has managed to trade away the ECD detectors that came with their unit (nice, radioactive, expensive), so we managed to get rid of something that we didn’t need and couldn’t afford to run, and in trade, picked up two cool-on-column injectors- those are worth about $1500 each, and you need them for the biodiesel analysis. THey’ve got a little heater that looks like a micro-VegTherm attached for the temperature changes that are needed in the analysis.

Then the saga with the school started. They’re quite poorly funded. They have the usual multilayered financial bureaucracy of a public institution. They agreed to pay for some of the equipment needed to set up their own machine (I’m paying for mine, with some help from donations). Then they took many, many, many months to put in the order for parts that they agreed to pay for. It’s taken several months to get a 20 amp outlet put in, and, in the end, they only gave us one and we needed two, so now we have to wait for a second to appear, sometime… Months ago, they green-lighted ordering the regulators for the ultrapure gases for the machine, and something got very screwy with that also so they’re not here yet either. At any rate, I’m buying my own regulators so that we can charge ahead.

Today, however, we cleaned the machines fully and actually started installing stuff, now that we have electricity to run at least one machine with. I started taking pictures, although all of these parts are also very well documented at the Agilent web site (don’t ask me questions about these machines, I really dont know enough to answer them). We’ve managed to acquire a fantastic haul of stuff in this process- I was originally slightly concerned about it, as the school was buying its machines sight unseen and the lab I purchased from unloaded five machines on me (three working, two not)- but when I showed up at the school with a vanload of dusty machines, oily power cords, ancient computers, and random parts, it was obvious that the organic chemistry instructors appreciate ’salvage’ just as much as I do. Out of this deal, the school’s machine will have two different detectors and injectors to play with, and the machines are replacing some even older gas chromatographs they had, which were not really adequate for the experiments they wanted to do in the chem classes.

Apparently one of the things they’ll be doing in Organic Chem class is fatty acid analysis using GC, something that’s quite interesting to me for various biodiesel experiments.

I’m home for one day after my Houston class, and I go back to the airport to fly to Denver at 6 AM tomorrow- this time, it’s work on the small producer plant that Steve is putting together there. Hopefully I will also get to see John Bush and Lorance and John Meuser, the people who are working on the biodiesel co-op conference in July. 0h, and, while I am home, I get to write a check for my remaining gas chromatograph parts, which are now on order!

Houston Biodiesel is an inspiring operation. They’re a very business-like, informed distributor of commercial biodiesel but they also homebrew a small amount, so we had a very interesting processor to show the class, and got to show people the effects of the glycerol remix prewash and the dramatic way that it reduces soap over normal processing. I absolutely loved meeting those guys. It’s great to see people who have a good head on their shoulders involved in biodiesel distribution.

Of course the class was sold out just like the others, so I got to start off the weekend by performing the now-regular ritual of ejecting rudely one man who has (also rudely) arrived without pre-registering “just to see if someone doesn’t show up and I can take their place “. Jeez, people! don’t do that! It’s so unfair to everyone else on the waiting list who bothered to ask in advance.

Houston itself was terrifying. The first thing I saw from the air as we were landing was a massive Wal-Mart. I spent a couple of days of class prep running around in a rented SUV around the cancerous ring of shopping development that encircles Houston. Like most places that suffered Los Angeles-like development, Houston seemed to have a corresponding ring of ‘dead malls’- older developments that had been abandoned as the city limits grew- in the middle, between the downtown and the outermost crust of Retail Development around the town. Strangely, the Dead Malls were full of companies that sold discount furniture.

Actually had no idea that Houston is something like the fourth-largest city in the U.S. which makes me really appreciate how terrible the hurricane evacuation must’ve been during Rita. It must have been like trying to evacuate Los Angeles.

The really aweome thing was that Shannon, who posts as Dodgeram on several of the biodiesel forums, came out and co-taught the class. He’s one of the people whose posts I always agree with, and obviously he really thinks through everything about this process. I think he also helped out one of the other forum members who evacuated to Houston from New Orleans during Katrina and that guy raved about Shannon being great. We had him do a talk and demonstration about the use of Magnesol, and about the glycerol remix wash, and more. I always love having experienced homebrewers around during the class because I think it means more for the students to hear about how the process actually works for a ‘normal person’ who has this as a hobby, rather than how it works for me, who focuses on biodiesel all the time. Here’s Shannon’s write up of the event.

On Friday night after hours of socializing at Houston Biodiesel, Shannon, and his wife Bonnie and I, tried to go out to eat. We were starving by then, and hadn’t thought about the fact that was the Friday of Valentine’s Day weekend – every restaurant had a full parking lot, and the good place we wanted to go had a 1 1/2 hour wait for a table. Bonnie had a great idea – we went to Hooters, where people were least likely to bring their dates for a romantic Valentine’s Day dinner. Sure enough, plenty of free tables. For those who have been hiding under rocks, or perhaps living in Australia, Hooters is a chain of college-bar themed ‘restaurants’ whose claim to fame is hiring waitresses with boob jobs and squeezing them into very skimpy collegiate sports-ish (?) costumes and flesh-toned pantihose to serve food , and, of course, beer, to drunks. There was a famous lawsuit a few years ago where a group of men alleged sex discrimination because Hooters would not hire them as waiters, and am sure it was amusing to see the whole concept described in lawyerese by the defense.

A few days ago there was a thread on the infopop biodiesel discussion forum where we North Americans talked a lot of trash about the strange things that people in the UK eat. For example, I’ve heard many horrified reports about deep-fried pizza. They serve it (over there) with vinegar drizzled on top. Yick.

Well, I hereby retract all terrible things I said about the British, the Scots, and their food, because on Friday night I ate deep-fried pickles. We ordered a huge bowl of them. Bonnie said that when she was pregnant this was what she craved all the time, and that she would go to Hooters ‘all the time’ because of this pregnancy-induced craving. I guess the stereotypes about pregnant women and weird food combinations must be true. Personally, I don’t like deep-fried food very much to begin with (spending a couple of months in Mexico City and eating a lot of overfried street food there, cured me of loving fried things for good) - and making biodiesel for several years has turned me off to the flavor (and odor) even more. So I was amazed that deep-fried pickles is actually pretty good. It’s kind of like putting relish on fried fast food. It makes me think that the deep-fried pizza of Scottish infamy may actually not be as disgustingly gross as it sounds. Now, deep-fried Mars bars, that sounds gross. And they eat that. Over there.

Well it seemed as if I’d barely gotten home, when it’s time to get on another plane. and that’s just the beginning of the next few months worth of traveling to teach around the USA.

I had not actually unpacked, and was still basically living out of my carry-on bag in my room.

ok, whatever, I’m whining- it’s not that bad this time. There was a real defining moment at the start of the truck tour that I did in the fall of 2004, when I found myself eating breakfast at a table in a convenience store after night a driving, staring in the fluorescent glare out at the institutional floor tiles with little bits of mop caught in the corner, and it really hit me that because I was doing the trip on such a shoestring budget, for the next two months I would be at the mercy of crappy road food and institutional amenities. Like plastic forks and microwave burritos at 6 AM at a minimart and brushing my teeth in a rest stop sink. And it felt at the time like I was committing myself to a homeless shelter for survival or enduring a hospital stay, or entering two months at some other institution designed for handling the needs of the many, the bare minimum way. Driving felt kind of gritty that way.

This time around, it’s just airlines- a few hours and it’s over. And I get a week in between to eat the roommates’ good cooking and sleep in my own fantastic bed. Then I"m off again. That ain’t too bad.

While I’m gone I hope that I can get the van fuel system timed. I really love that van (the voice recognition program, which looks for context to figure out what the hell you’re saying, keeps interpreting ‘I really love that van’ as ‘I really love that man’. It also adamantly refuses to curse, no matter how much I try to train it to say ‘hell’ and ‘damn’).

Anyway, the ace mechanic at East Bay Truck and Auto, who was recommended by everyone, just had a stroke and won’t be back to work, so I am trying out some new place for the Ford fuel system work. The van is awesome, and it has no visible smoke, ever, but it gets 10 mpg. I think those two things are related the- that the pump timing is way off in the direction that cuts down on particle emissions but destroys fuel economy.

After just ten days of living out of my carry-on bag on the southeast trip, I’m somewhat dreading spending four or five weeks later this spring on another long trip. So I’m hoping that I can take the van out that time, and somehow RV-ize it before then so I can take the comfortable bed with me this time. But not if that means 10 mpg.

Off to Houston, wish me luck. I’m scared of Texas, I think./

Mark

Tonight I got onto Google to see if anyone had posted a recent review of any of my classes that I could link from the class page. Of course, running a search on “Girl Mark biodiesel class” pulls up every old posting I’ve ever made on every forum advertising the damn things.. Anyway, in the process I found a good blog by one of the biodieselers from Durham, Jurgen. Here’s his biodiesel category, he seems prolific at writing the things:

http://words.yovo.info/category/biodiesel/

Today I tried something new. I’m still at square one with my right hand injury, and typing really aggravates it. I have been fooling around with the left-handed typing using the ‘Dvorak for left-hand’ layout, which is one of the options installed on Windows machines. Of course it doesn’t work so well with a laptop – the touchpad mouse gets in the way because that is where your hand wants a palm rest. It does feel a lot like learning to play a new musical instrument, something that I’ve been through several times. I’m starting to get marginally better at the typing. Because I’m a fast touch typist with two hands, it’s very difficult to go back to looking at the keyboard, which have to do while learning the left-hand layout.

However, right now, I am actually using a voice recognition program instead of typing at all. A friend who cannot type worth a damn gave me his copy of Dragon software, this being version 4 or something very ancient. It works well enough – you train it for half an hour to recognize yourself reading various words (in fact it gave me 2001 a space Odyssey to read), then give it some of your own writing samples so it can figure out what the hell you’re saying more easily. In my case, I gave it the entire text of my homebrewing book to read. It now recognizes the word “carboy” flawlessly, which makes me laugh. It was amusing seeing what exactly it thought ’strange’ about my vocabulary after it had analyzed my book for weird words.

I like it well enough that I went ahead and ordered a copy of the most recent version, which is several years newer, as I have heard that it has improved greatly.

It’s even more amusing when the microphone comes on by accident when I’m on the phone. The program allows you use voice commands to browse around documents, and to execute various commands. I had a document open when a long phone call came on, and something in what I was saying triggered the program’s own microphone to come back on in the middle of the conversation. It turned my document into gibberish, and of course you can’t laugh while using it or it writes more gibberish trying to interpret your laugh.

having spent just a very short time training the program, and getting myself used to using it, on extremely impressed with what a useful tool this is. All you non typists, this is worth trying.

Today was as overbusy with farm biomass plant discussions as Friday was. On Friday I’d pulled what was literally a 9-5 marathon session of phone calls and email having to do with both ends of biodiesel business. Welcome to small business- it still feels like I’m participating in my hobby or activism, but it’s starting to head into something more concrete. My head hurts from all the talking. I’ll be heading down to the county office to pick up my business license next week.

I had a series of fascinating conversations this weekend with engineers and farmers large and small: two educators, three dairy and cattle farmers, two engineers, an organic farmer, and a soon-to-be Republican candidate for Congress. People interested in sunflower oil, waste oil, sugar beet ethanol, biomass of all kinds, and da Insta-Pro press. And a partridge in a pear tree- that would be me. This idea of collaborating with a number of players is starting to take somewhat of a more concrete shape. Or if I don’t collaborate in a business sense, there’ll be a lot of info sharing that ought to come of my exploration into these farm projects. I’m already trying to connect people with each other and it’s amazing what a good fit some of them are for each other, as far as sharing equipment purchasing research and the like.

It turned out that several people I contacted from the forums, were folks I"d already met in real life, or otherwise had connections with, or who knew each other. There were a lot of “a-ha moments". The homebrew classes are doing their job which I’m now endlessly grateful for- I’ve done a better job of meeting the people, and finding out what information is buried where around the country, than I could have had I sat at home and focused on teaching locally two years ago, which could have had different short-term rewards.

It was really painful doing the tour I did in the fall of ‘03 but now I"m kind of reaping the long-term results to some extent, because of who I’d met and a variety of things I got to learn in the process.

I think my strengths in this business are that a. I have a pretty good handle on troubleshooting quality control problems from a technical standpoint and b. I have a REALLY good handle on where the information is buried, on the net and otherwise, and whom to ask when I don’t know the answer. I’ve worked (intentionally) at building up connections all over the spectrum, and it’s time to call on everybody for information.

For example, today I heard from an organic farmer who came to one of my classes and wants to grow sunflower and gave me a lot of details about his size operation, needs, history, etc. On Friday I had by chance spoken with a farmer/educator who had more or less the answers to everything that the organic guy was asking me today. So I’ll just connect the two of them and let them brainstorm together about some of the solutions that I don’t have good answers for. Maybe the “CSA System"- the little open-source ‘upscaled homebrew’ plant- can evolve with them speaking and comparing notes on a seed press and the sunflower processing equipment.

There was another dairyman I met in one of my classes in the Midwest on the tour up there, with whom I’d chatted briefly with about glycerine feeding to ruminants, which his family farm was going to have a nutritionist analyze. Recently- a year and a half later- I wanted to touch base on that data, so my to-do list said that I was to write to him next week.

On Friday I wrote to what I thought was a Colorado-based engineer who had posted somethign interesting on one of the forums. When he wrote me back, he turned out to be the man I’d met whose family had the herd nutritionist look at the glycerine-molasses replacement (?) possibility. And all these dairy guys are looking at the same seed press, which means there’ll be some share-able data coming out of one of these farms this year about it’s operation.

At this point the missing piece of the puzzle for me is that I"d like to talk with an oilseed researcher. Oh, wait, I know where there is one, in South Dakota…

Anyone else interested in talking?

alovert@b100.org

I spent a bunch of time on the East Coast trip in meetings with various potential collaborators about the small producer plant I’ve designed. While I was there, I got a consulting job offer from a small fleet owner who wants to produce fuel in-house with basically the same size system as I am working on- so, allegedly, I now have a pilot project to test out some of these designs, and they’ve got an in-house chemist already and know what they’re getting into.

While I was on the East Coast I had a couple of very productive meetings with other small producers. With one of them, I’m working closely with on our similar designs, and with the other, I may be doing some minor consulting/testing later in the spring. Having the gas chromatograph really opens some doors to thorough testing of various aspects of this production technology- I sat down with one of the guys and worked through some lists of potential problems we expect to be sticking points for our two technologies, and we drew up somewhat of a test protocol for experiments around those problems. I also managed quite by accident to ‘fire up’ a potential investor- investment was not something I was really looking for, but this is a biodiesel-industry-informed person, and a real smart businessman, so it was interesting brainstorming with him about the direction my project could take.) It’s all quite exciting and I learned a tremendous amount on that trip.

I got home and got on the phone for another round of discussions with farmers. I’ve been talking to farmers large and small about two different types of systems- my 10,000 gallon a month commercial-type design which I’d like to deploy, and, if it works as planned, market myself as a consultant/technology provider for, and an unrelated smaller, open-source design for the ‘upsized homebrew’ system similar to what we’ve been using in co-ops around the country. The small open-source system is what I think of as the ‘CSA plant’- community supported agriculture farms tend to be smaller organic vegetable or fruit growers who use one or three tractors, own a couple of market trucks, and not spend a lot of money running irrigation equipment. Their needs are really different than the larger farms.

For the larger 10,000 gallon per month system, I’ve had an idea for a while to put together an R&D cost-sharing consortium for developing this system by collaborating with several farmers/fleets who want one. The theory is that 5 or so businesses buy in to offset the costs of the first pilot plant and to pay for some of the initial engineering studies required by regulatory agencies, and that the data gathered from the pilot plant phase makes it easier for the rest of them to build their systems later. The first farmer/fleet physically builds the pilot plant and gets to make the mistakes, with the risk offset by the others’ investment. I help with design and experimentation. The other owners of the consortium get the documentation to build their own , and everyone goes their separate ways after the pilot plant phase is complete. This of course might be more complicated than desired- working with multiple partners- farmers aren’t known for being good businessmen necessarily- they know farming and are not necessarily product development experts- and business collaboratives like this are tricky in general. I think I originally wrote about this here.

Today I was on the phone with a farmer in Kentucky who’s working on the CSA Plant type of system himself, I grilled him on the finer points of animal feed and the economics of oilseed production. He’s exploring sunflowers and thinking of buying this press: http://flinthillsdiesel.com/

Then I wrote several annoying letters to various other folks from the forums, pestering them about farm biodiesel production and trying to finagle meetings or phone conversations out of them. The beat goes on…

I went back and forth about whether to go to the NBB convention this week to drum up some enthusiasm for the project, or potential partners for the consortium.

It bothers me tremendously that there is currently a bit of a ‘circus’ atmosphere around small scale production- I get the impression for various reasons that there are a lot of people hawking systems that don’t work, or haven’t been adequately tested, and a lot of bad fuel continues getting out there from both small and large producers.

I think it’s extra bad in California where liberals are so supportive of ’sustainability’ that there’s a ready-made niche for anyone who markets their company as being part of the ’sustainability’ movement. If you’re an investor, do your homework. Research thoroughly. Get hard facts. Remember that EVERYBODY in biodiesel is singing an ‘ideals’ tune. Some of them are awfully good orators, and dishonest businessmen. This research is very difficult to do in several cases I know about in my state, and I"m sure that when it all shakes out there’ll be a lot of small investors who didn’t do their homework and who’ll lose their little life savings they’ve investing in some of these rather scary companies. On the other hand, several distributors and other players in the industry are running an honest business and losing money, or close to it, and yet supplying an important role as suppliers, advocates, educators- it’s difficult to tell who’s legitimate as an investment, and who isn’t. Im sure they’ll all be at the NBB and this weekend’s CBCC hawking their wares and promoting themselves as leaders of the local, sustainable biodiesel movement.

It reminds me of the tax credit era solar thermal manufacturers, who did tremendous damage to the solar hot water equipment industry by providing bad products at a time when tax credits incentives worked the wrong way. High energy prices, biodiesel tax incentives, idealism on behalf of consumers, and poor quality control are inspiring the same thing in my opinion at the moment, and for various reasons I think I can do better sitting it out with the farmer/fleet focus until some of the BS shakes out, which I expect would happen in the next year or two. I have the feeling that the farmers/fleet customers are going to be a little more pragmatic than some of the other industry players I"ve encoutered. Or so I hope.

This message has been brought to you by My Inner Republican.

I just had great news about my remaining GC setup. The unit itself was $1,000, donations paid for a quarter of that, thank you. I was facing a remaining $2700ish in costs - a $1500 cool-on-column injector, a $580ish column/guard column, and the gas bottle/gas regulator costs (probably about $250 all together). I’d gotten the money together for that and was ready to drop it all this week on the parts.

It turned out that the school where I’m placing the GC finagled a trade for some other equipment, so we ‘re getting the expensive cool-on-column injector essentially “for free” now. Amazing. They’re also buying the gas regulators for their own unit, and I can use theirs until I move my machine out of there, so I’m now only having to purchase the column alone. Fantastic.

The downside is this is still a few weeks from operational, but we’re on track for coming online with it.

Mark

The boyfriend and I went out to SF tonight to drink coffee and work on our laptops. I spent something like 8 hours today answering old email that I let slide during the last two weeks. That stuff piles up fast, and a big part of the work of the tour is just the email in between the classes.

Anyway, we’d parked in a somewhat out-of-the-way spot on Mission, and on the way back to the car, there was a crowd of street people hanging out near the car. A couple of them tried one of those tricks of ‘HEY- HEY! Some guy just tried to break into your car, and I stopped them, andI been watching it for you, and now give me money for saving your car!’ We had walked up to the car and were loading things into it and one guy kind of jumped the gun on telling us the pre-arranged story before all his buddies were assembled there with him. I was looking around as I was getting in, and there were several drunken bums hobbling rapidly across the street as fast as they could, trying to catch us before we drove off, so as to sing us their line about the car. Of course, being a diesel, Tom couldn’t just drive off in a rush- I’d always joked about how you couldn’t use a diesel as a getaway car because you’d have the glow plug cycle to distract you. At one point the lead bum kind of grabbed the open door of the vehicle to steady himself, and was slurring the line about the alleged break-in.

I threw down my stuff and jumped out and found myself just about to jump over the hood to go hit him, which pretty much made him back off long enough for us to shut the door. It was one of those out-of-body moments for me- kind of like a piece of the brain was watching from a distance and saying ‘look, she’s about to hit him… look, she’s jumping out of the car and getting belligerent… Jeez, I wonder what she’s going to do next?’

It’s a great feeling that there’s not a whole lot to worry about with an old beater getting uglier- the guy’s more upright/less staggery friend managed to ‘key’ a corner of the vehicle as we were driving off. I was laughing.

Did I mention it gets 50 miles per gallon?

Usually I get at least a few guys in each class who’ve been suckered by JTF and they’re all excited about it’s claims and we spend some time answering questions spawned by JTF bunk. In fact, the NC class last weekend felt a bit like ‘debunking Journeytoforever’ as one person had brought a failed two-stage base-base process batch and an even more ugly failed Foolproof Method batch with him. People asked about all the JTF bugaboos.

Today in Atlanta no one cared about saving the world with ethanol, twostage process, or anything other than a ‘well if it’s too gross for biodiesel can I mix it with diesel and put it in my tank direct?’ kinda thing . They all knew about Diesel Secret. They were real sharp. I"ve never had a class NOT be interested when I ask them if they want to make an optional ethanol batch- these folks just weren’t interested when they heard it wasn’t as practical on waste oil.

Lots of jokes about whether my hair was dyed to match the phenolpthaleine.

Rob from Vegenergy who was the main host for the workshop brought his reactor in the back of his truck and Diesel Tim from Gabiodiesel.com did the same thing later in the afternoon- very educational for all, I think.

Both reactors/trucks were equally greasy- I like being able to show people a realistic view of what oil collection/processing is like. Not that it can’t be done neatly, but still. Most of us end up with spills on the truckbed sooner or later. Rob was telling people to collect oil with a trash pump if they were planning on handling large amounts, and Tim had one of those AWESOME NOrthern Tool 120V diesel pumps and a foot valve and was recommending those. I"d bought a teeny Northern pony pump to demo ($50 and selfpriming) and it paled by comparison.

None of my ‘engineered failures’ minibatches failed on cue. Dang. KOH is really tolerant of oil quality and you can really get away with some massive mistakes. I might go dumpsterdive some Church’s Fried Chicken grease tonight to save face- I don’t want the students to get the idea
that none of the quality parameters stuff matters..

I was incredibly sick with a cold all last week and this morning in the class I had a moment called Dial Tone of the Brain- the class started and the mind went blank. Sentences didn’t really form. Eventually I started talking The Biodiesel Speech and it came back. Last weekend one of the students said that watching me answer questions at one point was like watching me flip through a mental Rolodex and pull out the answer card- I’ve heard most of the questions before. This morning was kinda the opposite for a few minutes there.

This morning I was at the building before anyone had gotten there. I walked out to the parking lot at one point and could tell that my own students had arrived because there in the parking lot was a gaggle of men standing around a pickup truck excitedly pointing and smiling at a stainless steel tank that was strapped to the truckbed.

Rick from B100supply.com brought a rented van loaded with equipment for the class, which was a lot easier than me buying it at hardware stores. The Santa Claus of biodiesel homebrewing had arrived- it was Christmas under the biodiesel tree. The classroom has a packed corner full of kits, and even some water heaters. There’s a really good set of directions with this one.

I got out of the class and buried myself in email and class registrations and other entanglements- I’d been too sick for several days to focus on email and it’s grown to avalanche proportions. Two major emails from various quarters came through about the farm plant- I’ve picked up a ton of consulting work , paid and unpaid, for the next few months. My ‘inner Republican’ is getting quite excited about the business creativity involved with this project (I don’t think I"ve written about the Inner Republican, but he’s in there somewhere…). I"ve gotten to talk to a lot of people about the small producer plant design(s) while on this trip, looks like lots of collaborating is about to take place. I was completely dazed after the 6 hours of nonstop talking during the class, still slightly sick, and got on the phone for an hour conversation about the farm plant. I think I somehow managed to make sense. Not sure if I still am making sense in writing though…

Atlanta has springtime weather. I’m getting the memory-feeling of the South in the spring- humidity, the promise of swelter. The short days sure seem weird contrasted with the spring feeling. There’s a gorgeous view of downtown at night from Rob’s building. I grew up in New York- I"m a sucker for colored lights in the sky. There’s an equally appealing freightyard in the backyard, but that’s another story.

I got to eat real East Coast pizza yesterday. And it didn’t cost $35 a pie. California just can’t make the stuff. Atlanta is filled with interesting-looking hipsters, snazzily dressed hip-hop guys, I realized on this trip I"m seeing another thing I don’t get much of in my SF -area circles : everywhere I go my friends here are playing SONGS on the stereo. Not whiny electronic New Age lameness. I realized a while back that I never hear any real songs in my circles in SF. Recently I felt almost bad for inflicting rock on the shop stereo, where they usually play electronic music of some type.

Here, I"m hearing the stereo playing actual words, voices, rhythm.

Mark

I"m blazing around the Southeast in between classes, revisiting my old life. Or , as Rachel from Piedmont calls is, ‘the other life’. You know, the life you lead, back when you had one, prior to biodiesel or a career or an obsession or a bookwriting immersion project or a job that takes up all your time.

Tonight of course I’m in Atlanta sitting around with Rob from Vegenergy talking shop about filtration and Magnesol and business practices and fueling rock tours and Southeastern poultry fat availability and stuff like that. Fun. If Lyle Estill was here he’d probably give us a hard time for the painfully geeky conversation and point out that there is a life to be had out there in the real world. We already scared off Rob’s girlfriend with a discussion of the finer points of AOCS Ca 14-56 total and free glycerol test.

Amusingly enough Rob is friends with some guy with whom I was in a silly band with back when we were 18-19- which brought back some amusing memories (like the fact that the only time I"ve ever driven drunk was one night after seeing Rob’s former rock band, when B. got even more wasted than I was- and that driving drunk AND driving an automatic transmission car for the first time scared the bejeezus out of me at the time). I still have no idea how B. figured out who I was long enough to ask Rob if he knew me- I was certainly not using the name Mark back then, I have no idea what mutual friend told “B.” to look for me in the biodiesel corner of the universe. Tomorrow we’re allegedly going to try and track down B, who was one of my Georgia connections back when Asheville had only a ghost downtown and no social life to speak of, and ‘getting social’ used to mean packing up and driving to Athens or Atlanta because Asheville had no young people who weren’t hippies.

Last night in NC I went on the obligatory gay date with an ‘other life’ Asheville ex-girlfriend to see the Hollywood tearjerker gay cowboy movie- in fact, I had about three days of ‘no biodiesel discussion’ due to hanging out with her- a record of ‘no biodiesel discussion’ for me. I think that’s a good thing to do. Later that night I ran into someone from a totally different part of my life there- one of the older folks who’d inadvertently brought me to Asheville and convinced me to settle there initially in ‘89- people from the traditional fiddle music crowd. Since I"d been sick for about 5 years now, and dropped everything from ‘the other life’ other than biodiesel, I had completely gotten out of touch with those folks, some of whom treated me as adoptive parents when I first came to town and whom I still greatly love and admire. John was at the fiddle band session at a local bar where the girl and I headed for it’s late-night wireless service, and at one point I caught myself feeling mildly sad as he told me that a lot more people like me joined the movement after I left. I was about 5 years ahead of my time in that music movement - I spent the first few years out of high school following 38-year-old musicians around, having about two friends my age- Rob’s friend B. and one other guy whom I"d recently gotten in touch with as part of my current pursuit of the Complete Circle, of searching out and finding everybody all of a sudden. Now, the old-time-music scene nationwide is full of young rocker types who have traded instruments to pursue the high lonesome sound, and I"m on the West Coast making oily messes instead of music.

Then, another snapshot from a completely different phase- the day before yesterday, me and the girl ran into ‘The Love of My Life’, a working-class New Jersey environmentalist (they exist) whom I once considered a perfect soulmate- who once completely broke my heart out of the blue, then sent me an out-of-nowhere apology for all the alcoholic misbehavior, many years later. Looking up from my computer at a cafe and seeing him TLOML walk into the room was an unexpected and awkward moment- since he was supposed to be living on the other side of the East Coast right now, and I had no expectation of running into him THERE and had to look twice to make sure it was the right person.

If you have ever experienced that sort of mis-recognition of a loved one (I haven’t before- aging is just beginning to hit my age group)- it’s absolutely shocking. The first thing that came to mind ended up bypassing my filters and came right out at the poor man: ‘dude, that moustache looks makes you look pretty damn scary- is that intentional?’ Nope, not a good way to restart an awkward conversation. Some sober part of my brain looked at the half-brain that had just blurted that out, laughed at myself inside my head, and giggled internally, ‘what the fuck made you say THAT?’

The other life rages on, and moves on, and grows and adapts and changes, and shifts, and comes back to Asheville or New York, year after year …Without me… Tomorrow is, no doubt, back to my regularly scheduled biodiesel programming….

Holee smokes,

NC class, got overfull, we had 33 people and an intern or two in a classroom and laboratory at the community college in Pittsboro. People were beating down the email doors and getting really upset that it was full and that I wouldn’t make one more exception for them. that’s way bigger than I"m used to doing. Atlanta will be the same way (30 students). I turned away another 25 probably for the Pittsboro class. My last two classes in Seattle experienced the same problem (one person who was turned away in Seattle got upset that my ad hadn’t mentioned that there would be a cutoff number for attendance…)

To deal with the ridiculous demand for those two classes, ‘we’ scheduled a class at the community college in Wilmington NC for Febuary 24-25 (’we’ is Cape Fear Biofuels and I), and a second one in Atlanta for March 25-26 (’we’ is Vegenergy and I).

I"ll be coming back here to the East Coast over and over again it looks like. Which is good cause I"m actually managing to do ‘fun’ things here in between classes, like hiking (today, near Boone) and socializing (Asheville) and staying off the computer (not so good except for my hands enjoying it).

I’m going to cut off attendance at a slightly more reasonable figure for those two classes. Same thing happened in Seattle - I tried to accommodate everyone for the first class, got 30 on the menu before we finally had to schedule an overflow class there- and of course a high percentage of the first 30 didn’t show up. This time around I"m making people pre-pay and so far if any of them are canceling for personal reasons, they’re all doing so with reasonable notice.

The Friday night session with the NC biofuels groups looked amazing. I missed most of the talks though since I was setting up in the lab down the hall, mixing up turmeric and phenolpthaleine and acid-base ingredients and such, listening to the audience applaud the speakers in the background. They really have an incredible biofuels initiative here, many groups approaching the distribution/production/education picture from many different angles.

here’s Lyle’s blog about the evening:

http://www.biofuels.coop/blog/archives/000370.html

Mark

I’ve been in excruciating pain for the past 10 days or so with my right hand, which typing seems to exacerbate.. I finally set up left-handed Dvorak keyboard layout on the computer, but havent’ gotten proficient yet (it takes a while, and I"m on two-hand QUERTY typing right now) . A friend had given me his copy of a voice recognition program that he no longer uses- and sadly, it won’t work on Windoze XP. Ugh.

I got insanely busy, and went offline for a few days- and looky, the hand pain improved dramatically, in time for me to have to do massive crap-moving at the shop and use my hands all over again. But boy does the shop look good, and usable, and I know where my stuff is, and I took care of a bunch of emergencies…

Every few hours now if I open my email I have something like 15 emails related to the classes I"m about to teach- hence the massive typing marathons. I took on teaching the classes because I cant’ do my normal jobs right now (electrical work). I didn’t expect I"d be hurting my hands anyway. Yes, something to complain about everywhere.

I think I"ll go back to the hospital on Monday and ask to have my right hand put in a cast- immobilization really helps, but I dont’ have the self-control to keep my removable ’splint’ on all day, and seem to reinjure it regularly. We’ll see how that goes.

*********************
class updates:

New:
a. North Carolina and Atlanta homebrew classes are full, no more registrants possible.

However, the North Carolina Jan 20th evening presentation in Pittsboro is still open to anyone to attend (and free) . The lineup includes speakers from biodiesel co-ops and groups from throughout the state. More info at www.biofuels.coop/events

b. we’re discussing adding a second Atlanta class in late March
c. Utah class postponed to Friday night-Saturday day May 12 and 13th due to almost complete lack of response. Mid-winter in Utah certainly slows everybody down.
d. Denver class is now scheduled- March 18-19, with a possible workshop in Colo. Springs or Puebla somewhere around the same time. Phew!
I might drive to the East Coast at that point rather than fly out. I"m going to a medical training in NC for two weeks in April, then have a
e. Berlin MD class on Easter weekend, April 15-16
f. At some point I’ve got a Northern Michigan class for a farming community and a school district which are interested in a homebrew-type biodiesel demonstration project
g. Folks in Colorado are fired up about having a biodiesel co-op conference in early June, still trying to get a host facility to be ‘fired up’ about it also
h. At some point I"m probably heading to NY State to do some work for some small farmers who’ve been in one of my classes, which means a NY State class is in the works.

i. I was trying out a new print shop and I had a miscommunication with them, and have 100 spanking new copies of the book PRINTED SINGLE SIDED by accident. I’ll drag some of these misprints to NC with me and will sell others at a discount (like $9 plus shipping) soon. Let me know if you want one. I’ll put up a web page shortly for this deal. Ugh.

A big thanks goes out to everyone who’s hosting the workshops so far!

Mark

We had some killer storms recently which did massive state-of-emergency level damage in Northern California. The East Bay didnt’ get hit as hard as Napa/Sonoma/mendocino counties did.

My equipment did suffer a funny casualty. We’re slowly setting up a large homebrew setup down near the Coliseum where the Machine Shop equipment has been moved. For the last couple of months we’ve stored a few really large steel tanks out on a disused loading dock at T’s warehouse, which looks out onto an abandoned rail spur. They put some of the heavy units on carts and wheels so things could be moved around.

I got an email this weekend about some recently-discovered damage. Apparently our 300 gallon oil storage tank, which had been on a rolling cart on the loading dock, committed suicide and jumped off the dock onto the abandoned rail spur. Luckily it was empty (or it wouldn’t have been on wheels, and would have been welded, bolted, and strapped to the building for quake safety…) . I can’t imagine how exactly the winds whipped this object into motion, being as how it was up against a 2-story building and all.

Tom and I went over there today to assess the damage. Sure ’nuff, there was a cart in the grass upside-down, and a huge steel tank on it’s side, undamaged. The loading dock was about 5 feet up. Since my hand’s still unworkable, I excused myself and left the two dudes to deal with it (sorry, dudes). T. and Tom managed to muscle it up and over the ledge, lifting a foot or so at a time, sort of working their grips so that they eventually got it up to shoulder height.

Amazingly to me, thus proving the existence of Murphy of the Laws, the designers of the loading dock actually set it up to prevent rolling items from jumping over the side like that, and it had found the only chink in the safety armor. There’s actually a 6-inch high, 3/8″ thick angle iron ‘lip’ built in to the edge of the dock to prevent unattended pallet jacks and the like from falling onto the tracks and derailing the train. The lip runs the length of the building.

Unfortunately, there are about 3 feet of the lip missing in one little section.

Our co-op items, most of which aren’t on wheels and like to stay firmly planted, are spaced out over about 12 feet of the loading dock. The suicidal tank on wheels happened to be positioned EXACTLY across from the three-foot-wide gap in the safety barrier, positioned just right to roll, pick up speed, and do a flying somersault to freedom.

well, I finally had a fire in the line of biodiesel duty. A little one.

I set a laundromat dryer on fire after drying a triple-washed load of formerly oily shop rags. It was really funny in that nervous funny sort of way.

I’m not sure whether it’s really the oil or a defective dryer that caused the fire, as I’d actually washed the rags through three washer cycles and there really was no oil left on them that I could find.

I’d left the rags in the dryer for 45 minutes because the machines at the 24 hour laundromat tend to run too cool (reminds me of going into a laundromat on the Lower East Side in the 80’s to discover that they’d set the dryers ’slider’ to the coolest ‘air fluff’ setting, and had removed the levers so they couldn’t be adjusted back to hot- so that people would feed the machine an inordinate amount of quarters).

I went back to the shop (no one’s going to steal a load of shop rags, right?), got a call from my mechanic friend saying that the car was ready, ran an errand in the truck that was replacing the car at the shop, went to West Oakland to pick up the car and drop off the truck, chatted with the mechanic, found myself hungry enough to eat a cow on the way back to Berkeley, picked up the boyfriend, went on a wild goose chase looking for noodle soup just to find all the Asian noodle places closed early. The dinner we did find just about slayed me and I had a massive food coma/energy crash. The whole time I had shop rags on the brain. I had to crawl into bed for an hour with a drafting textbook to recover enough energy to continue. By then it was midnight and I only got out of bed because of … the rags… the rags… gotta go get the rags out of the dryer…

Well, my load of laundry was missing and there was a block of 4 dryers with fresh new ‘out of order’ signs on them where my laundry used to be. I poked around the laundromat figuring that they’d taken the rags out due to them being hours overdue and maybe smelly.

Finally found the attendant mopping floors in the bathrooms. He says, oh. Was they red rags? Did you have chemicals on them or something? well, they caught fire! He gave me the tour. little melted bits of shoprag in the dryer. Big black mess in the parking lot where they’d dumped the burning pile and hosed it down. trash bag in the dumpster with a wet, charred gooey mess that used to be my rag collection.

…oops.

Having a high Internet presence makes for some fun ‘accidents’ in reconnecting with the many people I know around the country. I’ve had tons of AWESOME ‘hi from your long lost friend’ sorts of emails, just because they’ve run into my book page by accident.

so here’s a few:

1… Last month I was ecstatically reading a new cookbook called ‘Wild Fermentation’ by Sandor Katz, which is all about fermented foods like sauerkraut, miso, sourdough, tamari, beer, wine, and other goodness , which brought back some memories. About 8 years ago I was standing around a kitchen in Asheville with Kerb and Jason, getting giddy and drunk on homebrewed sake that Jason had brewed 30 gallons of. I was surreptitiously making eyes at Jason, whom I’d just discovered, trying not to be rude to Kerb in the process. Cooking turned out to be a safe topic. We’d all just met and figured out that the three of us all made bread and beer and other cultured and fermented things, and Jason said, man, it’s so rare to see that many fermentation experts in one room- we should do a cookbook!

Our cookbook never happened, though my biodiesel cookbook happened instead. And the next few years in our scene in Asheville saw lots more sake, sourdough, malted grain syrup, amazake, yogurt, goat cheese, tempeh, wine, kimchee, and hundreds of gallons of homebrew beer.

I recently saw Jason when I was doing the Tour De Ex-Boyfriends in the Northwest this fall- visiting people from my very distant past- and we got to talking about the fermented foods fetishes. And the cookbook idea came up in conversation. We should do a cookbook… yeah, I did one- on cooking up fuel… funny thing.

I continued on to Portland. Portland is heavenly for it has a cookbook store. There at the cookbook store… was something new, Wild Fermentations. Someone had done “our” cookbook finally. I grabbed it off the shelf, took a look at the table of contents, and hauled it home without reading more.

Finally got around to reading it- it was actually ‘a read’, not just a dry listing of recipes, but a story- and recognized some names. It turned out to be written by someone I’ve met, from the Tennessee queer intentional community Short Mountain Sanctuary. I remembered then that at all the eco- street theater* events I went to in the mountain South 7 or 8 years ago (*throwing rotten tomatoes at Klansmen at a KKK rally, anyone? fun for the whole family!), we’d always run into the Faeries from Short Mountain, who’d be late to the event, riotously funny, and armed with giant jars of sauerkraut to share with us.

I spent a couple of weeks raving about the book to anyone who would listen, and was planning to write a fan letter to the author. One night in the midst of this, I was sitting around in Tom’s kitchen with the book on the table next to my laptop, and a huge jar of gorgeous red cabbage/beet kimchee* (*kimchee is sorta like kraut but spicy) culturing away on the counter next to me. I checked email, and there was an order for my own biodiesel book. And it happened to be from the author of the Fermentation book I’d been raving about…

2. It got me thinking about another friend with whom I’d gone to visit one of the rural Tennessee queer intentional communities for a party sometime around Y2K. She lived in Georgia and I was thinking about Georgia cause I’m headed there for a class… I haven’t been in touch with her since then but there were some great memories of cooking up a storm at the awesome Faerie party.

well, yesterday I opened up email for a moment and there was one of those ‘hi from your long lost friend’ kind of emails- and it happened to be from that same lady from Georgia. She’d found me because of stumbling onto the book link online, though it wasn’t at all related to my upcoming Georgia class.

3. It’s not always sweetness and light.

One day last spring, I checked the book orders emails, and got someone’s name stuck in my head a bit. I headed out for the Mercey Hot Springs biofuels weekend, and walked around all weekend with a little black cloud brewing over me- because of this name that kept running through my head. No, it’s not him, I thought, the first name’s wrong, it must be common enough somewhere, why would he be interested in biodiesel, I just imagined seeing that name.

I got home and started filling orders- and the book was indeed going to a name I recognized. I got on Google. Started looking up NYS Department of Corrections. Had trouble finding anything current. Found a transcript of a court appeal hearing. Could he be working for the Department of Corrections as part of parole? Finally did a reverse lookup on the address- yes, prison.

The guy who’d ordered my book was the killer of a friend of mine in NY. The manslaughter trial happened several years after the killing. One of the charges was something like ‘aggravated manslaughter with depraved indifference to human life’, which very much describes the defendant’s attitude around the time. I"d moved out West by then, and I flew back to sit in the courtroom and support my friend’s family during the trial, and it was one of the most intense, conflicting, enraging things to experience- again. And now, with the book order coming in, I went through it- again. I was at the Foothills job at the time, with no one around to talk to about it. I got on the email to Dana Linscott and Graydon and a few other people whom I barely know, and bawled my eyes out in 2-dimensional email.

needless to say I canceled the sale.

Mark

… couple of funny anecdotes from last month, so very Berkeley:

… There was a knock on the door at the boyfriend’s house and one of the roommates answered to see a couple of little girls selling these biodiesel T-shirts that someone in our community made. We’re about a block from Biofuel Oasis, and one of their parents must have just been shopping at Oasis and sent the kids off to entertain themselves for a few minutes and they just so happened to knock on the door at ‘my’ home away from home. I wonder which customer the little kids “belonged” to.

…We’re in a town where everybody’s on a gas line, so there are no electric water heaters for the homebrewers. They occasinally turn up on Craigslist or at the dump and we practically fight over them. So I and Jeff Biosmell and others have pointed out to each other that we’re always ‘looking’ expectantly whenever we see a water heater in the garbage, or when we see one being taken to the dump, unconsciously hoping it’s an electric that we can grab.

So one day I"m sitting in my van in a parking spot, looking in the rearview mirrow, waiting for a break in the traffic so I can open the door. A brown flatbed truck is barreling down the lane with a water heater on the back. I notice there’s an orange cord sticking out of the top- my electrician brain figures it’s a 10 gauge orange Romex, and I automatically turn my head to get a better look as the truck passes.

Turns out that not only is it an electric water heater, but it is in fact an actual used-looking Appleseed processor getting moved somewhere with some typical orange ‘power tool cord’ trailing out of the top, along with a truckbed full of blue gas cans and other obvious biodiesel crap.

Its 2:30 am. I’m sitting in my room with one of my wonderful roommates, with laptops and the space heater on. There’s a raging Pacific storm lashing the city outside. We’re working on our websites and listening to vintage rockabilly and eating cake and being extremely productive. No, life doesnt’ suck.

It’s actually mid-day for me- my sleep schedule got quite thrown off today after pulling an all-nighter at my metal shop yesterday, and taking a couple of long naps to compensate this afternoon. I had coffee at 8 pm and started my writing workday in earnest. It’s good to have other night owls to work with though. Days like that are surreal. Last night ended with a phone call from Graydon who was up and checking email at 7 am his time and noticed that I was posting. He’s a normal person and was quite shocked to hear that I was ’still up’ from the night before.

Oh, but here in San Francisco we are far from normal, and it’s quite easy to find others as abnormal as oneself. On the other side of town, Tom’s busy at his job, a contract position involving circuit design. He chooses to do it at night quite often. His Tribe profile includes ‘avoiding an office’ as one of his goals in life (important if your career is normally done in offices). He’ll probably be working till 5 or 6 am, as will I if I don’t watch out. Exchanging emails at 4 am is amusing. Tom sets his computer’s clock ‘forward’ a few hours when mailing out work emails at that hour so they dont’ look so strange to his boss.

I’m a 24 hour person these days- the awake hours, and the work hours, can fall at any point of day or night. I don’t have a set schedule so the last few days this week i"d been at the metal shop in the morning welding, and now I’m up all night, all in the same week. But after 10 pm it obviously becomes a lot more solitary. When Tom and I started dating it was such a novelty for both of us to find another night owl to be ’social’ with. Yes, the having of no life and the having of no sleep is one of the central tenets of our nerdy relationship. Im really happy to find that there’s another productive night person at my house, too, and more importantly, to be able to do ‘work social’ gettogethers, nocturnal or daytime. I’m not much of a partier or social person these days, and the ‘work social’ is a way of getting my ‘people’ kick without having the nagging feeling like there’s something else I should be doing because the To-Do List is whipping me.

My house is an owner-builder renovation. We’ve got one room with gas heat, and it’s been really cold for the area, at least for a house with no central heating (yet). It makes me feel good to walk into the dining room (where the heat is) and see someone hard at work at the ‘home office’. Sitting around and being productive with others participating (but not interfering), is really important to me. Being around self-directed people is important to me. It all started when I started working on biodiesel projects about 6 years ago- I had a girlfriend at the time whom I absolutely adored because she was extremely focused and self-directed and could take care of herself and half the world too (she’s now a medic, which is great for the community she’s in…) We got into this great pattern one winter called ‘work date’- where a date consisted of me coming over, cooking up some sort of obscenely rich dessert, and then us spending a few hours in her room, writing or doing research or something equally productive. It was during a few weeks of extreme blizzard weather in our town, and I’ve got some fond memories of being snowed-in and emerging with some tangible work to point to, both of us…

I’ve been trying to rediscover the same dynamic in my other friendships ever since. Being around all these computer programmer geeks who work at home has made that more possible than it was when everyone I knew worked in construction and socializing pretty much meant drinking. Last year, me and Tom and another couple of guys were doing ‘Mobile Office’ social get-togethers, whereby several folks who telecommuted, headed to one nice warm room with laptops (and McMaster-Carr and Cole-Parmer, in my case) and worked ‘together’ for the afternoon. It’s almost like a social life, at least for us nerds.

I jumped at one of the Craigslist MIG welders in addition to the fantastic TIG we’re buying. It’s a gigantic old brick of copper windings on wheels- the Idealarc Sp-200, and it set me back all of $450, which I couldn’t resist.

It’s got a decent duty cycle and gives us yet another machine in the shop. The shop currently has somethign like 6 little Lincoln portable wirefeeds belonging to other shopmates, so this one will do some mid-range jobs. We’re splitting theTIG three ways so the additional MIG also gives us a backup for when one of us is using that and the other wants to work.

This machine has the ’stitch’ function, which I"ve always wanted to try out, and a couple of similar features- ’spot weld’ (how different is that from stitch?)

I’ll have to wait till after Christmas to get the gas and start playing.

Our shop’s now putting the feelers out for a CNC machining center…

Mark

so this morning we got a TIG - a used Miller Dynasty 200DX.

We is me and the boyfriend and a third person from our shop. Twice yesterday I almost bit the bullet and picked up a cheap used MIG (there were several on the local Craigslist- it’s a good week for welder prices, I guess people are selling everythign trying to pay for Christmas spending?).

A ‘1/3′ share in that awesome Dynasty welder isn’t much more than I’d have shelled out for a MIG that wasn’t quite right for me.

My ‘major purchases’ wish list is pretty much down to zero. Well, there is a little matter of wanting to get a Sprinter van next year, somehow, but having the great hauling van makes that a little less pressing of an issue.

Mark

I’ve got a processor system for sale (actually, several- these are all new components).

-Appleseed processor, 50ish gallons, on metal stand

-HEATED, closed wash tank on a stand, with thermostat

-mistwash mister array

-bubbler for bubblewashing

-5 micron filter

-simple titration gear

- graduated cylinders for test batches and quality testing

-copy of Biodiesel Homebrew Guide book

-5 pounds of KOH

Basically, everything you need to get started other than a scale (I recommend B100supply.com for this . Good ones start at $35 there)

$1000

these are located in Berkeley.

Mark

email address: alovert at b100 dot org

I had a whirlwind month so far. Last month ended with a flurry of phone calls to farmers for a commercial biodiesel plant project I want to ‘incite’. I’m really shaking the tree trying to see what falls out about a particular business idea I’ve had for a few years. The process has brought me a really interesting education in farm economics and oilseed practicalities.

and, it’s meant meetings, phone calls, email, phone calls, brainstorming, and more phone calls. It’s still at the very rudimentary brainstorm stage, and I’m doing it all absolutely glued to a notebook- it’s too much information to keep straight- and it’s given me a renewed appreciation for what those people go through to grow your and my damn food. It’s interesting, it’s challenging, it feels important, and I’m generally just extremely happy to be spending early winter working on interesting projects.

The last round was meeting up with an interested electrical engineer who currently works in the aerospace industry on spaceflight controls, and having a fun afternoon at a cafe brainstorming about automation. We’ll see where that goes. At the very least he’ll automate a homebrew-type small-farm plant, for fun. Through him I also found a possible interesting location to try the CSA end of things, on a small CSA in the valley.

I"m starting to realize there’s a pair of markets for on-farm production- a commercial-type facility geared towards 100,000 gallons a year fleets or farms, and also a much smaller one that we started calling the ‘CSA plant’- a small unit barely bigger than homebrewing (about the size of what I’ve done at Machine Shop with rudimentary equipment, actually), geared toward large biodiesel coops or the needs of an entity such as a small CSA farm with one tractor and a few delivery trucks . I think there are a number of people currently furiously trying to crack the ‘CSA plant design’ dilemma.

Enough about that cause there’s a whole nother entry written already that I’ll post sometime .. later.

***************************
I had a list of long-term goals- this particular list was about major purchases- and they’ve all come around for much less than expected and much quicker than expected. The van, now a GC, hopefuly next a welder, and that’s just the blog-worthy stuff. I’ve blazed through a lot of minor but necessary tasks and feel quite happy about where it’s been going, despite my injury sidelining me completely off of my original plan for this fall.
*********************************
ALso somewheres ’round a month ago, one of my workshop students, a chemist, told me about a sale on old gas chromatographs he knew about.

!More phone calls!, emails to people around the world trying to identify if these were equipped like I wanted, phone calls to the lab to set up a meeting date, logistics, more email and phone calls to two other interested parties to figure out if we could each walk away with one. I drove to Santa Cruz, my friend who’d told me about the instrument sale took the afternoon to help me, and we took a look at the instruments at the lab. So far it looks great- Piedmont Biofuels is getting one and another, non-biodiesel, worthy cause is receiving the third. I spent a week chewing my nails waiting for the proper person at the lab to be ready to meet with us. My friend Hugh_D from the Ford forum was absolutely stellar through all this in setting this project up and dealing with all our phone calls, research, questions, logistics, emails… you get the picture. During this time he threw a little barbeque gathering one Monday night with a few biodiesel/diesel-owning friends down there, and we had a great time boring/scaring the teenage kids that they’d brought along, as we talked up biodiesel and Petromax lanterns and Mercedii and cloud point. One of the guests was Jorah, owner of the feed store in Ben Lomond (currently the only biodiesel pump in Santa Cruz area)- he’s a jovial person who seems to get along with everybody. The teens misheard his name and later asked Hugh ‘what’s up with that, a woman named Mark and a guy named Dorah’.
Jorah says that he gets firemen and country folk coming in to the feed store asking about the picturesque biodiesel tank (his pump is solar-powered and he uses an antique gas pump dispenser to hang the nozzle on). He is such a genial person that he manages to talk them out of their initial ‘why would you want to pay SO MUCH’ reaction , by invoking farm and national security issues, and they walk away with a tankful despite initial scepticism. Wow. Oh yeah, he loses money on the deal. HE’s just selling biodiesel because of his missionary zeal about the stuff.

Well, all the phone calls got settled, I had checks in hand from various people, and last Friday I drove down to Santa Cruz and loaded my van with gas chromatographs, the autosamplers, interfaces, computers, and spare parts, then topped it off by loading up the roof rack with pallet racking from a Craigslist deal. That’s the 16-foot tall warehouse shelving. My new shop has nice tall ceilings and I"m ecstatic about fitting my assorted crap onto pallet racks. I’ve really missed having a functional shop and it’s been chaotic with all my tools and supplies in various bins scattered all over.

Last week I went into the beehive and there obvious Varroa mite problems- common to surface at this time of year here. Yes, bees get PMS- Parasitic Mite Syndrome, a combination of blood-sucking mite infestation and viruses that hitchike around in the process. My strategy for dealing with them is really complicated and I spent a few days on the internet reading up the latest nonchemical management advances, which have really moved forward since I last kept bees three or four years ago. MOre on this later I think.

My weekend vaporized… into what? oh yeah, I had a couple of 9-hour days at the computer answering email, mostly about the tour, and doing tour promotion stuff. During the weekend I figured out my hand was the worst it’s been since I injured it in September. The typing is now officially part of the problem. My injury had gotten a lot better in late November but now it was back to excruciating. Damn! I of course have no morning times available to go to the hospital again for a follow-up for several days to come. Ick!

monday was a sort of low point- staring at my new shop accessories and thinking about injuries, and freaking out a little about my deteriorating vehicles and my inability to handle a wrench to fix them. I’ve literally never taken any vehicles to the shop for anything other than alignment or tires - I do all my work and have no idea how the process works for normal people- and I was going through this funny anxiety wondering how to select a mechanic so I don’t get ripped off.

The answer suddenly came to me- believe it or not, I actually know a real, live mechanic- and a big cloud lifted when I realized that yes, there is in fact a solution to this unsolvable problem. the VW now in his hands with instructions to both fix the switch that turns on the electric fan (something that’s ALWAYS burning up on these cars- in fact it had just been done three months ago), and a request that he also wire up a permanently-mounted manual switch on the dash that I can use to turn it on and off the NEXT time it burns up. Every VW should have this feature.

I laid off the typing on Sunday and Monday (I think) and sat around reading and doing similar ‘doing nothing’ tasks- that made me think about all the different Web and book projects I was just starting to work on last week and how frustrating it was to have to take it easy with the injury. Arghhh…. Then two days off typing and the hand feels great. I should leave the typing alone for a while, but at least I can use tools again.

It pretty much had to get better- I had a pair of workdays scheduled this week, where I’d hired a friend to assemble Appleseed processor parts for me and to help set up the shop. I’m making a few ‘full system’ processors for sale to pay for my GC setup costs (which dont’ come about for a few weeks, so I’m doing fine with it). The last couple of days I installed the pallet racking with the employee’s help, plopped all my shop possessions onto it, created a really nice work surface, and installed the employee at the tedious task of assembling ’sticks’ of plumbing. I gotta say it’s really unpleasant just ’standing around’ and watching other people work or lift things for me. However, my new shop is making me extremely happy (as long as my injury lets me at least use SOMETHING in it). There’s a great group of people there whom I really enjoy socializing with, a nice kitchen, and lots of light… such a contrast to the old shop.

Three of us at the shop have been talking about buying a TIG for months. Tonight the need for a TIG in my life got poundingly loud when I started working on the wash tank that my employee had prepped and realized I can’t keep borrowing welders.

I think we’re ordering a lightweight inverter-based TIG tomorrow, and I"ll be looking for a wirefeed accessory for it to set it up for MIG when I need to.

There’ve been way too many exciting new expensive-ish possessions and projects in my life lately, but it’s working out so far as long as my hand lets it.

Next month is GC setup…

Mark

Complete information about the classes in North Carolina, Georgia, Houston, and Salt Lake City, is at http://girlmark.com/tour2006.html

A lot more information about the tour is here:

http://girlmark.com/tour2006.html

http://girlmark.com/tour2005.html
Homebrewing and biodiesel equipment building classes this winter with
Maria ‘Mark’ Alovert:

North Carolina Jan 20-21
Atlanta GA Jan 28-29
Houston Tx Feb 11-12
Salt Lake City UT, Feb 25

others with exact dates to be announced:
March: Denver Co
later in the spring: Berlin MD and New Hampshire

for further info email classregistration@girlmark.com
to register, please see end of this announcement.

some details:

Pittsboro, North Carolina, at Central Carolina Community
College/Piedmont Biofuels:

January 20, 7-9, Pittsboro, NC: Biofuels 101 with me and local SVO
users. This is an optional presentation providing a short overview of
biodiesel, straight vegetable oil, the biodiesel industry, and homebrew
biodiesel.
cost: by donation, please email me to register.

January 21 and 22, Pittsboro, NC: two-day biodiesel homebrew
comprehensive workshop with equipment build
10-4 each day
cost: $120 for the weekend
this hands-on class will teach you how to safely make biodiesel fuel.
We’ll be making small batches of biodiesel, visiting the Piedmont
Biofuels homebrew site, and building equipment for some attendees to
take home (additional parts costs and details to be announced, email me
for info)

January 28-29: Atlanta, GA at Vegenergy. Class sponsored by Vegenergy
and B100supply.com
This is a two-day comprehensive homebrewing workshop with equipment
build- you can build a processor to take home (additional parts costs
and details to be announced, email me for info)
Cost: $120 for the weekend

Feb 11-12, Houston, TX, class hosted by Houston Biodiesel
This is a two-day comprehensive homebrewing workshop with equipment
build- you can build a processor to take home (additional parts costs
and details to be announced, email me for info)
Cost: $120 for the weekend

Feb 24, 6-9:30 pm, Salt Lake City, UT, Processor Building class hosted
by Utahbiodieselsupply.com
This is an equipment build class. We’ll assemble a few processors for
students who purchase parts kits (email me for info).
Cost: $25-50 sliding scale of your choice

Feb 25, Salt Lake City, UT: Comprehensive homebrew class, hosted by
Utahbiodieselsupply.com
This fast-paced, hands-on class will take you through the steps needed
to produce homemade biodiesel, test it for quality, and more.
Cost: $60

March: two-day class in or near Denver, Co, hosted by Lorance Romero and
Denver Biodiesel.

Dates and details will be announced at http://girlmark.com/tour2005 as
soon as they’re confirmed. Cost will be $120 for the weekend and we
should be building processors for those who wish to purchase parts kits
(details to be announced)

For info on past classes I"ve taught, and links to students’ reviews of
these classes, please see www.localb100.com/tour.html

How to register :
Registration: Pick what class you’re attending, and send payment and an
email requesting registration to me. I expect some classes to fill up,
please check back to this web page for class status. I prefer Paypal
payments if possible. I expect some of these classes to fill up early.

checks to:
Maria Alovert, PO Box 2994, Berkeley Ca 94702

Or Paypal (preferred) to me at the account wrench@tinkersworkshop.org
(First time users, you do not have to be a Paypal member to use Paypal
(it accepts credit cards). Go to Paypal.com, click on ’send money’, and
enter my address in the recipient field)

For any additional information , please email me with the specific
classes’ date or location in the subject line, to:
classregistration@girlmark.com

I’ve been trying to pick up a gas chromatograph for a few months. I finally got a call today from a chemist I know, who has access to several HP 5890’s that a lab is liquidating. These are the same machines as used in the GC training I went to this summer. I"ve got a few options on where to set it up in the Bay Area, and am going to use it in a bunch of experiments to prove or disprove various ‘truisms’ in homebrew biodiesel.

There’s a thread on the yahoogroups biodiesel list right now, someone’s asking whether there are a few steps that homebrewers/small producers can take to improve their quality control to commercial-spec levels. I think I’m on the cusp of a lot of the answers to this one thanks to some work I did this summer which involved GC.

Anyway, I’m looking for suggestions on which column and which detector I’d need (I don’t have the ASTM test description at home here tonight). We apparently get “the pick” of several machines and there should be almost everything there to choose from.

Also, I’ve in the past heard from people offering to donate money to this project. I can pay for the machine but there’s quite a cost in setting it up (gas bottle rental, standards (ie pure chemicals used in the test), microliter syringes, and probably some odds and ends that I might initially miss at the lab sale)- so I’d be grateful for any money that can be donated towards this project. I wasn’t expecting to see this machine show up so soon, and I’ll write up a plan for the experimentation that I’m planning to use it for and post it here in a couple of days. I’d be using this machine for both nonprofit/open source work, and probably also for a commercial project with small producers/farmers which I"m starting to get off the ground.

please email me at alovert@b100.org if you have any suggestions for the equipment I’d need for the “total and free glycerol test” specifically.

Mark

Clark and his friends came up with a way to insert a heating element into a standpipe wash tank:
http://www.wvofuels.com/index.php/archives/2005/11/16/wash-tank-heater/ I really like his homebrew blog in general.

couple safety notes:

-You’ll probably want to at least goop over the terminals with silicone to prevent anyone accidentally grabbing the live wires, or fit a plastic electrical box over it somehow. I usually just weld a box onto a tank to make a heated wash tank, but that’s not the point of a weldless design like this one. Your electrical inspector or fire marshall might not be too happy about this.
-I have serious doubts about installing heating elements in plastic tanks, especially ones without a thermostat. But you can add this to a steel tank and shouldn’t have any problems. Thermostats can be mounted with zip ties and such, though they’re also a pair of live wire terminals and need to be covered with something to prevent someone touching them and zapping they-selves.

His article about this design is going to be the basis of a new Biodieselcommunity.org article about heating wash tanks in general- weldless rigging, welded boxes, good fish tank heaters and the like, and heat exchangers .

If anyone has photos of a heat exchanger in use this way, please let me know at alovert@ b100.org.

Mark

I sorta sloppily uploaded some photos of the Appleseed processor design that I’ve been doing for the past few months:

theyr’e here: http://www.localb100.com/appleseed2005/

I’ll put up an annotated version with notes about “what connects to whom and why” soon. Here’s the discussion thread about it at infopop’s Biodiesel Tutorial discussion section

Here’s another layout that accomplishes the same thing in one huge picture:
http://localb100.com/appleseed2005/alternate/lower%20biodiesel%20reactor%20plumbing.jpg

Mark

it never ends. Last night there was a flurry of email on the Machine Shop list about crap floating in the biodiesel tank. The biodiesel tank is full of fuel known to be in-spec this time. Apparently it has bacterial growths now after having left the tote lid cracked open for several months. There was also a nasty series of air-in-the-line incidents after our third Facet pump that pushes fuel from the storage tank to the genny’s injection pump died .

(this facet is a metal one, not the plastic cheapie job)

Again, my point is?… to dissuade some of you from taking ‘generator maintenance’ lightly and from falling into the trap of seeing generators as the easy answer to offgrid limitations.

In other news, after an insane amount of man-hours spent on troubleshooting many other new kinks in the system and in the context of our sulfation situation, The Investor wrote the following:

i’m learning to really not like batteries. and i’m learning that on a battery system with big inverters, the efficiency you want is not a big efficient generator that only runs for a short period of time each day, but rather a smaller one that can run for many hours at low power, quietly, ideally during the times you are using ac loads anyway, therefore bypassing the batteries in the process. it is our attempt at short charging cycle that makes the charge incomplete, as well as insures that most of the day is spent discharging the batteries while the generator is not running.

of course I disagree that a new small genny is appropriate to that particular place, as we (oops- they at this point, I’m not involved…) got a battery system in the first place to stop running a generator all day long, and there’s no such thing as a small quiet diesel genny as far as I know, and we have no predictable AC loads that happen on a schedule that you could plan charging around.

It’s like there’s just no easy answer to inefficient offgrid consumption , which is effectively what this experiment tried to do over there . Hippies with no offgrid experience go to Burning Man and come back thinking you can solve anythign with ‘just get a generator’ or ‘a few batteries’ , assume that the biodiesel or the SVO will suddenly make it all very cheap (aka ‘hippie bus’ syndrome)- but the day-to-day realities of the maintenance of an offgrid generator are really different than those of temporary use ones and it’s not even easy fix it by throwing money at the problem.

he later says:

i now see why all off-grid systems ultimately become a battle against the batteries. they are the most tempermental part of the system. and i now see the rest of the system should be designed with this fact in mind. system integration, balancing and interoperating motivation is more critical in this than i have often realized.

which I actually agree with. Whoa!

Mark

I’m starting to line up workshops for the next few months- I"m not sure that I"ll want to add any more other than in the Northwest.

Atlanta Ga
Salt Lake City UT
Berlin MD
Houston Tx

It’s not clear yet which one is when exactly…

Mark

well that was quick- within about 8 hours of writing that post I got a cheap diesel van. The truck is going!

Mark

I did two classes in Seattle in the past month. The first one was in mid-october , and we had three times as much interest as we had space. We scheduled a second class for ’spillover’ registrants two weeks later and that one generated twice as many inquiries as we had space. Some of it is gas prices related and some of it is probably due to us all having reached a ‘critical mass’ whereby the general public has all heard about this stuff by now so there’s just too much interest to go around.

For the first class I drove to Seattle with the boyfriend and his van, and became completely ’sold’ on the idea of doing this with vans in the future- it was so nice having the RV setup after doing my 10,000 miles last fall with the cramped single-cab brown truck.

The rainy season has started here in Northern California- so I’m looking for a van of my own and selling my king cab 86 Ford truck effective immediately. I dont want to go through another winter with an open-bed pickup truck when I"m not working heavy construction.

I own ‘the perfect trailer’ (5 by 8 with a superstructure for tie-downs , and reasonably heavy suspension), so I can fit anything onto my trailer that I might otherwise need an open-top truckbed for.

*****

The second ‘added’ class that was two weeks later, I actually flew up for and rented a car (it was completely shocking to drive a cheapo gasoline Hyundai with acceleration after driving a cheapo VW Rabbit for the last few months!).

I bought all new plastic labware that didn’t weigh as much as my former glassware, fit all the liter batch labware into a suitcase, and let the airline Homeland Security inspectors make what they could of it during their inspection. (note: a special thanks to B100supply.com for unearthing great prices for a few things that made this possible, such as the $36 super-accurate pocket scale- I bought four of these to get rid of the last labware ‘bottleneck’ in class- they’re a lot easier to pack than the triple beam scales I"ve previously used in classes, and his prices on them are a lot cheaper than the ones I"d previously seen anywhere).

Once there I rented a car and drove around for a day picking up the flammables and additional large stuff that I didn’t bring on the plane. I found time to go bother Chris at Frybrid and gossip about SVO for a few hours that day even.

Lyle R. of the Northwest Biofuels Network and Noam of Breathable Bus Coalition, who teach high school and adult classes about this stuff, helped with oil and a couple of samples of biodiesel and a few other items (Lyle had arranged this class and the wonderful community center classroom location!), and I later passed on some of the class equipment to them (like titration supplies ). Students brought plastic bottles for reactors, and a few brought samples of oil. It was extremely easy. Afterwards I stayed for 4 more days and visited biodieselers in Portland and many old friends in Olympia and Seattle and had an indescribably fabulous time.

I think I can even teach a ‘fly-in’ workshop in the future that involves a small welded processor if I have shop access for a half day before- fly in with processor plumbing already assembled, buy a brand new RV-size 8-gallon propane tank at Lowes, and weld up a few ports to add the plumbing to- then sell it locally to cover costs before flying back home. This might be a little bit much to ask in midwinter when I expect to do this tour and when backyard welding venues are unavailable, but we’ll see what turns up. I’ve been mostly teaching without a processor since last spring anyway especially for one-day classes.

So… I’m now looking to plan some workshops out of state again (for a while I wasnt willing to plan any, until I"d replaced the original brown Ford with the current red king cab one). It’s winter, I know, but I think I can fly out to the East Coast or the Southwest, affordably rent a (gas of course- gasp!) car for two weeks and get a lot of ‘visiting’ in in between teaching some classes.

This is a fundraiser for my nefarious plans to get a good diesel van someday ($??) and a gas chromatograph soon ($2K).

What I"m looking for are folks in cities with biodiesel homebrewing interest who can help me locate/negotiate a classroom space- community center classrooms, etc, or someone’s shop space or garage.

above and below: We had a ‘guest lecturer’ at the 15th’s class- “johnO from the infopop biodiesel discussion forum brought some innovative equipment to show.

We’ve done a few workshops in conference rooms and carpeted spaces- they’re not messy if we’re not building processors- so there are a lot of possibilities for types of rooms that are usable as long as they’re warm enough for people to spend a 7-hour class, mostly sitting, in them.

If we’re building processors we’d need shop or garage space but I’m not tied to doing those anymore as they take a huge amount of energy on my part to organize and run.

-I’d take it from there and run registration so it’s not a burden on you or the local group
-I’d fly in a couple of days before and do the shopping runaround / help you with your backyard system/etc. If you have shop access I can probably even build a portable table-top processor for use in the class.
-Another goal of mine in traveling to teach is to gauge the ‘pulse’ of what’s happening in grassroots biodiesel ’round the country, so I really want to visit co-ops, small business biodiesel, and similar projects.

- the contact info is alovert at b100 dot org

Mark

Last week I finally braved the Urgent Care department at the county hospital-= yep, I"ve no health insurance of course. I spent 9 hours in the waiting room with half of East Oakland’s obese population and a few smelly and wingnutty homeless people, watching my $10 in change disappear into the junkfood machine as I didnt’ bring dinner, and finally got my hand looked at which in itself was a two-hour process or somethin’. It turns out I tore a ligament, the one that controls grip. EEEWEWWW, gross, ick!. I’m now in a splint (a removable ‘cast’ basically) with my right hand unusable for a few weeks. Of course I went untreated for about 6 weeks before finally going to the doctor and had moved my entire shop during that time, so I hope (pray?) I regain normal mobility after this self-abuse!!! The agonising 9 hour waiting room experience reminded me of why I was so reluctant to go.

I can “kind of” type since my main fingers are unaffected, but the cast makes it quite clumsy, especially since it’s on my wrist and I can’t rotate my hand comfortably into normal typing position. I ordered an ergonomic keyboard after test-driving a couple of them that belong to the boyfriend’s ex?girlfriend, which should make typing a bit easier. It’s driving me nuts not being able to type fast and not being able to do anything else with my hands to occupy my time. I was in the new shop tonight, staring longingly at some of my new tools, wondering how long it’ll be before I can do some of the exciting projects on my plate.

I also took some of this as a wake-up call of sorts- I’ve known for years about the problems with my hypermobile joints and known I"ve gotta do some serious strength training to compensate. Last month when I was doing the ‘dear gods,dont let this be the beginning of crippled hands too’ dance, I was swearing up and down about recommitting myself to doing some injury prevention work this time, Lyme exhaustion or no. I’ve also decided to take a look at safer typing ergonomics, before I wind up with the wrist injuries that plague my computer-user friends.

I was also overjoyed to finally learn what my other ‘RSI’ injury is- I was misdiagnosed with tendinitis a few years ago after another sports injury to my elbow which has sidelined me from serious carpentry work ever since. That time I was in the throes of Lyme disability and the only health care I had access to was community health clinic staffed by young residents with too many patients- the diagnosis consisted of ‘you have tendinitis of some sort, take ibuprophen and hope it goes away’. The sports massage guy a few years later clued me in that this wasn’t the right diagnosis. This time the older and experienced doctor poked at my elbow for about 60 seconds and wrote down the name of another ligament I seem to have torn. When I looked it up on Google, the description of it (it’s a rare type of injury) fit my circumstances almost exactly to the letter. At least I can do something about fixing that- tendinitis is a tougher thing to deal with (I think) than what I apparently have. I"ve seen people with similar injuries make miraculous recoveries through strength training, though, so I’m pretty ecstatic to find I was misdiagnosed.

Since the vertical keyboard I’m getting is going to require me to really focus on relearning touch-typing (no peeking at the keyboard possible with this radical design), I’m also going to work on learning Dvorak keyboard layoutlayout which I’ve wanted to pick up, so I ordered a set of stick-on Dvorak layout letters for one of my ‘normal’ shape keyboards to see if I can wrap the brain around that too. I"m not sure it’ll all help during the relatively short timeframe while I’ve got the cast on my wrist , but it seems as good a time as any to start using these improvements.

Anyone know a good physical therapist in my town (no chiropractors, please, I have good access to those already and I"m looking for a ‘conventional’ PT here)? email is alovert at b100 (dot ) org

Mark

I did a sports injury to my right hand a few weeks ago (like 5? weeks at this point?) and it hasnt’ healed. SCARY!!!!!! I’ve got another case of tendinitis in my elbow already and what’s going on with the hand feels exactly like that. Dear God, please, I dont’ want to end up like one of THOSE people with the repetitive stress injuries who cant’ use their hands.

Of course I was super busy and using tools the first few weeks of the hand injury, and had a couple of big complicated classes to teach during that time that required constantly stressing the hand. Arggghhhh! I’m hoping to find the time to get to the clinic tomorrow and get it diagnosed. The other tendinitis I have (also from a sports injury) is still undiagnosed- when that one happened, I went to a sports massage CMT who is known for being able to work miracles on people’s chronic injuries. The medic, a veteran of 30 years of sports injury patients, felt around my elbow, said something like ‘you’re weird’, and dug out an anatomy textbook to consult. Uh-oh. Apparently I’ve got weird anatomy as my joints are (unfortunately) hyper-flexible and things aren’t lined up quite right, making diagnosis of that particular problem difficult. At this point I"ve done everything I"ve been told to try and heal that particular problem, and I’m ready to throw in the towel and pay for surgery if that’s an option.

In the meantime, I"ve been ignoring the forums and most of my email as typing requires either one-handed hunt-and-peck or hurting it further. Be patient if writing to me.

Mark

Speaking of ’stewardship of stuff’, several energy machines at the shop are sick.

our generator seems to have gotten bit by the load of bad BioEnergy Systems fuel that went around earlier in the summer (in fact I helped figure out that it was BioEnergy’s fuel rather than World Energy which we all thought we were buying). We got clogged injectors and crap had settled into the bottom of the tank after just 50-100 gallons of that stuff, and it’s costing big bucks to deal with.

and our batteries are sulfated. That part is obscene. Many people who go offgrid end up ruining their first set of batteries, and they learn a lesson from it and are careful with their replacement set. We’ve sulfated our replacement set.

…a week ago I was walking around school thinking about people who get excited about going offgrid with a generator. I hear from them a lot. There’s a false sense that generators on biodiesel or SVO seem like a limitless source of offgrid energy- you dont have the dramatic charging limits of PV, so folks feel like it’d be less of a change to their lifestyle. This is the sort of offgrid system we built at the Shop- so much charging capacity and so much battery power and so much inverter that in theory ‘you don’t have to conserve’.

I always want to warn would-be generator users that it’s a massive hassle and that the maintenance isn’t something to take lightly. In many cases the folks wanting to mess with a generator are gearheads like us who think of ‘maintenance’ as changing the occasional oil or fuel filter. IN our case, the fuel filters and the occasional contaminated 300 gallon fuel tank has COST and cost and cost. When we bought some of Jess’ crappy fuel (it developed a crystalisation of monoglycerides problem) last winter, we estimated that it eventually ended up costing us $15 a gallon to deal with the fallout- by the time we were done draining fuel and refilling tanks and purging air and pulling injectors and so forth. And that was with the older crappier generator. The newer, cleaner one seems to be more sensitive to fuel fluctuations.

So when I got on the computer that night after thinking about the ‘false economy’ of generators versus conservation and PV, I saw that the Shop email list was overrun by panicked generator-related email.

Behold- I present to you, the weirdness that is the Shop and it’s list and its energy issues. I actually think this will be funny to those who’ve tried to run a cobbled-togetherpower system, and I"m trying to dissuade any of the rest of you would-be offgrid hippies from trying it.

Don’t buy a generator: The Machine Shop Generator Chronicles of October 2005

note: All this frantic keyboard-strangling took place over 2 hours (mostly in the first half hour), and there are a few extra emails I’ve even deleted:

The Investor writes:

The whisperwatt is belching smoke for some unknown reason. please don’t start it unless your name is P. and you need to for testing.

Until the smoking is figured out, all battery charging should use the top grey generator.
There is now a fuel valve that will direct fuel up there. push 3 way ball valve to the
right of the xfer switch box to up position and fuel will go up there. make sure you hear
pump going in Biodiesel room. Not sure if pump power line got moved to the center
power buss on the xfer switch so it works off of either generator. Liam?

Also make sure xfer switch is in the up position for the top generator.

Brian may or may not have landed the power wires top and bottom to the grey generator.
Look inside the xfer box to make sure. If he has not and you need power, please call him
at 510.xxx-xxxx and ask him very nicely if he will come over and finish the wiring.

then they argue about whether the thing is actually smoking and what is the exact state of the ‘hack’ that we’ve contrived (ie the ‘gen control’ , a custom circuit board P. built):

TheInvestor:

I understand the batteries cut out after hours of charging yesterday. the inverters were in float but the gen did not shut off. I don’t know what the issue is with the gen
control. Maybe P. does. I do know the batteries desperately need an equalization but
that can’t happen until the gen control is done and the generator is not smoking. But I
can’t come over and there and deal with this stuff this week. and liam has school stuff.
So not sure what to do.

Also, the whisperwatt continues to smoke terribly. The injectors need to be pulled as
they are likely not seating well.

Until then, battery charging should use the grey generator. But I’m not sure if it is
wired in. brian? Did you finish the wiring?

If all else fails, I think liam has some kerosene lanterns. And wood is easy to work with
hand saws and hammers.

Sometimes it feels like this just never ends. And some times I simply cannot come over
there to deal with it. such is the case this week.

Not having made his point sufficiently strongly, the same caffeinnated guy argues in a second email to no one in particular three minutes later:

i cannot start the EQ on a questionable generator. if it starts smoking again in the middle, 100s of dollars of fuel get wasted. this is what happened last time and remember the mess and multiple cycles that resulted. i am not starting it again under similar fucked up conditions. also, i’m not terribly interested in sooting the neighborhood for 5 days either.

the injectors need to get pulled and taken to the shop. liam cannot do it due to school.

nesdon, can you pull the injectors tomorrow possibly? crisp money can be paid injectors pulled, shopped and reinstalled to correct torque settings tomorrow.

then i will EQ. but i can’t until this is done. it is easy, but i can’t get there during a weekday to do it.

The EQ thing he’s referring to is an equalizing charge, when they run the genny for days on end. This should happen every few weeks. In our case we’ve had to do it due to torching our batteries, which should have never happened… the second time.

P. writes and suggests we can switch to our really crappy, loud, less-reliable old generator:

It’s absolutely NOT smoking at all right now. I could see “hot air distortion” at the top, but nothing else. Liam saw it burning clean too.

Even so, you can always switch to the gray genny (or even run it instead).

The smoke a couple days ago was thick black sooty stuff that made your eyes burn. Then when I was testing the auto-start, I noticed it was nowhere near as bad, and now, it’s better than most diesels.

The Investor, who has an unwisely abusive relationship with P. (who’s volunteering through all this and isnt’ even a part of our community), proceeds to insult his volunteer, as usual:

Phil, don’t enable a half ass solution that is likely going to bite us later. i do not have time to ignore recurring problems that are going to cost money and hassle later. fix the problem when realized.

this smoking problem is recurring problem. it has come and gone several times. that it is not smoking now in no way changes taht this is a recurring problem. this is an intermitently sealing injector seat or the like. i would to get them looked at by the injector shop.

the grey generator burns vastly more fuel. it is also noisy and bubbles loses her beauty sleep and gets cranky. next time i have to switch to the grey one for a stupid reason, remind me to give you the bill for the extra fuel.

the EQ can’t start until the whisperwatt known issues are fixed.

P. points out:

I would say it’s air in the fuel or other “goodies” in the fuel. The acrid smoke makes me lean toward the latter. I don’t think it’s an intermittent injector, but either way, it’s your call.

The Investor says:

it has done this on many fuels, delivered both from the native tank and the tote. all the filters have been changed. the air filter has been pulled to see if any difference was made. none.

when we first installed the new injectors it smoked like crap. i figured the old poorly atomizing injectors had carboned up the motor. so i gave it an italian tune up and floored it. i pegged all the inverters on max charge, turned on every electrical device in the yard, which loaded the gen well over 30k, and ran it as such for two hours. afterwards it ran much cleaner, but never really right.

some weeks later, cycles of heavy smoking and non smoking started again. now i could this time give it a northern, italian tune up and beat it even harder, but i’d really rather take it to a shop in rome and have the proper rites administered by trained experts.

as it is, white smoke means there is no new pope. and it is about time we got a new pope.

It comes up that we dont’ know actually the name of the shop that we use, because we keep really crappy records:

the Investor explains:

i believe it is the place you were sent to with the dt466 injectors. i do not konw the name. the receipt is lost int he annals of Machine Shop virtual accounting.

but talking will likely work. make it sound bad, not good. claim art. we bought them there 3 months ago. explain we have gone through everything multiple times and are getting intermittent smoking that seems like injectors. stress the intermittent part so if there tests show things ok, still request an exchange. they just rebuild these things so it is not much skin off their fingers.

start and stop the engine cold several times before you pull them to make them in the worst shape possible. though no, smoke is not normal on this engine when cold. maybe a litle black on initial fire, but not while running. this engine should run clear exhaust. this is a CARB compliant engine. clean clean.

i have figured out how to be int he east bay tomorrow afternoon from about 3 onward. so if you can get the injectors out and to hte place and back, i can get them back in later int he day. or i can go pick them up if they need to stay there for a bit. i want to check compression too. and whack the thing with a large pipe several times just for good measure.

someone brings up an entirely other new problem we’re having. Yes, it really never ends around here. And it all needs to be discussed via email list, and in many emails. There’s a joke that in a post-earthquake, Katrina-style disaster, the place would still have the capability to make electricity, but since the Internet will go down there’ll be no way for those stranded at the Shop to know how to run the generator syste, because it’s in such a constant (yet changing) state of ‘hack’ that always requires detailed emails to explain. And the Gremlins that occupy such a hacked-together system will absolutely thrive in an absense of debugging emails…

Well, it auto started some time in the night, and is running, and is not
smoking at all but two of the gauges are fritzing. First time I’ve seem
this, the RPM’s are oscillating at about 8 hz between 1800 and 2000, (it
looks kinda like a bad cable, but I assume its fully electrical) and the
ammeter is jumping but with a little jerky randomness between 15 and 25.
hmmm

It started at 8:24 this morning. It emailed me:

Message from phil-O-Matic Generator Control System: Startup Sequence
Message from phil-O-Matic Generator Control System: Glow Plugs On
Message from phil-O-Matic Generator Control System: Cranking Engine
Message from phil-O-Matic Generator Control System: Engine Warm-Up
Message from phil-O-Matic Generator Control System: Generator Online

Then at 9:49 this morning:
Message from phil-O-Matic Generator Control System: Engine Cool Down
Message from phil-O-Matic Generator Control System: Generator Offline

The gauges are normal. The Tacho started doing that after Jim got water in it. I drilled a hole and let the water out, and it was ok for awhile, but now it’s moving wild. It clearly isn’t varying that much. According to the service manual, it’s got an electric tachometer, but it’s actually driven off a cable. I know this because I built the auto-start originally to use the pulse from that pickup that doesn’t exist.

The ammeter jumps because of the regulator. It tends to “hunt” when there is little load. But 15 to 25 sounds like a little much. I’ll check it today.

-Phil

the Investor writes:

Unfortunately, I must take a moment out from stewing about the unrelenting toil and annoyance of all things Shop Infrastructure to note how, ummm, unbelievably cool (and geeky) it is that the generator emailed phil and told him what it was doing. I do not believe that is a feature that comes stock with the unit.

Can you add me to the cc list?

P continues:

Since the Genny start is set just above the LVCO, this means power would have been lost this morning sometime had it not started. The absorption time is set at 1 hour, so that means it only took 25 minutes of bulk charging. I can only assume BAD sulfation!

I didn’t really look at the voltage trips in there. Do you recall what they are set at?

-Phil

Investor talks about sulfation (which he’s 100% responsible for, since he;s the one who decided to tweak the inverter settings too low). The ‘EQ routine’ he’s describing is a matter of running the generator for 6 days straight to do certain types of charging to help desulfate the sick batteries:

Yes, this means the batteries are nearly as unhappy as the rabbit. Or maybe I should say the hamsters unhappy. the first time I showed darryl the batteries, he said, “oh, so this is where you keep the hamsters".

But yes, the batteries should charge for at least 2 hours in bulk. They are heavily
sulfated. You can probably see it crystallized on the negative plates. This is very bad
we keep doing this. we can NOT run them into the ground like this and expect much life
out of them.

I got a new EQ scenario from the factory for heavy desulfation. It takes 6 days. Be
warned . . .

I’m actually sparing you guys a few of the emails. It turns out there’s also no emergency-disconnect at the generator, so if the inverters (across the property) decide to start it while you’re trying to work on it, you’re screwed.

The Investor writes:

Phil,, there MUST be an autostart disable at the generator. Like the old twist lock we
had. Something simple and obvious must be at the generator. I suggest a toggle switch
mounted next to the circuit breaker. There are nice toggle switches up in the electrical
hardware store by the hamsters. Above the box with the circuit breakers.

aah, it turns out the safety disconnect is a ‘work in progress’. Phil writes:

This is designed into the system, but not yet wired up. It is simple: If the big genny selector switch is “off", it will not start. This is a needed interlock, and also functions in 2 ways for safety.

-Phil

P. then replies to the point about the generator’s ability to email him. As you can imagine, our crowd itself creates an immense amount of email- it’s quite scary to me that the inanimate objects can now start to send us email:

Keep in mind it’s in a debugging mode, so you may get about 20 emails during each event (startup, shutdown, etc).

As I refine the software, this will stop and be reduced to only emails with “alert” status, like start errors. However there will soon be a web page that you can peruse to check the current status of the generator, and the log of events. This will also be shown on the display of the power control center. I also have the “alert” emails sent as text messages to my cellphone.

I am still working the kinks out of the genny control software, so expect to see some strange messages if you join.

-Phil

someone else points out:

Phil, was this all your idea? There must be, by now, something protectable
(patentable) here. If you developed it to this level recently, you may have
been working for The Investor, in which case ownership would be dubious, but without
wanting to start a fight (please guys) it’s friggin’ cool, and should be out
there.

Jake.

The Investor takes his opportunity to rib his volunteer P, which is kinda a dumb habit since, as I said, P does all this crazy electrical engineering stuff for free. Last year there was a minor rent rebellion when he was particularly nasty to Phil while Phil was headed into uncharted territory hacking the inverter synchronisation

Unfortunately phil is constitutionally incapable (or just terribly resistant) to
documenting anything, so it is very difficult to submit patent papers, or even
manufacturing drawing to a producer where more might be made and sold. It is all only
lodged in his mind, but usually gets pushed out by the next impossible (yet successful)
hack.

phil can’t even remember what he did in the 3phase Phil-o-Matic as he made it at 5 am and it
has 200 soldered connections and a weird pulsing heart. It is the absolute core of this
whole system and if it ever went down we are fucked and no one knows how to build another
one. Smart people would have another one there waiting to go. But us? Not even the
software loaded on the eprom is backed up. Duh!

Phil would be a very rich man if only for the spoils that documentation would bring . . .

P defends himself (I would have told The Investor to go fuck himself long before, personally).

Cool as this all is, it’s been like 2 years of constant hacking and refining. We would have been best off paying the 6 grand and gotten an off-the-shelf solution.

Phil writes:

First off, you are wrong on the inverter phase synchronizer. There is no documentation, but there are only 3 active parts in there, the main one is a microcontroller, then there is a quartz crystal, and finally and LED. (which has already entered into the most bizarre failure mode I’ve ever seen!)

So barring a fire or someone smashing it with a hammer, all the needs to be done in the event of a failure is burn a new microcontroller with code that IS backed up in 3 states. It is even mounted with a socket for ease of servicing, so it will take all of 5 minutes to fix. Since this is a software-driven system, the software is really all that’s needed for documentation. Which I have. In triplicate.

The genny auto-start is a different story, as it has much more hardware, but you don’t need documentation to troubleshoot and repair such a simple system anyway. The problem with documenting this is not me, even though I don’t enjoy doing it, it’s the fact that we are HACKING on UNDOCUMENTED systems to begin with! The inverter ports are totally undocumented with software full of bugs, and the genny documentation is sparse, only a hook-up diagram with no full schematics, and on top of that, it’s incorrect by a number of points!

On top of this, The Investor only paid me $500 (He initially only paid me $300) for the entire genny controller which is insane for all the hours that went into it, and are still going into it.

Also: I have built much more marketable products than a generator that emails. This is a limited market thing, and it will cost more to market than you could make selling it.

-Phil

another drudge volunteer:

So the injectors were judged as “weak” by Diamond, they are lapping and
honing (hopefully at no charge) them as we “speak", and I will reinstall
them this afternoon. but Liam did provide me with receipts and docs, but it
has been less than 90 days (approx 70) which is likely the warranty period.

He remarked that the only thing that he knew that could cause such a rapid
deterioration was contaminated fuel, and as lousy as that last batch was,
when we saw all sorts of crap plug up the filters for the upper genny, I
kept my mouth shut.

My auto start disable technique was to pull the + terminals. I did set all
the inverters to gen-off, but just to make 110% certain than I didn’t get my
fingers ripped off, I pulled the terminals, a typical mechanics safety tip.

On to equalization!

So far, I think that what happened with the bad fuel from June/July affecting us so badly in August, is that I’d used a really fast new pump to blast-fill some fuel into the generator’s fuel tank, and the visible layer of ‘crap’ that was left in the fuel tank from the BioEnergy Systems fuel got re-stirred up and got past our filters and promptly clogged injectors.

I’d told the Investor two months before that we’d developed a layer of crap in the bottom of the fuel tank, where it came from, that it had happened to others who had the same fuel, and that it should be drained or filtered out. I guess he ignored that. I just now found out that injector damage had started right then, as well.

the injectors had damage that indicates bad fuel. They are needing new nozzles and a cylinder honing (the injector cylinders, not the motor). They were only in there
two months, but yes, we ran lots of crap through it. but we have previously run lots of
crap through it everything here without problem. Maybe the isuzu in the whisperwatt is
more sensitive than the grey gen.

Anyways, if we are messing up injectors, we might also be messing up injection pumps,

which are deeply expensive.

Given the ambiguities of hippie fuel, we should maybe install a more bomber water oil
separator and finer filter. the napa ones are not likely that fine. Maybe 50 microns at
best. It think you really need a 10 micron one to get all things of relevance.

Girlmark, what do you recommend?

here’s a choice quote that explains how our many systems are hacked together,and why it’s been really difficult to lure non-gearheads here to work on the biodiesel project- this is typical Shop engineering of systems:

Wonderful news. I will be over at the yard about 8pm tonight to start the EQ. please do NOT run the gen tons before I get there. if charging is needed, continue to use the grey one. I want to load it heavily from the beginning cause the motor is likely carbonized
again and I want to get that out as quickly as possible. The only way to load it heavily
enough is with a bunch of inverter setting foo which I cannot explain in email.

he’s discussing how to select between generators for the fuel system. We practically have an SVO type setup in there in terms of fuel tanks and such.Just make sure you plug the BX cable into the right place. And remember a dozen other things at the same time, which change from week to week as the system evolves…

Remember, to run it, you need to switch the 3 way fuel valve to down and make sure you
plug the tote pump BX line into something. When running the whisperwatt, you can plug it
into the side of the generator. When running the grey one, you need to plug it into the
local grid power. This line still needs to go to one of the center power terminals in the
xfer switch so that the pump is powered with either the top or bottom generator is
running.

things are taking off, several PV systems are coming together, everything’s ticking faster and faster in my circle of solar enthusiasts, just in time for the days to get substantially shorter and darker.

The Machine Shop crowd was hauling some panels and the new homebuilt racks to the roof (s) yesterday with the gigantic two-story forklift. I was over there uncrating my own ‘pile of inverters’, gloating as people asked me how much I paid for them. Chatting up the peers was fun, though, listening to someone else’s take on the ‘make cheap energy without bankrupting yourself’ problems.

My stuff is off to storage and to the new studio, and I’m trying to bite my tongue as much as possible when stupid typical Investor shit comes up. I’m out of there, and their stewardship of the solar gear isnt’ my problem. Not my problem. Not my problem…

My truck was nearby, loaded with a harvest of oil cubees- 150 gallons in 5-gallon cans is a bit much to handle efficiently. Unfortunately the restaurant’s got a basement kitchen and there’s no easy for me to just pull up to the barrel and pump. The VW I just bought had a full fuel tank, ready for another 600 more low-emissions miles. I’d just had a call from Jeff that we have a fun PV installation job in a couple of weekends- time to get un-rusty about this stuff.

I was juggling a batch of biodiesel that was mixing in Tankenstein, and fighting with my brand new Makita 14.4v cordless drill (which I gotta say I’ve been wanting since 1998 also). Darryl, who’s The Investor’s latest work-trade drudge, was over there with that other poor guy from the warehouse with no PG&E service who’s got the biodiesel-fueled generators in West Oakland, talking solar. They were hovering like vultures over the ‘pile of inverters’, and I waved the drill at them and told them to back off.

I am “so” out of there. There are a bunch of scary issues that they’ve still got to sort out- there’s a reason that civilised countries have electrical codes, and I found out about a scary violation that I didn’t know we had. Darryl and The Investor have apparently been privately arguing about lighting protection. The Investor was insisting that they put up the system minus lighting protection, since we “don’t get thunderstorms” (which by the way is another reason to hate California). This is kind of a typically retarded Investor line of thinking. Darryl had deferred to him on it after trying to argue common sense. The next step is apparently to “take it to the list” and argue about it- and probably fight about it in public- so the artists and the electronics dont’ get fried in a freak storm. After two years of constant wiring and re-wiring, it’d be ridiculous if the whole thing melts down in a lighting strike, but he’s willing to risk that and risk regulatory wrath and save $100, which is how we got into this whole offgrid, noncompliant mess to begin with.

Earlier this week Tom and I went to visit another artist warehouse that’s got a huge PV system. They did it legally of course, and are grid-tied. The inverters have a readout that lists somethign like ‘pounds of carbon dioxide saved’ instead of just watts. It’s huge. Chris, the owner, is about to sell off half the panels because they put out way more power than the group uses. He’s got an extremely sexy drainback hot water system going in- heat exchangers for radiant floor heat, domestic hot water, and a hot tub. mmmmrrrrr….

I’m off to Seattle this weekend, and I’m afraid we’ll be buying a bunch of diesel along the way (or at least some BD tomorrow) as Tom and I didnt’ have time to make any in the last few weeks. In fact, I"m resurrecting the wash system, and just made my first batch in months, last night. We made something like 300 gallons at the beginning of the summer, and I haven’ had to make any fuel at the shop. the system’s been dismantled since the beginning of June. Tom fueled himself and gave several other people their first tankful this summer out of that huge 300 gallon stash, sort of a drug-dealer’s ‘the first fill-up’s free” sort of dynamic. Making fuel every three or four months isnt’ a bad schedule.

I jumped ship from the shop and didn’t really know where I was going with the biodiesel equipment, I just wanted out. I"m still keeping my fingers crossed since the Investor and I have had words over who gets what. Its one of those co-op problems- you’ll never get back the labor you invested into equipment , and we’re arguing over what the gear is worth versus my free labor versus his free rent. But it seems (fingers crossed) that there’s been a good compromise.

I didn’t know if it was a good idea to take off or not, just gave notice and I didn’t know whether I’d be experimenting with larger homebrew biodiesel wherever I was going- my new shop isnt’ a biodiesel project. I made a bunch of calls in September trying to find a new location for a co-op, trying to find a place to site a gas chromatograph, and trying to find a place to site a fuel distribution depot for the ‘Taco Truck’ distribution collective. None of the obvious suspects panned out. I figured something would come up anyway.

Shortly after that, an amazing new opportunity fell into my lap- a couple of ‘the perfect’ skilled smart, and responsible people decided to take on me and Tom and the Machine Shop biodiesel equipment. Looks like we’re finally going to have an “Oakland Biodiesel Brigade". Sometimes jumping without looking first does work out.

But that’s another story.

****************
going to Seattle.

We’re traveling together and actually using that fantastic van that I went out to the East Coast to pick up for Tom last July. He’s had it for a year+ now and we still havent gone anywhere interesting in it. He did try and drag me out to a Burning Man type scene event in the desert at mid-summer, and I was so grossed out by the whole encampment and the whole yuppie car camping thing that I bolted after 24 hours, but I still haven’t really experienced the vaaan wonderfulness other than that brief day trip.

Social life, along with a couple of huge biodiesel classes, beckons this weekend. I called my Seattle people- I’d almost moved there in 99- and found myself amazed recalling that I actually have friends out in the world who aren’t my biodiesel acquaintances. Joaquin said, you wanna go drink or go out dancing on Friday? Someone invited me to some club on Thursday. I kind of forget about that sort of activity, only living in San Francisco after all.

the ‘take my bedroom off the grid’ photovoltaics project at my house is shaping up a bit. I went over to my ex-house in San Rafael to retrieve my PV panels, and ended up borrowing Jeff’s large panel and a cheapo inverter since he can’t install them there. So I have something like this :

two Uni-Solar amorphous panels I don’t know the wattage of yet- something like 35 watts each I’m guessing

Jeff’s 120 watt full-size PV panel

Trace C-40 charge controller

Jeff’s cheapo WalMart 700 Watt portable inverter (I’ll probably buy a 2000 watt portable instead)

For the ‘full-size’ system I’ve got some Xantrex 5548’s and a 2512 (the 12Volt will probably go to Tom for the portable ‘hot tub on a trailer’ project we’re working on). My roommate has another C-40 and we’ve got our eyes on various battery banks available to us. I ended up with various interesting odds-and-ends from buying the ‘pile of inverters’ - like a DC disconnect and various cables and breakers.

We’re not planning a grid-tied system for either of these house systems.

here’s my short-term to-do list for the ‘take your bedroom off the grid’ system:

a. borrow Kill-a-Watt or Watts-up meter from Tom’s job and do a complete survey of my bedroom electrical usage. I print the Biodiesel Homebrew Guide with a bank of laser printers and have NO IDEA how much power that consumes. one advantage of printing the book myself is that I get to use recycled paper, etc, and the idea of using green energy to do it also is an appealing selling point!

b. figure out needs to meet some of this usage. I"ll probably buy a few more PVs and go with cheapo golf cart batteries for the battery bank. Right now I have no idea what my usage actually is and what my sizing for this will be.

c. figure out where the battery box is going- my bedroom is PACKED but the downstairs currently has exposed ceiling joists due to renovation. Theres actually a tiny PV/battery/inverter system down there already in Dan’s shop, and I’ll probably site my battery bank there. I"m assuming that ‘bedroom off the grid’ is going to take 2 or 4 RV batteries or 4 golf cart ones. I’ve seen some nice systems that people have built for portability, and will probably try and make a battery box on wheels with some of the other components mounted on it. In the future the idea is to take the power system on the road for powering biodiesel demonstrations (or even RV camping…)

d. I’ve already started on the power reduction. Right now all my phantom loads are on power strips mounted within easy reach so I can turn them off, but that makes a spiderweb of cords all around my room. Few of the appliances/electronics are ‘on’ at the same time, but I like to leave them plugged in as long as I can turn the power-sucking transformers off with a power strip. I just picked up a couple of other power strips and plan on mounting one or some sort of master switch near the bedroom door so I can turn ‘all’ phantom loads off when I"m gone, and figure out how to group the rest of them by similarity onto their own power strips. This means the laptop chargers and the printers are on one strip since they’re used simultaneously, and the stereo and cell phone charger (used in the evening) are on another strip of their own. I"m actually unsure if printers are a phantom load or not- doestn’ seem like anything gets hot when they’re not in use, but if there’s a transformer it might be buried deep in the guts of the system.

Our house was on the Oakland solar home tour last weekend. I realized that one feature of my room is what’s ‘not’ in there:

I had to get a new computer recently but didn’t even consider a cheap desktop machine because of the power consumption issues. I"m doing everything with two laptops even though a desktop machine would’ve been an easier choice. I’m about to put in a second wireless access point (because the home’s wireless doesn’t reach to my room very well) and I’m really hoping that I can unplug it when I"m not using it.
My printers are energy-star rated. I unplug the stereo and dont’ run one with a digital clock. My alarm clock isnt’ a plug-in AC model, it’s a battery- powered (rechargable of course) gizmo. I’ve got an alkaline battery charge as well as the fancier NiMH one, and any ‘regular’ disposable alkaline batteries that come my way get reused at least twice. The lights are compact fluorescents. I use an electric toothbrush but it’s not left on it’s charger all the time as seems customary. Any other chargers are unplugged except when in use.

e. heat: I’ve got great afternoon light in my slightly southwest windows. I plan on sewing up window quilts for keeping the warmth in at night. UNfortunately this fall I"m in school till 9 pm, so I"m not there to run them when they need to be shut. I’m hoping that if I eventually build a big enough power system, that it’d would be energy-efficient to run a small motor on a timer or on a light-sensor each evening to close the window quilt after the warming sun passes. This is just a theory, I assume that it would save energy over my just waiting to close the window quilt when I get home and turning on a heater, but dont’ know. DOn’t have a good idea how much power the quilt operator motor would take, versus how many BTU’s I’m actually retaining from afternoon sunlight. At the moment it gets quite warm in there if I have the curtains open at the right time of day, but of course it’s really warm right now in the Bay Area.

f. lights- does it make sense to do 12V lighting? If I set up a 12V circuit in the system there could be a few places where it could be more efficient. Tom wants to do some creative LED lighting in his van for RV camping, and I’m hoping to hitch onto that project to build some custom low-volt lighting for my room. I’ve had ‘electronics projects’ on my ‘fun things to do with the boyfriend’ list for a while, and been waiting for something fun to come up that would be a good excuse to learn more about basic electronics. The window quilt operator and lighting is going to be one start to that project. Yes, I am a nerd- that IS my idea of a good time and luckily I can sometimes turn that into a social occasion.

g. circuits: because we’ve got a renovation going on downstairs and the joists are going to be exposed for a while, I’ve got plenty of time to run custom wiring in my room. I think I"ll be installing a series of switched outlets with the switches by the door, so that phantom loads are easier to remove.

h. I hope to do the bigger house system after learning a few lessons from the smaller one.

i. we’ve got various solar hot water projects on the back burner here as well, and that’s somethign I"ve got a lot more of a grasp on that PV/electrical energy control, but that’s a different to-do list.

Mark

I love my new home. I didnt post a good story yet about the whole drama of me and a ‘home’- in a nutshell, I was floating without a house for a full year, because of going out to work at the Foothills job after getting back from the Appleseed tour, and boy was I ready to move back in somewhere at the end of the job- it was damn painful to be disabled and couch surfing at the same time, or to be disabled and camping on a couch in a back room at the jobsite.

Right now I"m taking out my years’ worth of housing transience frustrations on creating my ‘dream kitchen’, making hellacious food whenever I feel like it, and enjoying being able to pass out on my extra-thick down comforter whenever the hell I feel like it. Laalalalalalaaaaa!!!! (is that the opposite of ‘waaah?’ I hear?)

I live in a two-building ‘green renovation’ in a seedy part of Oakland sandwiched between the highway and the BART tracks. The house is awesome. The neighborhood is interesting.

We had a shootout outside my windows last night. And a few days ago there was a little earthquake in the middle of the night, a big loud ‘BANG’ as the earth shifted and released and woke us from sound sleep, and my roommate’s first thought was ‘oh no, another car hit the house!’.

The downstairs corner is severely armored with structural steel after a car plowed through a wall a few years ago as the driver lost control escaping police. I think people are scared about moving in here, but the area is actually really neighborly, most of the people on our immediate several blocks are nice quiet families who’ve been here forever and are very attached to their neighborhood and history here (and I can see why). The roomate who owns our house has managed to do a good job of managing the ‘white freaks move into a nonwhite neighborhood’ thing, and is friends with everybody (ie he didn’t evict the tenants who lived downstairs when he bought it, and I think that earned him a good amount of respect from longtime residents concerned about gentrification).

The prostitutes and whomever sparked the shooting the other night generally tend to be further down the street in both directions (so are the other biodieselers and others who are offgrid in various ways, for that matter- there’s a fair amount of fuel being brewed in this end of the ghetto).

I guess my worst problem with the neighborhood is that there’s a gigantic white-painted church outside my windows and the glare off the church walls makes my room painfully bright in the morning. Things could be worse!

And we’re installing solar PV and hot water shortly. We’re going offgrid, shopping for our first battery bank. I’ve wanted to do this for, oh, 12 years or something.

There’s already a solar hot air system here, lots of creative skylights for daylighting some darker spots of the house, and a bit of PV here and there for various things. I already have a few unbreakable PV panels and some other gear, and also want to put them to use doing a second, portable system that would also power my ‘take your bedroom off the grid’ enclave before the main system is complete. I hope to put it to work running the printers that print the Biodiesel Homebrew Guide. I also hope to haul the personal mini-system along in my future dream teaching tour vehicle. The dream vehicle is going to have to be a brand new Sprinter that I’ll have to afford somehow, no use looking for anything else in an older truck since, since Dodge finally imported the exact vehicle I’d been wanting for years, I guess I"ll have to figure out how to buy one. I’m hoping that tour will happen again next summer, so that’s the deadline for me to come up with my $30K for it. That’s all a lot of ‘hopes’. Luckily they’re starting to come into being.

I got a good start on the house PV stuff- out at the SEE energy fair in NC, I picked up what one vendor was calling the ‘pile of inverters’ - a lot deal of 5 used Trace SW series inverters, some good, some with problems. These are the same SW 5548’s that we have on the Machine Shop generator-fired system. At the Machine Shop we’ve already committed electronic ‘crimes against nature’ on these exact units- in the process of making them do what they’re not designed for (that’s a whole nother blog story someday). One of the 5548’s I bought puts out 130V instead of 120V, which isnt’ too difficult to deal with, and that’s what’s going on the house system.

At SEE fair time I think I only had enough savings to equal the cost of the pile of inverters (they weren’t very much) and had just left one of my jobs, so I was chewing my nails trying to figure out whether it was a good idea to blow my miniscule life savings on 900 pounds of copper laying on the floor on the wrong side of the country. I decided to go for it, and as I was flying back from SEE, the hurricane pounded the Southeast and gas prices went up, which suddenly increased demand for my biodiesel consultation/book sales services, which made the life savings come right back, thankfully. No, you cant’ buy one of my inverters.

Energy nerds are such a funny thing. I’d been working towards this process of going offgrid in the city for such a long time. I got bit by the solar bug while living in NYC at an urban homestead in the mid 90’s, and did all my research and reading without anyone else around who did anything with the stuff. A few years later it was such an epiphany moment when I went out to an Earth First Rendezvous in Colorado, and Ed from Solar Energy International was in the parking lot with his solar RV and a gigantic collection of solar cookers and other gadgets. I spent a lot of the gathering sitting at his feet with a huge gang of solar energy nerd kids- it felt so strange and wonderful to have peers my own age in this pursuit for the first time. This reminds me of what I see people go through who’ve been working on biodiesel in their own backyard and researching it and becoming obsessed, and who finally get to be at a biodiesel event and cant’ stop talking about ‘Biodiesel And What It Means To Me’, because for once there are OTHERS who might understand the obsession.

At the Oakland eco-house we’ve got one or two people who are smitten with the solar geekiness. I came home a few weeks ago and my roommate was spending Saturday night with few beers watching the Home Power Guerilla Solar DVD by himself. I love this place. Another roommate is organizing the Solar Home Tour (which we’re on). This morning, I came out of my room in my lingerie trying to stumble a straight line towards the nearest caffeine, and a couple of voices in the office said ‘hey Mark- come over here and take a look at these specifications and see if you can make sense of them’. So of course I did even though I couldn’t really talk yet, I HAD to come and look at ’specifications’. You know you’re an energy nerd when ’specifications’ are more exciting than your caffeine even though you aren’t awake enough to talk yet….

It turns out there are a few other urban offgrid enclaves doing equally silly stuff with electrons as the Machine Shop. There’s another artist studio right on the Berkeley/Emeryville border that’s got a large offgrid system. The guys with the questions about the ’specifications’ are stuck in a situation with the utility similar to what the Machine Shop has gone through- they’ve been denied service and are going it offgrid instead. They’ve got a biodiesel processor in a container and have been fueling a Detroit Diesel- fired genny with homebrew. It’s a rough, rough way to generate significant amounts of power, though- dont’ try this at home, kids, we’re quite happy to have the ‘biodiesel taco truck’ turn up and fuel the Machine Shop by accident rather than making our own when a fuel-hog such as a genny needs to depend on us cranking out large amounts of fuel…

Mark

Oddly enough, as I’m about to leave my stint at the world’s most unique offgrid Machine Shop, I’ve finally enrolled in machinist school. I"m attending what I think of as “Concrete Community College". The architect who designed the school must have thought he was building a shrine to the god called ‘one part Portland Cement, three parts sand’. It’s a really urban campus on the south side of Chinatown. They seem to have an enormous budget for pigeon impaling devices so that the concrete stays fresh and birdpoop-free.

While I was a tenant at the Shop, I was too ill to get involved in the actual Machine Shop club at our shop, and I’ve been a bit afraid to learn safety practices from people who learned them third-hand from someone who was at one point an actual working machinist. Whatever energy I’ve had the past couple of years has been going to learning to weld, and to my silly dedication to those damn tanks at the biodiesel project.

At this point though machine technology seems like a good set of skills to pick up, considering I think of myself primarily as an ‘inventor’. Mills and other machine tools fall into that category of ‘crap’ that’s so huge that it’s sometimes sold off quite cheaply by hobbyists in cities like this one. The Machine Shop has outfitted itself primarily due to it’s willingness to take on Big Crap that others smartly get rid of due to the constraints of rental space in the city.

Concrete Community College machine technology program is kicking my butt- it’s something like 16 contact hours a week, evenings. I have no spare time now. I also stupidly enrolled in the welding class and three others. I havent’ really been in college before, and I"m having a blast remembering elementary school arithmatic. No, really, it’s been fun. I felt a little silly in my ‘math for the trades’ math lab on the first day- I used to be quite a geek as a kid, and my math skills have atrophied 110% due to disuse.

So here I am in remedial math. It was extremely funny realizing I’d forgotten how to divide by fractions- I just pull out a calculator for those arithmatic problems that aren’t in the “16ths” of my carpentry profession. Then I looked over at the kid across the lab, and he was literally counting on his fingers with a confused look on his face. And he was actually college age so ‘disuse’ wasn’t his excuse. Damn!

I’m actually learning a lot about how badly people ‘don’t learn’ and it’s been a great immersion course in teaching styles- things I never noticed when I was there in high school or trade school in my early 20’s, before I"d tried teaching people myself.

The welding class is particularly funny- I"ve been in a couple of different schools for auto mechanic classes before, and thought I had a good idea of what to expect here in a trades program. But no, I’ve finally found something that attracts stupid kids even more than working on cars does. Daytime community college auto mechanic classes are usually full of unruly 18-year-old boys who aren’t interested in academics (diesel school’s a bit better since it attracts people who know what they want to learn- they tend to be older, already work as mechanics, and tend to be focused). But even for the 18-year-olds, auto mechanics is something that they’re likely to have done before, and it takes a certain amount of thinking. Welding doesn’t.

So Concrete Community College is full of these kids who just CAN’T FOLLOW DIRECTIONS worth a damn. I started over a week late because of the East Coast trip at the end of August, so I"m still in catch-up mode in my classes. With me in ‘catch-up mode’ in my welding class are some of the young kids who started on time but just don’t get it. The other day we had ‘remedial cutting torch’ demo- all the kids who had flunked the cutting torch written safety test after practicing it in August, were getting the whole load of info all over again.

We had a long line of kids (sorry, ‘guys’- they were all doofy guys- not ‘kids’, which implies that the girls were flunking Cutting Torch along with the guys), standing around the cutting torch table. Each person, um, I mean guy, would get to the front of the line and pick up the torch. And I’d watch from the end of the line as a great big dial tone would go off in his head. Nothing there. If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and dial again. And this stagefright comes right after watching the teacher lecture and demonstrate it (for the second or third time). So each guy would go up to the front of the Remedial Cutting Torch line, do everythign wrong, get it all corrected a few times, do it wrong, get it corrected again. Then the guy in line behind him would go up to the front of the line, pick up the torch and stare at it like it was somethign alien he’d never seen before. And proceed to do it wrong. Many times. Then the next guy would get up and pick up the torch wrong and not know what any of the controls did, again. again.

Hooray, I just jumped ship at the Machine Shop. Or, at least, I’m in the final throes of moving out.

I’m moving down the street to another sculpture studio, where non-artistically-inclined me and the equally artistically-challenged boyfriend are going to share a nice, warm, indoor fabrication space for our ‘wanna-be engineer’ projects.

After the really crappy facilities at the Machine Shop, the idea of being someplace where I can leave tools out without fear of them getting rained on seems like an unimaginable luxury- especially relevant with the coming of the rains next month. The thought of welding indoors, without standing in big wet puddles while gazillions of amps of real, live, renewably generated power flow through my workpiece is really pleasant. I’m moving up in the tinker world. Maybe I’ll even make something pretty this year with my newfound metalworking skills.

Actually, there’s kind of a nerd exodus going on at the Machine Shop. All the smart kids have left in droves in the last few months. Kind of a ‘rats fleeing a sinking ship’ sort of feeling.

I was kind of maintaining radio silence about something I’ve been dealing with a lot in the past year- we’ve been dealing with an increasingly abusive and dysfunctional landlord/shop manager guy (the artist known in this blog as The Investor), to the point where the shop’s been sometimes difficult to use. Now a lot of us have taken flight for better spaces.

A lot of the geeks at the shop have been sort of chased off by The Investor. There’s been a lot of opportunity to argue- we have an in-house email list which is sort of his personal soapbox. This encourages people (particularly The Investor) to yell at each other way too much. Traffic on that list is immense, and the signal-to-noise ratio is appallingly low. We’re all supposed to be on the list because it’s where logistics discussions happen- whether the power is out and who lost the forklift key and whether some crackhead whose set up camp outside in the alley needs to be chased off.

For all my participation on biodiesel discussion forums, I happen to detest ‘armchair politics’ and other theoretical blabber, and I’m not a member of the Burning Man communities that most of them belong to, nor am I interested in ‘art’ in any shape or form, so it’s been sheer torture having some of the chat garbage flooding my inbox for two years. Unfortunately the Investor has refused to allow us to have a non-chat list for just the shop essentials (ie where we’d discuss whether the power is on and what crap needs to be moved where). I’ll be sooo happy to unsubscribe in about three weeks.

The new space uses it’s email list to discuss the bills and tenants’ comings and goings, rather than the goings-on, real or imagined.

The problems at the Machine Shop were manyfold- our warehouse is just way too small for the number of artists (hence the repeated ‘welding in the rain’ problem). We lack an all-important ‘Thou Shalt Store No Crap’ clause, which leads to packrat behavior. Packrat behavior times 25 packrats is kind of a problem. No one is really in a position to ***** about the Crap Storage Problem because we’re all almost equally guilty. I say ‘almost all’ because The Investor is far more deeply ‘over the top’ about his packrat tendencies than any of us- guy is occupying about 6 times the amount of public space as any of us do, piled with rusting useless junk that he hasn’t touched in a few years.

Most projects in ’shared space’ at the Shop begin with an hour or two of running the forklift to move other people’s crap (at times, mostly The Investor’s crap) out of the way. This phenomenon is another reason I"m such a fan of welding in the alley, that one with the big puddles in the wintertime- it’s usually empty. If you want space you’re cleared to remain clear, you have to stick around and vigilantly bark at people who try to Pile Crap onto it. That’s been referred to as ‘pissing your territory’, and it’s sometimes a really dysfunctional dog-eat-dog world in there when it comes to space use. The Exodus of the Nerds was some sort of response to this level of functionality, I think.

It’s been said by former residents that the Shop is not a place for people who want to just come in a few times a month and make art- it only functions if you’re a constant presence, a full-timer. And the constant self-inflicted electrical issues are an even bigger problem. They’re moving towards fixing those, slowly, but in the meantime, it’s like living for years in an ongoing generator-fueled electrical renovation with ‘electrical curiosities’ that give little reward and cause a lot of hassle.

A couple of years ago I was a full-timer at the shop. The last few months I’ve been up in the Foothills, still paying rent at the Shop, and of course it’s been quite frustrating to come down expecting to do some work and find that some incredibly vast Burning Man project has taken up ALL of the public space, five months before Burning Man. And that’s the best-case scenario- at least we supposedly exist for the purpose of doing Art, which is a much more noble purpose than Storing Crap, which is what actually happens in the public space most of the time.

At one point this winter, after pissing everybody off with some longwinded list arguments about Burning Man and Art, and signing our collective names, without permission, to a petition about an issue that not everyone agreed with, the Investor abruptly tried to back out of managing the joint (he doesnt’ own the real estate, just manages the art space). He offered it to us on some conditions- that we become a nonprofit entity and collectively manage it together, rather than one or two interested parties taking on his former role as a manager.

We had a big meeting without him, discussed the liabilities and benefits, and found almost nothing beneficial about the arrangement. The place is just far too small, and we’d still retain him and his 6 spaces full of crap. I think after that meeting all the core group of Most Involved Nerds all lost heart and started finding other spaces to join. A few people, people who’d been there since the very beginning and had worked closely with the man, left with a bang- various flavors of nasty, angry Exit Speech. I’m avoiding it pretty well so far which is quite unlike me- I dont’ think their ‘what I hate about The Investor’ speeches have done anything to change the guy, and he already knows everything I think of him- I dont’ mince words and mine came in person, not via email. Too bad, it’s a nice setup in some ways. Next stop, Xian Studios…

Back when Biofuel Oasis was just a mote in it’s mothers’ eyes, and they were still trying to figure out how to afford such a non-money-making business, Hope and Jennifer briefly considered the ‘mobile tanker’ fuel distribution model.

Apparently there was a used tanker for sale somewhere and it seemed easier to buy a tanker, rent a cheap parking spot, and sell from the tanker’s Weights and Measures certified pump, than it was to find a location suitable for a stationary set of tanks/going through the rigamarole of setting up a new certified W&M pump, etc.

I found that idea hilarious and teased them about running Fruitvale’s first Biodiesel Taco Truck. I assume everyone knows what I mean by Taco Truck (recently some Canadian on one of the biodiesel lists was quite mystified by our use of the term ‘Roach Coach’ to describe a mobile dining establishment)

The Biodiesel Taco Truck idea’s out there, and I think a few people have implemented it in various cities- buy a small tanker, or a trailer with a tank on it, plop it into various parking spots, and dispense fuel to co-op members or whatever, and, voila, less red tape at least for ’startup’.

Some of the headaches with biodiesel distribution come from our being tarred with the ‘flammable/toxic petroleum gas station’ brush- Hope and Jennifer had to spend a year in red tape, proving to their fire marshals that biodiesel didn’t require a petroleum gas station’s regulatory requirements fulfilled, and that it was OK to store commercial biodiesel in polyethylene tanks in a light industrial warehouse (I think in hindsight they think the poly tanks were a mistake).

Luckily they were able to run the ‘carboy exchange program’ the whole time, selling 5-gallon containers of fuel with strict instructions to the customers that they were not allowed to fuel up (and spill) directly outside the station. Kimber and Eric at Biofuel Station in Laytonville had to go through their own rural red tape, causing Mendocino County to create a new zoning category for sale of commercial biodiesel, called something like ‘fuel sales, non-toxic, non-flammable’ or something like that- it’s difficult to convince regulators that the stuff is a fuel and at the same time, nonflammable in storage conditions. Kimber and Eric also started their business delivering off a transfer tank and then a minitanker truck, before they had their red tape in place for the stationary fueling station.

*************

The Taco Truck idea lives on. I think a few people in the biodiesel small distribution world have bought a tanker and done distribution off of one without owning a fuel depot facility.

Piedmont Biofuels bought an old fuel oil tanker, inspired by Kimber’s example, and spent a couple of years taking it across the state to Charlotte to pick up 1500 gallons of fuel at a time for their B100-hungry community near Raleigh. They brought the fuel back to the Triangle area and delivered to customers right from the truck, without going through a stationary Weights and Measures certified pump morass (one appeal of tankers is that they come with certified pumps and double-walled containment already).

It’s probably quite a bit more economical to lose money in biodiesel that way, than to lose money in biodiesel via building a ‘landed’ biodiesel distribution depot with tanks and a Weights and Measures pump. Piedmont is now working on/has completed a pretty impressive tank project, but they’re working with quite different investment than the other biodiesel small-scale businesses I know of, so the project is within their reach.
******************

At the end of last month I packed up on a whim and flew out to North Carolina to check out Piedmont’s business, and the Blue Ridge Biofuels business, and ended up talking biodiesel business with a whole pile of people for about 5 days. My excuse to go out there was twofold- I’m planning a new renewable energy fair, so I wanted to see how the Southern Energy and Environment Expo is run, and because I’ve been diving into the biodiesel business world lately, I also wanted to go ’summit’ with various folks about their regulatory experiences and investment experiences. Basically, I wanted to go see how the non-bozos do it, after seeing lots of examples of how not to do it out here in that weird, weird West Coast place.

I got quite an earful on the East Coast for my trouble (and the Expo is amazing, but more on that later). I basically got a hotel room with Lyle for a couple of days during the Expo and we holed up and talked about biodiesel business and investment and regulations and strategy and The Big Picture and the Case Studies until my brain hurt.

We ended up going ’round and ’round about biodiesel distribution. Recently I’ve started to think it’s the death of some smaller biodiesel businesses who are trying to break into production as well- you can’t make money in it, there’s insane pricing instability from the wholesale level which customers dont’ understand. Many people look at Piedmont’s many-pronged approach (distribution, homebrewing, education/nonprofit arm/commercial/Piedmont Industrial) and decide to emulate it all right away- ignoring the fact that it took them years to develop all the prongs while they slugged away at the ‘30 gallon homebrew’ level. I suspect that before it all shakes out, we’ll have a lot of failed businesses (hell, Carolina Biodiesel is one already…)

In California ‘our’ people seem to be unable to get direct access to World Energy or other producers, so here the wholesale stuff is effectively ‘unavailable’ until a few middlemen take a cut and raise the price, and I’ve been watching Yokayo Biofuels lose their shirts on doing distribution for years now without getting anywhere. Now Piedmont is expanding their distribution operation beyond the tanker level- creating a fuel depot so they can eliminate the 1500 gallon runs to Charlotte and so as to be able to take delivery of the stuff direct from the fullsize tanker(s). They’re also building a plant and focusing on growth in distribution at the same time. Danger!!!

We went through the numbers on that a little, Lyle had a pretty convincing argument that their company has the focus and the people to keep up with the perils of distribution. I’m aware of several other folks who are starting up businesses trying that model- distribution and building a plant at the same time- and who dont’ have the numbers of people, the track record of success, and the developed focus, that Piedmont has. In many cases I suspect it’s a great way to fail in this business.

Small distributors provide a valueable service- they’re the first biodiesel usage and handling education for various unwitting consumers- and we’ve seen examples over and over again of how easy it is for petroleum gas stations to fail to deliver that, with resulting problems. I’m not going to go into that right now- I’ve written about the ‘Fairfax NAFT Gas experience’ at biodieselnow and elsewhere a few years ago- but it’s certainly a pain when something goes wrong and consumers dont’ know who to go to, to troubleshoot the problems (at NAFT we had a quality control problem from a big commercial producer). In many cases the problem gets blamed on ‘biodiesel’ in general rather than ‘bad biodiesel’ or inadequate cold weather performance information or something like that.

But to provide this valueable service of dedicated B100 distribution and education, folks are doing a serious cut in their potential earnings. I think Hope and Jennifer were trying to make enough (retailing at 15 cents a gallon over the wholesale cost) to pay themselves a salary of $200 a month or something like that last year. Yes, they had day jobs, and a business like ‘breaking new ground within the Berkeley Fire/Building Departments Bureaucracy’ was a pretty full-time job in itself and a gigantic ‘life savings’ drain.

They seem to be doing a lot better this year, having morphed into a co-operatively owned group (5 owners, all women from the Berkeley Biodiesel Co-op who’d worked together extensively before going into business).

**************************

Lyle wrote up the following silliness about our trip to the SEE Expo (and don’t ask me what I actually said about that heat exchanger cause he got it wrong).

I’d basically told him and Leif what I know of the story of biodiesel distribution in the Bay Area- there was quite a sordid tale of gas stations carrying and discontinuing biodiesel sales, and a lot of weirdness that’s unique to our part of the world.

Lyle wrote:

Once everyone was in the car, Leif, Girl Mark and I started geeking out on all things biodiesel. By Winston Salem my interest was starting to fade, but they came alive with a spirited discussion of vacuum pumps. We stopped for dinner at a bizarre Italian place in the middle of nowhere, and the conversation was re-ignited when Girl Mark remarked that it was easy to file out the bumps on the reducing end of the average heat exchanger.

Her comment snapped Leif to attention, and as they waded into the concept, Evan and I proceeded to reflect on how our dinner guests were in fact beyond hope.

Back in the car, I was ready to fall asleep as I drove into Asheville, but the conversation cam around to the history of biodiesel distribution in Northern California, and this time it was me who hung on every word. Girl Mark talked about card lock systems gone by, and gas stations that carried B100, and brokers who flipped loads of fuel, and the community in general.

It was a remarkable and epic story, sort of like one that Homer might have recited in a theatre in the park, and Leif and I found ourselves riveted.

Leif would say, “Go back to the part where you were talking about territories,”

And I would say, “Back up a second. Did you say Achilles son of Peleus brought sorrow to the Acheans?”

*************************

Well, today I was reading a non-biodiesel-related email list, and the following amusing observation was posted by someone (who needed biodiesel, NOW, and had an empty tote sitting around)- this guy had no idea of all about all the shenanigans that the small-scale biodiesel distributors have to go through to get the stuff in the first place:

Liam wrote:

“I’ve been noticing a pair of funky looking tanker trucks that meet up on the
old R.R. tracks ever so often. Today I decided to stick my nose in their
business and see what these hose ranglin’ hippys with tankers were up to.

Turns out they are from the “Peoples Fuel Cooperative” And they meet up at
the R.R. tracks every two weeks to exchange fluids. The driver of the
smaller tanker truck was more than happy to stick around and fill our tote
for us.

He also said he clould supply us with a regular fuel deliverys. The
trucks meet up every two weeks alternating tuesdays and ***days the next
meeting is ****day the *th. They are charging 3.60 per gallon.”

Yep, the scene of the crime was a really desolate piece of railroad track real estate in Berkeley. The fuel being exchanged was ASTM stuff direct from a major producer I think. The activity? Biodiesel Taco Truck goes to the next level- someone finally bought that scruffy tanker Oasis had looked at, and had become the next player in the Bay Area distribution scene. Somehow the ‘you guys are too small for big companies to deal with you’ problem is being solved- another newish player in town’s making it happen- a middleman with a cell phone and good “people skills". This guy owns no infrastructure himself. The Shadow Broker guy’s arranging the meetup, and other meetups like, to make it worth the producers’ time selling the entire truckload. He’s presumably making a cent or two, and making it possible for some of the B100 distributors to have ASTM fuel available from this producer. The hippies who bought the Scruffy Tanker are working at becoming the SF fueling station, doing delivery off their Biodiesel Taco Truck, and dreaming big with a nice big group of folks over there. Their plan seems to be working well and to be built on a solid ‘people’ base.

Since no one locally has a fueling depot for tankers to load and unload at (I was on the phone this week trying all my connections trying to find real estate for one), we’ve got the big producer linking hoses with the small distributor hippie operation at a random railroad siding near you.

I tried to take some photos of the Methoxide Mixer From Hell but they didn’t look very impressive and it still looks like a pile of steel parts.

However, I’ve also been working on another project the past few months- Hot Mama. Hot Mama is a big 350-gallon heavy steel IBC tank, which I’ve been doing oil dewatering experiments with- it’s got a lot of horizontal surface area and it’s weldable. Most of the weldable free tanks I come across are vertical cylinders without a lot of surface area available, which you need for evaporation or boiling. this weekend me and Jeff ran a batch of particularly disgusting grease through the Hot Mama boiler to test out various nozzles:

This photo is a 40 psi spray through one of the nozzles we’re trying out- turned out to be a flat 180 degree despite the nozzle’s claims of 60 degree cone spray:

I’m in a position to buy yellow grease at an attractively cheap price for the Machine Shop setup, but it’s got major hurdles to overcome- one of them being water. The price is low enough that if I can figure out how to use the nasty stuff, it might really make the cost of running the Machine Shop generator system a lot easier on the “labor costs” (collections is a big issue when you use 300 gallons a month for just one user, not counting anyone else’s vehicles). Our generator had a disasterous experience with some bad homebrew bought from my friend jess last winter, so I’m kind of concerned about quality control a bit more than usual.

Yellow Grease is rendering industry terminology for recycled fats that are of a certain percentage free fatty acids. Many people in homebrewing assume that yellow grease is the stuff you get from the local restaurant fryers. The industry reality is quite a bit nastier than just what’s in the barrels- either it rots on the way in or they mix in some trap grease type stuff. In either case it’s been found by many peopel to be a LOT nastier than the nastiest stuff you may find, for example the nastiness that’s in back of McDonald’s on San Pablo and 63rd in Berkeley. You can’t just go buy some yellow grease ad expect to throw the journeytoforever biodiesel webpage at it, and actually get biodiesel.

The big challenge with the stuff I’m playing with is water. I use KOH as a catalyst so I can handle solid fats and high FFA at once without getting ‘glop’ like you’d see with NaOH. But it’s also got a fair amount of water in it. I can ‘heat to 140F and let settle’ after filtering the nastiness but the bottom third gets all the water.

That’s where Hot Mama comes in. her current incarnation is as a boiler tank for the vacuum-assist flash evaporator system I"m going to build someday. In the meantime I’ve boiled oil dry in Hot Mama, and boy is it disgusting.

high-FFA grease STINKS something fierce. I actually gave up on dewatering at all when I was first making biodiesel , because the smell of heated oil is just foul and carries far and away to the nearest yuppie neighbor’s nosehairs- if I were neighbors with a rendering plant I"d be upset. So I haven’t been able to experiment with the bad grease that the urban Machine Shop coop needs- lord knows the neighbors are the last thing we need to antagonize. here in the foothills I can go to a metal shop in the middle of no where and make bad odors with yellow grease to my heart’s content, the odor control for the city version will come later.

There IS somethign nastier than yellow grease- brown grease. That’s a category of ‘product’ from a rendering plant which contains trap grease, fats from dead rotten animals, and other free fatty acids (with a bit of triglycerides thrown in). One of the participants of the Infopop biodiesel forum, the Diff, earns my great and undying respect for being able to apply homebrew technology and some of the ISU processes to making successful biodiesel out of brown grease. He described it as ‘it looks like crap and it smells like feces’. That pretty much describes the yellow grease I’m working with- looks like some sort of diarrhea. ANd I"m boiling this goo and spraying it through the air to try and separate the water content out.

Hot Mama has a heating element in the tank and a pair of them inline in the pipe, and a spray nozzle from McMaster-Carr at the end. It’s also got a Harbor Freight Pump circulating the oil through these features. This weekend Jeff re-plumbed the piping circuit to add a pressure gauge and a place for a future pressure switch and a pressure bypass around the pump so we could spray the grease that looks like crap and smells like feces through a sprayer nozzle and see if any (water) vapor comes off of it. BLORT is right.

Well, it works OK- but man what a nasty odor. We turned on the tank and ran away for the evening (and burned out the in-tank heating element which I havne’t seen happen before, might have something to do with really wet grease and steam pockets, somehow?????). You really had to pretty much turn it on and run. The point was to be able to see the spray pattern and that took some serious nausea-supression:

me trying to not run away from the nauseating stench:

Jeff did in fact run away and still looked like he was about to heave:

it’s a really good thing that you cant’ transmit odors via computer yet. I am getting these horrible odor flashbacks just looking at the photos!

Mark

I’m in the foothills job, dealing with building, and it’s August weather. I can count my blessings, though- when I was working on a roof in Eastern Montana a few years ago, it was 118 regularly all of July, and the survival strategies of construction workers made front page news. Here we’re only dealing with 110. I go home to Berkeley and it’s 65 degrees at night and I friggin love it.

I will now loudly praise the name of Jeff Biosmell from the Infopop forums, for he came up here to work with me for a few days and he makes the most gourmet lunches ever eaten on a construction jobsite. Today’d special was freshly grilled wild salmon on spicy naan bread with goat milk brie and baby greens served with lime/cucumber-scented ice water. Breakfast was similarly fancy.

Normally at lunch here I go up and down all three blocks of Main Street marvelling over and over that there’s nothing to eat here, and I fix that by buying some overpriced processed food at the health food store like it’s any different than the regular supermarket’s processed crap.

Like the weather, I can fix this particular foothills problem by running home to berkeley where I can pig out on sushi and Ethiopian food and the ethnic food court mall at Emeryville Public Market and the southern style barbeque place and the mediterranean buffet across from the Ecology Center and my own damn cooking of whatever was fresh and in season that hour at the Berkeley Bowl market.

In the foothills I’m in a rush and dont’ really have my act together to eat properly. I’m kind of camping out at the jobsite which screws me up for cooking - with the extremely notable exception of a couple of nights a week cooking with the hippie bosses (translation- there’s nothing to do here- and at their house we tend to look at really fancy cookbooks for fun and occasionally I cook great fanciness with these folks). The problem isn’t really the “camping out"- that’s never stopped me before- it’s just one more facet of autoimmune illness that makes easy things and regular “life maintenance” tasks difficult.

There’s no way to just throw money at the situation and ‘eat out’ - cause there’s nothing to buy and here in town they roll up the sidewalks completely by 9 pm, just as I"m getting off work to go to dinner. Not eating properly really sucks for autoimmune illness and makes me even stupider/spacier than usual and starts the vicious cycle that I"m too tired to cook or feel like I want any of the food that’s for sale in town.

When jeff came up here I realized just how much I kind of depend on other people to take care of me when I’m not feeling well- I can always go to Jeff’s and someone’s feasting. Right now I"m typing this at a friend’s office where we’re using internet, and Jeff’s sitting at a conference table cutting up a marinated buffalo steak with blackberry sauce and feeding me slivers before shoving the office fridge full of good stuff again. Tomorrow night we invade another friend’s home with the rest of the roast. The friend, who barely knows us, was really pleased to hear the pronouncement that Jeff just showed up in town with a cooler full of gourmet food to share with her. Jeff’s middle name happens to be ‘welcomed guest’.

I know, one of the sucky things about blogs, is people posting the stupid mundane garbage like what they ate that day as though anyone cared. Tough shit, you’re still reading.

Mark

I’m finally working on a motorized methoxide mixer, or, actually, a pair of slightly different ones- one for a customer and different type for Machine Shop.

I’ve been OK with the carboy system for years, but most of my reactors (except the trailer one I hauled around the country last fall) have been over 80 gallons-oil-per-batch, which makes them require 3 or more carboys of methoxide. 2 carboys I’m OK with, 3 is a bit annoying to handle mixing. So I"m trying to come up with a standardizable design for a larger methoxide mixer that’s both safe and doesn’t release any methanol vapor that EPA et al would be concerned about.

I’m not even bothering with no-weld methods - I dont’ think there’s a simple one available here. You need various ports for no-weld, and methoxide needs a big top port- I think that most common metal containers with a top port big enough to introduce catalyst (15 gallon drums etc) tend to be sealed by some sort of degradable rubber gasket. I think various folks have tried soda syrup kegs, but they’re smaller than a carboy so defeat my purpose.

I"m working with big old decommissioned propane tanks (beer kegs are another handy size). I think there’s a potential Appleseed in one of the systems I"m trying out- something that a lot of peopel in the USA can buy and build easily- though the cost of building these methoxide mixers is in a quite different costs bracket than the seat-of-the-pants Appleseed.

I’m using a FilRite explosionproof gasoline transfer pump to do the mixing and trying out two different methods of introducing the catalyst- what I call the Airlock method and the laundry soap method.

Before you get the obvious idea, no, you can’t use a cheap FilRite transfer pump to mix a biodiesel reactor- the duty cycle’s too short.

Yes of course I’ll post pictures when it’s done. Later- nothing to see here yet, move along, move along.

Mark

A while back, Jennifer Radtke wrote a story about ‘Hearing Biodiesel Everywhere’. She came up with this when we were driving back from the Iowa biodiesel production workshops a while back, where we’d been surrounded by a geek convention talking about biodiesel 8+ hours a day for 5 days.

On the 1500 mile drive back home, we kept experiencing this illusion, whereby overheard conversations in truck stops or gas stations sounded like they included the word ‘biodiesel’.

from Blogs and Bio-diaries 2 thread at infopop

since i’ve gotten obsessed with biodiesel, i’m always walking around overhearing conversations (like on BART, on the street, at restaurants, etc.) where i think i hear the word ‘biodiesel.’ of course, i’m just mistaking some other word for it, until…

ANyway, i had a particularly embarrassing case of ’seeing biodiesel everywhere’ the other week. Someone made a joke about sex and somewhere in the back of my mind the autopilot thought it referred to biodiesel instead.

Someone friend sent me a random email joke about polyamory. For those of you from the Midwest who dont’ know about such things, that’s like consentual informed non-monogamy. Yes, I live in the San Francisco area and you don’t. The leftie crowd certainly has it’s share of experiences with polyamory, some of which get processed-about, discussed, argued-over, support-group-meeting’ed about, and certainly joked about. The topic is kind of an institution. Peopel often shorten the awkward Latin term to ‘poly’.

ANyway that email had a subject line about ‘going poly’.

The friend who sent me this isn’t a biodiesel person, and I don’t know him particularly well at all.

So I had a very strange confused moment when I first checked my email, wondering why the hell this person wants my advice about building a processor out of polyethylene tanks when he doesn’t even have a diesel vehicle yet.

Mark

Over at the Infopop biodiesel discussion forum they’re running a storytelling thread called ‘how you got into biodiesel’. here’s what I posted. I don’t usually talk politics in the biodiesel world, but here’s some of the deep dark secrets of why I’m a biodiesel pusher:

Well I was 17 and hitch-hiked around the country by myself for a summer, and met a lot of different vehicles. I decided I wanted to do the same trip in a van. But how to pay for gas with such a potential gas hog?

6 months later I was hitch-hiking home to New York City from a bluegrass New Years’ Eve party in Mt Airy NC. I got picked up by a guy driving a diesel Ford Tempo. It was the first time I’d heard of a diesel passenger car. We started talking about it and he told me about 50 miles per gallon and a few other positive things about diesels. I was HOOKED- it looked like the solution to the ‘gas hog’ dilemma.

I went back to NY and this kindly old mafia guy neighbor I knew, tried to sell me on a shortbus schoolbus sort of thing. I decided that if I were to own such a thing I"d need to learn how to fix it, since I was under the impression that it was hard to find a diesel mechanic. Another 6 months later I had a hard time finding a job (in New Orleans this time, right during the recession in ‘91). I applied for a JTPA job training program and went to mechanic school.

****

I never did end up getting a diesel van, but spent a lot of time obsessing about diesels and fuel economy and pestering anyone I knew who knew anything about them. I learned that one of the advantages was that you could run them on ‘other’ fuels if you couldn’t find any diesel.

****

In the summer of 1995 I was on the road again (in a slightly more respectable manner, like with a vehicle of my own) and met up with a group of NY friends who were doing their own disorganized tour of some sort. We met up in San Francisco after a couple of months traveling around the country separately.

A few days into the visit to SF, I was sick of being the non-drinker/designated driver who was always ‘herding’ the whole scatterbrained group of them around ( I earned the nickname Drill Sargeant on that trip). One day they were planning a day trip to ‘visit some artists’. I was dreading another ‘cat herding’ incident with the too-large group of my friends, and I generally find that artists are YAWN boring to me, so I ditched the group and went on a date instead (which turned into a 6-year long-distance relationship, which later brought me to California).

When I got back from my date and asked my friends how the ‘artist’ thing went, they said, “We went to see the Vegetable OIl Ladies". What, huh? they said, “you know, those ladies who did that trip with that diesel van that runs on that used vegetable oil stuff” (my friends had apparently seen the documentary Fat of the Land when the ‘ladies’- the filmmakers- showed it in NYC that spring, but I hadn’t heard of it yet).

At that point I got this incredible sinking feeling that I"d missed out on something important, and at the same time, bells started going off inside my head from everything I knew about diesels (the fuel-flexibility thing, and wanting a van, etc, etc) and my other interests. It just made SO MUCH SENSE.

I went back East and took a diesel class so I could figure out how to do the same thing, though I still had no idea about biodiesel, or that the ‘ladies’ had a film, or how exactly the vegoil thing worked. Sascha, one of the people I was traipsing around SF with, went to Guatemala later that year- where he met Josh and Kaia Tickell in language school, and told them about biodiesel, which apparently lit some light bulbs over their heads (ever hear of Kaia Tickell? She was 1/2 of the Veggievan project as much as Josh was. She’s also been edited out of Tickell’s official story, as was any mention of Fat of the Land. Too threatening to think of Josh not inventing the whole vegoil van tour concept…).
****

A couple of years later still, I was fast becoming a solar nut. I was frustrated with what I was or was not doing as a leftist and what was happening politically with the rise of right-wing radio and various political issues that the far right seemed very successful at inserting into public debate while we leftists floundered meaninglessly (and frustrated with the Clinton policies hauling us ass-first into Americas-wide globalization and some other scary issues that arose back then, but that’s another story).

I felt disconnected and decided to spend one summer hitchiking around the South, partly so I could talk to people and learn what the hell they were thinking. By chance, my travel clothing involved some camoflauge pants- and I happened to carry an olive green backpack and had short hair. A lot of people who hadnt’ looked very closely, had pulled over to pick me up, because at 50 miles per hour they assumed that I was a military guy heading home (I dont think soldiers hitchiked anymore at that point, but the image was there in older people’s heads). So I got a lot of very candid conversations out of the drivers, because I was being picked up by relatively ‘normal’ working class people or Christians who’d initially thought they’d be picking up a young man to tell stories with to pass the time (ie they weren’t pervert ax murderers who wanted to talk about sex or anything like that). They were all ready with their life story and it was interesting research.

I had one pivotal experience that made me realize that unlike other environmental issues, people were universally open to the idea of renewable energy as long as they thought that the costs weren’t very high (in 2005 they’re a lot more willing to spend on it than anybody was in 1997). I was traveling across Tennessee to go to an event and for the entire 450-mile stretch, splashed across the Knoxville Sunday paper front page news was a story about the troubled Tennessee Valley Authority nuclear power program and some revelations about serious safety infractions that had been covered up by the authorities in charge of public safety. It made great hitchhiking talk.

I developed a routine that summer when hitchhiking, bringing up the subject of renewable energy and asking the drivers something or another about how far they’d go to support it in favor of energy independence. I found that as long as people thought it was going to save money, they were very supportive of the idea of renewables, and that in fact truckers etc had given the whole issue of energy quite a bit of thought (thanks to the economics of their business).

They didn’t always have the facts straight, but it was a real eye-opener for me to see that this was one facet of the pollution/renewability/sane energy issue which hadn’t yet been assassinated by the media as some ‘evil environmentalist’ thing. I was thinking about strategy and tactics in the environmentalist movement a lot at the time and was quite discouraged at the uphill battle we faced on most issues and the distortions that a lot of issues received in the media which it seemed most peopel swallowed whole.

Another bell went off in my head- this energy independence/clean energy approach seemed quite frankly like an inspiring and positive campaign direction from which to approach pollution or nuclear power issues - I was surprised to find that average Americans inherently support the “idea” of solar or renewable energy, at least in theory (one particularly angry and racist and nonstop-ranting trucker that I rode with on that trip was going on and on about how ‘if Al Gore is elected President he says he’s going to ban all internal combustion engines- and he’d be right ‘ and then would rant some more about the importance of voting against Gore so that we could still have our cars. The “and he’d be right” part was a major eye-opener and I’ve been looking for ways to pry at the little undiscovered crack between ‘I know cars pollute’ and ‘but I"m going to keep my way of life dammit’ ever since.

Today, after 9/11 a lot more of us support energy independence, but you’ve got to remember gas was $1.09 a gallon back then in ‘97 and the California energy crisis/Enron corporate scandal hadn’t yet happened (and it certainly wasn’t affecting anyone in Tennessee back then, whereas Iraq is now)

I realized on those trips that I’d discovered a potential activist gold mine- what I now think of as a ‘gateway drug’ approach- a way to talk about conservation or other environmentalist issues to people who would otherwise not listen if they thought it was a traditional environmentalist issue, by playing on the economics of it. It seemed to me that one of the things that attracted people to the idea of wind or solar power was a (false) sense of payback economics- the idea that you’d personally save money over paying utility bills (whether that’s true in any particular installation varies in reality, but people seemed to think that it would, and everybody loves the idea of ditching their bills). Later on , this realization fit neatly with the biodiesel homebrewing or SVO angle- first you reel them in with the promise of cheap fuel, then they inevitably start thinking about energy conservation just a little and they suddenly support solar initiatives too. Heh heh heh…

The event I was hitchiking across Tennessee to go to that summer was a women’s gathering in the woods in western Arkansas Ozarks. In the ‘literature’ area with the other flyers, I found a stack of brochures that someone had photocopied from the Fat of the Land filmmakers trip from back in ‘94. I think it had the biodiesel recipe (as now preserved at the Dancing Rabbit website). Interestingly Rachel Burton, who is one of the two original founders of Piedmont Biofuels was also at that 100-person event, and probably saw the same flyer. I was elated to finally find out what the fuel ‘mod’ was actually called.

All the pieces kind of came together in my head that week in Arkansas- my longstanding interest in diesels and finally learning what ‘the process’ was actually called, my obsession with trying that vegetable oil thing I’d heard about, some guilt I’ve always felt over the fact that I devoted a lot of my (mechanic) time to keeping polluting old gas-hogs on the road, and the weird activist “hook” on environment and air pollution and clean energy I"d just discovered. I decided I’d found energy issues as my longterm cause and wanted to explore just how far I could ‘pry’ at that strange loose end I"d just found in American attitudes.

I went home, discovered the Internet, and started working towards doing what you guys see me doing now about 8 years later. That summer it looked like inserting renewables into the American dialogue was going to be an easy win because people seemed kind of primed for it for economics reasons. Now I’ve got an interesting feeling that we’ve ‘arrived’ to some extent-the stuff has hit the mainstream, who the heck would have expected BioWillie? I feel a little redundant in the role I’ve been playing for the past few years, and that’s a good feeling- though I"m a little murky on what the future of this technology in America looks like.

Mark

The Saturday and Sunday after the SF class, though, I had an information-packed encounter with something completely new- sailing school. Oh, My! it was two days of 8-4, incredibly fun, low student-teacher ratio, lots of practical hands-on training, we were on the water almost the entire time. SOOOO fun. I’d always felt like an idiot for moving here to the Bay and not doing anything with all the water around me.

I can’t say enough good things about Olympic Circle Sailing Club (the school). I was of course watching the teaching styles for tips on my own teaching, and they obviously had a really developed ’style’ that all the teachers followed. I found out later that the school spends 2 months training their new teachers in the school’s teaching style, and it’s really effective.

I also had a great time exercising my brain for the first time in a while. Partly because of biodiesel, and partly because of being sick, I’d become so focused the last couple of years on my biodiesel pursuit to the exclusion of social life, reading, or just about anything else. To some extent I’d become “illiterate” outside of biodiesel. I watched it happen and kind of let it happen, figuring I didnt have the energy for a full life anyway, and that it’d be an interesting experiment when I finally decided to learn new things again. I figured at least I’d become really good at understanding biodiesel.

So, sailing- it was great to pick up something new from outside the world of biodiesel. It reminded me of learning a musical instrument- similar coordination/hand-eye-brain coordination. Similar level of theory as what I’d experienced when I played music (I’m actually an ear learner rather than a music theory person though) Looking forward to doing more learning, sailing or otherwise.

I left the foothills this weekend for another bout with Mad Rush Disease- there’s an epidemic of Mad Rush in the Bay Area and I’m no exception.

Friday I co-taught a class at SF’s community college, with SaraHope Smith of Biofuel Oasis. We did a morning of Powerpoint, trying to cover all the bases, and did an afternoon of 1-liter batches and ‘mad science lab’ with the students who wanted to homebrew.

It’s a great facility- the automotive department of the community college, one of the best-equipped and biggest auto schools I’ve ever seen. They have a motorcycle department, and regularly do alternative fuel seminars (CNG, and have something on hybrids coming up), and are helping other community colleges in the area do some of the same seminars. Two of the instructors built a scratchbuilt electric vehicle 15 years ago and have put 50,000 miles on it since then, which is quite a feat considering the small daily range of such EV’s.

Last time when we taught this class, there was an A/V guy helping set up the projector. He had long hair, looked like a hardcore Burning Man person, dressed in a black Utility Kilt and those socks kilt-wearers wear, and I assumed that he was some freaky computer geek volunteer. Turns out the ‘guy in a skirt’ (OK, the Scots will get upset that I just called a kilt a skirt) was the automotive department’s department head. I love SF.

Speaking of SF, I absolutely never go there. I moved out here from NYC and I was really ‘over’ big cities. Berkeley/Oakland certainly is a big huge city but the size of the house lots in Berkeley at least, still makes me feel like it’s a bit smaller or at least a little more green and livable. SF reminds me of all the land issues I hate about NYC, with the stressed-out people associated with high rents and all, people crammed into tiny apartments, with the rent instability associated with it.

After the class, Hope and I climbed to the park at Bernal Heights- a huge hill with a 300 degree panoramic view of the city and the East Bay. Wow. I’d never gone there before. New York City really needs something like that- a park on top of a Midtown skyscraper or something, something to give us ants on the ground, a sense of perspective. For a while when I was a bike messenger in NY years ago, I was keeping a list in NYC of skyscrapers you could walk in off the street and get into without dealing with a security desk, where you could sneak a view out of a hallway window. Today in the anti-terrorism climate, such list-making probably a federal offense.

It was a glorious clear day, no fog, and you can see for miles, and the big ugly city turns really picturesque and harmless from up here. Hope and I were chitchatting mindlessly. I’d really gotten out of doing nice social things like that. I was starting to feel like perhaps I actually have the potential to ‘get a life’ when of course Hope asks the dreaded question I hate so much:

’so what is your motivation in all this biodiesel stuff?’.

ARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!! I hate the motivation question. I dont’ care. I dont
know what my motivation is. I don’t expect other people who are JUST as embroiled in biodiesel to ask, either. She doesn’t have a life because of biodiesel, either. The whole thing is a stupid question. Why’d she have to ask that?

Biodiesel Confidential, the name of my blog, became so confidential in the past few months, that I stopped posting. You didn’t miss much.

Mostly I spent the winter in Berkeley being really sick. I’ve got a really disabling case of autoimmune something-or-other- probably from getting Lyme Disease from a tick bite about six years ago. I was pretty much useless in January and Febuary. This winter sucked and I’ll be happy when this phase is behind me. When I wasn’t too sick I did a lot of equipment building, and got a little better at welding, and learned a few other similar metalworking skills, Somehow I’ve somehow gotten myself an out-of-town building job, so I’m suddenly having to cope with the real world again.

I’m two weeks into it, still very sick, and trying to work 8 hour days while ’sick’ is kicking my ass. I’ve relocated to the job out in the foothills, and it’s really intense being completely isolated in a rural area and not feeling well.

Last time I did a live-on-the-jobsite construction job, I relocated to Humboldt County to help a guy finish one of those endless owner-builder strawbale projects that some architect had gotten overzealous on. There’s kind of a natural building ‘circuit’ out here in the West, where quite a few builders travel from one rural job site to another (*this implies that the projects actually get finished, unlike the owner-builder/architect thing in Humboldt) and camp out on the job, building strawbale or cob or rammed earth homes.

The huge jobsite that I was hired onto back then was one of the longstanding stopovers on the traveling strawbale builder circuit. It’s a REALLY fun way to work construction when you’re able-bodied and unattached to a family or a garden or other trappings of a ’stable’ life. The people you work with are unlike ‘conventional’ construction crews, it’s a very hippie scene, and as strawbale building in particular is only about 12 years old, everyone’s really involved and interested in what they do- we’re still inventing it. Kind of reminds me of biodiesel, but it actually pays money and raises a profit for somebody and there’s a tangible result at the end.

A few weeks into that strawbale job, lonely at being surrounded by the region’s several generations of hippie dope smokers whom I didn’t relate to, I wired to New York for my tough-guy best friend/favorite co-worker, to come join me. A few weeks later we were having the time of our life working in the 110 degree heat on the roof being goofy jackasses- some of the best worksite fun I’ve ever had. He’s since then become a landowner there, an East Coast toughguy among the laidback hippies of Humboldt, nothing any of us would’ve predicted 5 years ago.

Anyway, the current hellish phase of my life reminds me of the Humboldt job, I’m excited to be building again, and I’m remembering how much fun that job was in the end. It’s one of those interesting change-of-scenery situations, where I’m sitting out here in the sticks in a new-to-me community, engrossed in work, wondering who’s going to come out of the woodwork here and step into my life, and what turns it’s going to take.

Mark

There are lots of biodiesel and SVO educational events coming up in the next few months. I listed all the biodiesel events I know of here:

http://www.green-trust.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=60

There are events listed in Colorado, California, Oregon, Texas, and one is coming soon in New England.

click here for biodiesel article in the ESSN online renewable energy magazine

In spite of some of the craziest computer trouble ever (if I was superstitious I’d think this project was cursed, the way my hardware was misbehaving just about every single day- new antivirus software got my computer stuck in endless ‘restart’ one day, my scanner driver disappeared completely one day, took photos with a really high-resolution camera and THEN remembered that I do not have enough disc space for the photos I took, the (borrowed) $20,000 camera’s removable media had a bug that wouldn’t let us download my new photos even though we could see they were there, SaraHope’s disc of Biofuel Oasis photos that I was supposed to use wouldn’t open at all etc, etc, etc….)

… I’ve managed to write an ‘introduction to biodiesel’ article which is in the March issue of the Energy Self-Sufficiency Newsletter, which you can download for free from http://rebelwolf.com/

I’ll be running an ongoing ‘column’ on homebrewing and biodiesel topics there (co-ops are a subject of one of the upcoming articles for instance) in future months. ESSN is a new e-magazine now in it’s third issue, which presents an off-grid perspective on renewable energy. I really like the other issues too- they’ve got a lot of substance behind all of their articles.

Mark

Forrest started a blogs aggregator for the biodiesel blogs he knows of. It’s an excellent tool for those of us scene geeks who religiously read Lyle and Kumar and others. It’s sort of like what I"d wanted to do with the infopop forum blogs thread, but completely inclusive (I used to just re-post blog entries I liked, which means that some of Lyle’s speech transcriptions got left on the cutting room floor). That means all those folks tuning in there wanting to read about the fuel will unfortunately also have to endure my rambling about my health and my social life.

Mark

I just added a few more of my posts from the old infopop biodiesel discussion forum blogs thread, and edited the timestamp on them so that they now are in chronological order. I still have a whole set of stories from the Appleseed Tour this fall to print here, and a few more things from the infopop blogs thread to re-post here.

Mark

I just lost a couple of weeks being extremely sick. This time it was the flu from hell, not autoimmune issues, and I’m driving myself crazy with Day 12 of this explosive cough I’ve acquired. Blech. The boyfriend recently pointed out that I’ve lost roughly half of my ‘time’ to being sick in one way or another this winter, which makes me feel a bit less awful about how little I’m getting done- I’ve managed to be sick with the infectuous sort of stuff four times since early November, which is really annoying considering that I didn’t get a single cold for two years straight, recently.

Somewhere in the middle of my flu-ridden fog, we had a really intense group writeup of a comment letter to the IRS on the topic of the tax incentives for biodiesel- some of the way that the incentives are written could potentially drive smaller distributors out of business depending on how larger competitors behave, and the IRS has already said that the excise tax credit does not apply to B100. So while the tax incentives were the biggest news in consumer biodiesel this year, they’re really not going to help most of the B100 people.

So we’re back to letting the NBB run the show with biodiesel policy in the US, and the B100 user crowd not getting what we want out of it, surprise surprise. Someday! (shakes fist at the NBB). Anyway we managed to write up a letter trying to convince the IRS to change their stance on a few things- and got something like 70 organizations and businesses to sign it. I hope it means something to them. Generally though our stance on policy should be written into proposals from the very beginning, and reacting to existing rules is friggin ‘ difficult.

I went totally nuts on a welding spree right before this crap hit me- I was making a bunch of my barrels and tanks into various processors and other ‘equipment’. It was something like three or four days of full-time welding. I’d been gradually working on my shop before then and was really ecstatic about everything being in it’s place. My shop is a 20′ shipping container, and it’s been in a state of half-usability for a year and a half. Basically once you move belongings into a shipping container, you can’t weld anything to the walls because of the grinding dust- and I’d moved in before I modified it into a shop format at all. So all of December, when I wasn’t sick that is, I’d been gradually shoving my stuff to the back, taping off the front third with a dropcloth, and slowly towards welding on the structures (or infrastructure) that I”ve needed- mostly electrical boxes, shelves, and supports for a big lab table I”ve been needing. It’s turned into a lot of hours with little to show for it for a few weeks, all to get away from a tangle of extension cords. This month I finally managed to get all the basic electrical in and roll those extension cords up- I can walk in and flip a switch to turn the lights on- 19th century technology, here I come.

After my welding spree I shoved gear back into the shop and it looked like a tornado had hit it- but the amount of work it stood for made it a happy kind of a mess

Mark

I finally got around to putting up photos from the conference:

www.localb100.com/conference

Mark

More of my own unending conference reportback from the Piedmont event…

I caught parts of a few sessions at the conference, but didn’t quite have the attention span to deal with an in-depth discussion for the most part. There was an amazing emissions presentation by Michal Vojtisek-lom (www.buffalobiodiesel.com). Not only did he do a great presentation on diesel engines and diesel emissions in general, something that I think we need better literacy about within the biodiesel enthusiast community- but he’d also done a number of onboard, on-road emissions tests, including on SVO. The SVO had performed really well. If I remember right he was somewhat advocating (maybe just on a theoretical basis) driving SVO for longer distances and highway trips, and using biodiesel for short trips, due to data from his emissions tests. The tests were done in conjunction with Greasecar, so perhaps some of the data is on their site?

Recently Tom Judd from Boulder Biodiesel had posted something about wanting to buy emissions testing equipment and to pay for a round of testing to answer some of the questions about SVO once and for all. He was concerned about non-regulated emissions- the questions about aldehydes and formaldehydes and acrolein and all that kind of questionable stuff. Michal didn’t have those answers, but his presentation covered a lot of important questions about the regulated emissions, and got me thinking about whether it was possible to just build some of the emissions testing gear ourselves. Surely within my community of electronics nerds, the skills must exist.

The conference had really good representation from a bunch of biodiesel co-ops. The Asheville co-op, Blue Ridge Biofuels, is trying to approach the issue from the ‘legitimate’ small producer/legal distributor angle. Their plan is to try and produce fuel for their town’s biodiesel needs- in compliance with all local, state, and federal regulations blah blah blah. I”m not sure this has been done successfully by a co-op before. Most of our groups have talked that line but never got out of the 100 gallon batch once a week sort of range.

They’ve got a building, have an intermediate sized homebrew-style system, and they’ve been fundraising for both the equipment and the salaries to go ‘the rest of the way’ with making it safe and legitimate in the eyes of their regulatory agencies, (and joining the NBB as one of the new small producer associate membership members). You guys better keep the rest of us in the loop on what you find yourselves dealing with in terms of permitting for your small plant. If I remember right, they’re currently mired in the fun and joy of proving to their county that biodiesel handling shouldnt be ruled by the stringent laws that govern gasoline distribution. That’s one of those situations that should be a no-brainer (ie biodiesel isn’t flammable on it’s own) but fire marshalls and other regulatory agencies don’t like to make exceptions for rules on the books. Fuel is fuel, the thinking goes, what’s non-flammable fuel? Of course this county is quite nervous about fuel now after this autumn’s hurricane-induced floods, which caused quite a few huge diesel spills in the flood zone).

Colorado’s CU Biodiesel group was there en masse, there were folks from Madison WI, Seattle, up and down Virginia and North Carolina, one of the James Madison University staff came out in support, lots of DC area people, a lot of Buffalo NY people, a couple of the local Clean Cities Coalition B20 people, a number of wants-to-be Clean Cities folks from other areas. The St Louis Biodiesel Club drove 12 hours on clouding-over homebrew that almost bogged their Mercedes down over the icy WV mountains. We had lots of farmers and locals who want to support a better farm economy in NC (which has been in recent years decimated by the collapse of the tobacco industry here, and several men and women spoke eloquently to this issue and their hopes that biofuels oilcrop production could help the local farm economy). There were quite a few students from elsewhere, a few teachers, and a couple of vocal homeschooling parents. Tons of homebrewers and people who wanted to be homebrewers. Libertarians, conservatives, liberals, former liberals, and Bill Levitt and son. There were a few different folks whose businesses run heavy equipment, who were looking into biodiesel as an alternative. Many people came with SVO experience, good and bad. The list goes on and on.

We had a great work session with the Collaborative Biodiesel Tutorial workgroup- Maud Essen officiated, with Sam Ley and me for support. The Tutorial is a project a few of us have been working on for the last few weeks- a group-written, open-source ‘how-to’ project about homebrewing. The work so far has been online. This time we opened up the floor to 15-20 newbies and asked them detailed questions about what they like or dont like about existing Web biodiesel tools, and got some awesome and sometimes surprising responses. Some of them knew little about biodiesel but they had well-formed ideas on how they would like it presented in a Web tool. Some of them, Maud included, worked professionally in jobs that involved creating trainings, tutorials/presentations, and there were a number of computer geeks present, so there was a relatively high level of technical discussion on how to proceed. Graydon Blair’s simple graphics laying out the biodiesel process got rave reviews. My favorite technical term that we learned, was what one of the corporate trainer guys called “USA Today Graphics”. Lots of people had bought my book at the event, so I got some feedback on how I presented info- people found even my extremely crappy cartoons helpful- so everybody making a website, listen up, the people want cartoon outlines of their process. More sketches, less words.

There was a lot of discussion about Eric H’s “biodiesel-o-matic” spreadsheet tool that we have online at the localb100 forum, and suggestoins for other interactive tutorial tools that we can adapt to biodiesel homebrewing education. Again, stay tuned. The details and the project are at www.localb100.com/forum. I”m happy to report (not that anyone cares) that no one accosted me to ask about my motivation this time around, or asked me to tell them stories, with the exception of a really weird newbie SVO guy who went on and on, really excitedly, about something to the effect of “I know, I figured it out- you’re called Girl Mark because there was already someone else named Mark you knew, and you had to distinguish- did I get it right? Right??”. I managed to almost completely avoid talking about “Biodiesel and What It Means To Me” this weekend. Got to talk emissions instead. Success.

Mark

I’ll post more interesting stuff about the event a bit later, but here is a bit about how it was organized. Please note that in my post I say nothing about ‘anarchists and angry raw food vegans’ like Lyle persists in seeing at these events (which I think is wrong). In the photo in the last post, I see a bunch of grey heads, and relatively nondescript people, who have jobs like ‘farmer’ and ‘contractor’, and whose interests in biodiesel align nicely with their conservative, liberal, and libertarian politics… Unfortunately posing the biodiesel movement as this culturally polarized ‘b100 hippies versus corn-fed farmers’ thing makes for better storytelling, so journalist types like Lyle tend to make comments like that no matter how boring the reality is. Judging from his blog today, it sounds like he’s telling Wired magazine the same thing right now, which means damage control later. Damn.

So, more from the weekend’s conference:

I think that I actually did OK for being completely sleep-deprived on the main day of the conference. It was just such an awesome event. A few comments on the conference organizing, since I think we’ll be having more of these events in the future:

The Piedmonts organized their event with no ‘biodiesel 101′ introductory session, nor with an introductory ‘track’. So I got stuck in the “quality in the biodiesel industry” session on Saturday morning with a wide mix of people- both beginners who barely knew anything about biodiesel, and folks who were already involved in the industry.

We’d done a big go-around on Friday night in the opening session, and I’d learned that many of the folks present were local farmers/contractors/small business owners who wanted to make their own fuel, or to learn the basics, and some of them were there to look at the possibilities of growing fuel crops. Many of these folks were in my session. So I took the easy route and dragged everybody through a “Contaminants 101” rather than going into BQ-9000 and Certified: Biodiesel Driven and industry quality control issues.

My session was probably a waste of time for a few people but it seemed like a conference like this needs the ‘101′ level stuff addressed, and the next people to organize a conference should keep this in mind. Lyle said that they’d organized it this way because the folks from their co-op were bored with all the ‘101′ level stuff that we included in last year’s conference, but unfortunately I think that they actually had MORE beginners in this year’s event than last year’s, and that it was more necessary than at the California event.

Another constructive criticism I had, is that we should really hold these as two-day events. It’s VERY hard to see where a 101-level series of workshops could have fit into the schedule of the Piedmont conference, other than maybe replacing some of the ‘go-around’ from the first day with a 101-level workshop, or an optional 101-level class, or something. Maybe a basics ‘track’ could have been run. I don’t know.

Another criticism I have for future conference organizers is that there was no ‘basic’ handout on biodiesel (not that ours from last year was very well organized, but at least it was large). Last year for the California biodiesel consumers conference, I got permission from Dr. Jon Van Gerpen to do a handout of his 26-page online course, and my impression is that he would give that permission to anybody who needs it for such an event. Since many of the folks present were farmers who were probably not huge “internet biodiesel research’ junkies, it seems imperative to make sure everyone’d hav

oh yeah, the conference.

We got there after the keynote and the pre-keynote addresses. The keynote was from a gentleman from the state energy office, and Lyle was attempting to impress him with the robustness of the B100 movement in the state. Lyle also apparently did a pre-keynote speech. In July Rachel told me that Lyle was ‘the black hole of press’ - ie when their group gets press attention the press tends to talk to Lyle (or so she said, I dunno). Sure enough, Lyle was in a tophat delivering a speech. It’s at his blog here . Anyhow, we got there during the ‘what is the grassroots biodiesel movement?’ discussion, which was a huge go-around of introductions, with a bunch of peopel talking aobut their fairly interesting projects. One of the James Madison University peopel was there, folks from the Clean Cities Coalition were there talking about their B20 usage, there were all sorts of users and co-ops and even a random and kind of free-energy-ish inventor who’d just found out about this gathering. The go-around was the format that Nick (of ‘SVO to Mexico’) once dubbed ‘biodiesel and what it means to me’- usually the point at which I skip out if possible. But this was a pretty impressive bunch of people- a good geographic spread was represented, much of the Eastern Seaboard from New Hampshire on down to Florida, and folks from Seattle, Colorado, and St Louis, and elsewhere. There were peopel I knew from a whole bunch of the lists, too, everything from Wastewatts to the VW Diesel Parts forum. Made for some interesting conversation afterwards- like we’re talking in two different dimensions, the present and the virtual.

There was an 85 person turnout in a room that seats 100, and we swamped and overwhelmed the General Store restaurant afterwards for the social. Pretty good going. We’ve nominated New Hampshire to host the next one of these, by the way, whether they know it or not. but not in the middle of winter, please.

anyway, they videoed the whole thing so hopefully it’ll be edited into somethign or another one of these years, here’s a photo of the go-around:

It’s the middle of the night at Lyle and Tami’s Home For Wayward Biodiesel Junkies here in North Carolina after the first night of the Grassroots Biodiesel Conference. I’m wide awake and will be useless tomorrow at the conference. The house is full of people from the Blue Ridge Biofuels co-op (the Asheville boys) filling all the spare beds. I commandeered the living room couch and the woodstove and shooed the other visitors into the official guest rooms so I could take over the living room, knowing I"d be up half the night with insomnia after sleeping half the day today on the drive down here from DC. Just tried to chill out by doing some light reading of a 1996 study on biodiesel contaminants, and tried to wrap my mind around quality issues I’ve heard about/experienced this year. Trying to figure out what I"m going to say in the ‘quality in the biodiesel industry’ talk that I got drafted to give at the last minute. Oh yeah, that’s scheduled for first thing in the morning, too. ugh. morning.

I’ve been trying to figure out if I"m going to the Florida NBB convention or heading home after this NC event. I’ve been excruciatingly sick with autoimmune illness issues since about mid-december, and I"m a freakin’ wreck at the moment. If I dont’ go to Florida I’ll probably really regret it for the rest of the year, and if I go, I’ll be screwed up for a couple of weeks, which I can’t afford to do since I"ve got some major work planned in another part of the state when I get back. Tonight I was already surfing the airline ticket websites trying to figure out if I could afford to go home early instead of on Wednesday. That’s pathetic- here I am on the East Coast, should be taking advantage of the amazing blessings that come with being able to step on a plane and fly out to the other side of the continent and ‘Poof! you’re 3000 miles away!’. I’m surrounded by people whom I like and whom I don’t get to see much, and really want to spend time chatting with (back home I’m not a major conversationalist and I’m really sick of talking about biodiesel in person, believe it or not, so me WANTING to talk to all these peopel out here about it is a pretty big deal). For me, this conference is almost like a mini-Appleseed Tour-reunion. But all my body wants to do is go home early and sleep. waaahhhhh!!!!!!!

It’s been an interesting last few weeks.

I almost didnt’ come out here at all because I’ve been too sick to work, for the most part, for a month and a half. I’ve had a serious argument with my immune system for a few years- I had Lyme Disease, the tickborne thing, about 5 years ago, and about three or four years ago I developed what seems like chronic Lyme or fibromyalgia or one of the other autoimmune complications that Lyme sometimes sets off. I went through a huge battery of blood tests a few years ago, to no avail- I never got it officially diagnosed beyond A. learning that I did in fact have some sort of overactive immune system signs, and B. reading enough about Lyme and chronic autoimmune disorders to learn that there’s not a whole lot that western medicine, at least in the US, has to offer (and that there are hundreds of quack schools of thought about how to deal with it, which I dont’ feel qualified enough to evaluate. Every form of non-conventional medicine in this country seems to want to claim that it’s discovered the cure for poorly-understood autoimmune illness issues)

I was actually doing pretty well from last spring to about mid-december. Tour was difficult and I had a few weeks where intermittently I’d get serious bouts of fatigue and need to pull over and sleep in the middle of some of the long drives, but I more or less pulled it off despite all that. It could have been better, it could have been worse. Tour was one of the most important (or at least the most visible) things I’d done in my life, so I was pretty happy to do it even in my slightly- gimpy state.

I almost wrote a blog entry in mid-december about how I really seemed to be doing better, and then, as if to spite me, another bout of ye old fatigue and brainfog came around almost as soon as I had that thought about how great I was doing. So in the past month I"ve been pretty much unable to work construction, and mostly unable to do focused brain work either. This is just about the worst time for this to happen- right before this trip, and all the money-making that it’d require to get out to these conferences, and I can’t work all of a sudden and needed to sleep 12 hours a day. I’ve had a piece of writing to edit for two months and it’s driving me nuts that I can’t get it together to do a good job of saying what I need to in the assigned number of words. It’s pretty scary not having either resource available- brain or brawn.

So mid-january, I looked at my finances and decided that I wasn’t going to the conferences and it felt like a great relief to stop struggling to make it happen. I posted an announcement on the lists about trying to sell my train ticket between the two events. Instead of someone buying the thing off my hands, a couple of my penpals from the lists started up an impromptou fundraising campaign to get me out here. I’m really grateful for this and it made it possible for me to get here, but I’m still in a bind about Florida and the NBB convention and whether I can even deal with a few days of that one. Hopefully I’ll be semi-awake enough to have coherent conversations tomorrow! but I don’t think I can even deal with the trip to Florida now.

Someone else responded to the fundraising by offering me some consulting work in DC in getting a large-scale offroad fuel user into their own on-site production. In-house production for fleets and possibly farmers is something I"m really interested in developing, and I think I"ve got a solid grasp on the technology to make it happen up to a certain scale. I’ve been dying to implement a farm sized system for a while now. I went out to DC a couple of days ago, and immediately realized that this user was biting off more than they could chew- at the scale they wanted to work, they couldnt’ economically do their own oil collections, and of course had been looking at buying yellow grease from the renderer, which immediately eats up something like $1.20 a gallon even before methanol, labor, and energy costs.

There are some ways in which homebrewing doesn’t ’scale up’ (but peopel tend to hear the numbers as they apply to homebrewing, not commercial production). Yellow grease, at least the cheap version, actually brings some of those issues about quickly (ie high water content, high ffa compared to what homebrewers are used to handling, which instigates a round of filtering/dewatering and acid-base pretreatment steps that we often avoid with the nice oil we handle regularly).

It also turned out that they were interested in in-house production because they wanted to save money over diesel costs. The numbers looked do-able to them on paper because of their massive monthly fuel usage- a few cents’ savings can really add up- but the economics are still really marginal if you’re competing against $1.80 a gallon offroad diesel. If something were to go wrong with the feedstock and the process, the economics didn’ look so favorable anymore.

This is kind of where I think the common argument about how small producers should target the offroad diesel market instead of dealing with EPA registration for legal on-road fuel sales sort of falls apart. Big earthmoving companies like this one, or other construction, farming, and mining operations, are directly depending on turning diesel energy into money, and there’s no room for a profit margin for commercial biodiesel there. In-house production holds some promise for the smaller ones, or for farms that produce some oil-bearing crop. It’s a puzzle I"d like to work on for a while, especially the farm-use side of it, since the heavy diesel use on farms probably ties in somewhere with health issues like the ones I"m having.

I hadn’t realized that saving money was the only motivation for this place to use biodiesel- I was talking to them through another person, and I misread the info I did get. I incorrectly thought I was coming out here to deal with a big organic farm that had environmental motivations in doing this (they have ‘organics’ as part of their name), which wasn’t the case at all, and, although I think that saving money is a very valid motivation for homebrewing, it’s tougher to make it fit into a business plan when the company’s constantly comparing the economics to those of offroad diesel and has no other reasoning behind the decision. I know we occasionally run into fleets/bulk users who want to produce their own in-house fuel because they’re still working off the homebrew ‘50 cents a gallon’ myth. arggh. In their case, that wasn’t quite true- at least I wasn’t the one to break the news to them about how its not really 50 cents a gallon. They’d already studied that issue- and at least they’re still interested in pursuing it, with a pretty good-sized chunk of money ready to throw at the whole proposition. I talked their homebrew enthusiast into starting really slow with a small homebrew setup onsite and to answer all the outstanding questions about what he was capable of doing with that feedstock, before trying to work that into the tight economics of the business on a large scale. He’ll be trying to talk the renderer out of a few barrels of yellow grease to start with for tests (the renderer didn’t respond well to their request for ‘ two tankerloads’ either- that was somehow too small too). The homebrewer is going to be on salary to get started with these smallscale experiments, which also seems like a good move on the company’s part.

We ran down to North Carolina today, we were in a rental car (my ride’s real ‘ride’ was all gelled up in the DC cold snap) and I wasn’t on the rental agreement/insurance, so I couldn’t drive. As a result I slept for the entire trip (now I"m paying for it with being awake at the wrong hours)… As we rolled onto 15/501 on the way down to Pittsboro, I was enjoying the smell of the winter breeze and had a little moment of nostalgia for North Carolina- I’d lived here for years, in a variety of dilapidated farmhouses. I felt a round of homesickness for NC and felt this brief rush of what I can only describe as ‘homecoming’.. There was bluegrass on the radio station and some lights twinkled in the distance out of an old farmhouse… and a moment later we passed the modern NC reality, an ugly housing development with some ridiculous theme as it’s ‘ye olde’ gimmick, and the spell broke as I thought about how much that great farmland isn’t economical to actually farm anymore, and is getting snapped up by developers if it happens to be anywhere near a road like this one. I still gotta say despite all that I feel a heart-aching love for this place that I’ve never experienced about California.

The original inspiration for my blog thread at the infopop biodiesel discussion forum was the user Peacenik’s amazing story about traveling to Mexico on SVO, about two or three years ago. here’s the link to his story:
SVO to Mexico

I’ve actually been running a blog about biodiesel, and a collection of other people’s blogs aobut biodiesel, as a ‘thread’ in the biodiesel discussion forum, and am only now getting around to transferring it over to wordpress. Some of the following are going to be from other people’s blogs and forum threads.
There are three of these threads that I’ve been dominating at the infopop biodiesel forum:
blogs and other bio-diaries
blogs and other bio-diaries 2
and now blogs and other bio-diaries 3

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I had already planned to just fly to the NBB meeting, meet up with the Piedmont Biofuels people to coteach a workshop in the DC area at a homebrew site that already had a processor similar to mine. I was going to fly out and fly back, which these days is cheap what with discount airlines and all. But Tom bought an eBay van on the East Coast at the same time as I was going through my deliberations, and it needed to be driven back West as well- I put two and two together and we all agreed that all this van-juggling could be combined into one logical trip. Obviously the word ‘easy’ didn’t surface during the logistics discussions. Did I mention that Tom’s van was in North Carolina and Jeff’s was in Maine, a distance of some 1000 more miles, and that’s before the crosscontinent haul?

So I put in a phone call to Piedmont Biofuels in North Carolina, who were coteaching our Washington DC workshop. Rachel agreed to pick up Tom’s van, drive it to DC with some workshop supplies, hand it off to me at the class. I was going to fly out a few days before the class with tools, class text books, and a bunch of other materials, and spend a couple of days or so setting up the rest of the class prep. The logistics of the classes I teach are staggering, and I was going to figure it out in two days of prep, starting with nothing (buying all kinds of supplies, making fuel for wash demonstration, making sure that there was good oil and a variety of bad oil samples for class, buying methanol, and checking out/finishing the reactor we were going to use). After the class and the NBB meeting, I’d build a reactor for a gentleman from the Biofuel list, and scrounge a water heater and the supplies to build one for myself somehow. Then I was to drive north, pick up Jeff at Boston airport, and while in Maine, somehow find oil and make fuel for the trip while we worked on the D-309 bus. Or so the theory goes.

Trouble is that the Piedmonters couldn’t get to DC till the night before our incredibly logistically complex workshop, and they didn’t want to drive 6 hours with methanol in the van, nor could I reasonably ask them to do ALL the runaround for class prep as they were far too busy themselves.

In order to deal with the class prep, I started to rent a car- then decided to double check on the company’s credit card policy. To my fright, I learned that since I don’t have a real credit card (ie I use ‘ATM’ card for such things), none of the rental companies would guarantee that they’d actually rent to me until they do a credit check. And they absolutely won’t do a credit check till I’m at the airport in DC, and no there’s no way to do it online, over the phone, or at their offices in California, or at all before I arrive in DC with all my crap. And since I don’t have a credit card and any credit, I’d probably fail the credit check- but I don’t actually know that for sure. Also my plans depended on bringing an immensely heavy collection of luggage along (ie tools and class supplies, oil pump and processor parts), and I didn’t know anyone in DC well enough to ask them to drag out to the evil Dulles Airport and get me. arghhhh.

I made my usual ‘spam’ round of class advertisements all over the internet- and we got some 30 people responding. The Mid-Atlantic region is practically one gigantic city- from Boston to Richmond- and a lot of people seemed willing to brave the drive up I-95 to go shake up bottles of biodiesel and hear the four of us quack about quality control. In all of this communicating, a solution to my car errands dilemma emerged- I found out that there were a couple of ‘coops’ in DC- one for commercial fuel bulk buy, and one small one that homebrews. That Takoma Park homebrewer group contacted me and offered all sorts of wonderful help. I found out where the methanol sources were, what public transit goes where, and found places for me and the Piedmont Biofuels horde to stay during our spree in DC. People from both coops collected two-liter bottles for the class, and lent us lab gear, and offered a location to brew up the various ‘samples’ I would use in class. All this happened over the internet about three days before I was to fly to the East Coast, and they were absolutely awesome about the last-minute requests I kept flinging onto their poor listserve.

I got to the airport, worried about how security would feel about the bromothymol blue indicator powder (with the label worn off but still obviously some sort of LAB CHEMICALS) and the box of syringes (for the class to use in titration practice) which were in my checked luggage. It turned out that I also had a pocketknife (that I’d forgotten about) visible right in the outside mesh pocket of my carryon bag. They found and threw out that one of course, then waved me through. I landed in DC and found that I had also had accidentally brought along a box cutter in the same carryon bag, which the airport screeners and I didn’t find! You get what you pay for I guess- my flight crosscountry was $92. Scary.

Bill Levitt, the host of the Pasadena MD workshop we were doing, picked me up from public transit. I told him over the phone that I would be the one at the station who has the ‘Okie Dust Bowl Refugee look”- my luggage needed an ‘Oregon or Bust’ sign. Bill had taken the day off work to run errands for the class with me, and we ran him ragged doing this. I got to Pasadena at 10 am, and we weren’t out of the errand-running/workshop prep till 10 that night. In between we were babbling on about biodiesel and all the lists we were both on. I remembered that there’s the hobby of biodiesel making and then there’s the hobby of biodiesel lists and forums. It’s like a huge penpalship. One of my objectives on this trip and on my fall tour is to meet as many of the penpals as possible.

Bill has a warehouse space for his business selling valves to wastewater treatment plants. He’d been making biodiesel in 5-gallon buckets for a while, doing lots of liter batch experimenting, and had just built a water heater reactor using the Appleseed design and some nice salvaged parts. We decided to alter it somewhat, and to work on the oil pump I’d brought, and to pick up hydrochloric acid, sulfuric acid, and titration stuff, along with methanol and lye and small pots for oil testing and safety gear for 20 people and so on!

One of the my most hated activities is going to Home Depot. We made several trips there, and to a couple of Ace Hardwares, and to the thrift store, and to an industrial supply, and on and on like that for the remainder of the day. Finally we ended up at Tilley Chemical in Baltimore to buy methanol that he’d prearranged for. Big mistake.

The chemical supplier segregated visitors to a sort of stairwell lobby, and we had to phone in our order to some peon upstairs. We asked about the assay on some KOH and ordered our barrel of methanol. The place gave us about 8 wrong answers on the KOH as different underlings kept trying to find the answer and their overlings kept changing their minds about whether or not they had it in stock. Then the parade of Methanol Questions came charging at us. We waited in the stairwell for a full hour while several different grades of company bureaucrats came out every eight minutes like clockwork to ask us what the application is. I guess we kept giving the wrong answer as they’d send their higher-ups to intorrogate us on what the application is. Now take note that Bill is an articulate, conservatively dressed middleaged engineer type (in fact he’s an engineer or something in his professional life)- the exact ‘type’ of person I’d imagine running a commercial biodiesel facility and ordering methanol by the barrel during the pilot plant stage, not the average person’s stereotype of either a terrorist or a methamphetamine producer. It was amazing to watch the bureaucratic wheels grind along.

Finally an older guy with mussed hair came downstairs and got into an argument with Bill over the fact that he didn’t understand why it is we were buying a flammable product for and that Bill shouldn’t be questioning why they kept us waiting for an hour because they had a protocol to follow. Amazing. Obviously this one was from the north end of the nearby Mason-Dixon line, judging by his New Jersey-like attitude towards customer service.
Worst of all, we knew already that we could have just driven down to the MRI racetrack (www.mridrag.com) near DC with whatever kind of fuel container we happened to have on hand and they’d have filled us up with blue dyed methanol for a cheap price. Besides, Bill IS actually professionally in an industry that uses methanol for one of it’s processes. It was weird watching the standoff that resulted as though we were trying to buy anthrax culture or something. The older guy invoked the fact that it was ‘Post-9/11’ and practically accused Bill of being a potential terrorist, and kept ranting that he had no way of knowing that Bill’s was a legitimate company. Bill kind of pointed out that he was frustrated that there was no way to prove right then and there that his company was a ‘legitimate’ one. Wow. I mean, the customer is always right, right? Wrong. I’d hate to be a hippie biodieseler who tries to deal with this place.

Well, they finally released the poor barrel of methanol to us, and off we went into Rush Hour Traffic (I think that gets a proper noun on the I-95 corridor), having wasted our precious ‘before Rush Hour’ timing on these idiots. We spent a few hours re-building and welding on some optional ‘bells and whistles’ onto his processor, and I got to Takoma Park at 11 pm, absolutely exhausted and grateful for all the logistics coming together and everyone who was making it happen . I was staying there that night with someone I didn’t know, who left me a key and a bed and was gone dancing for the night. I was so worn out that I didn’t even have the energy to go check out her co-op’s biodiesel processor setup till the following morning.

Contrasts and a Countdown

I”m in the countdown to leaving on my two or three-month trip (the duration depends on how I choose to look at it- I’m back to California in November, but then am off on other shorter teaching jaunts until January). I will be on the road on September 1st, teaching in Salt Lake City where some really enthusiastic people have been setting up a co-op. Then it’s on to Colorado, then to North Carolina, and then all around the Midwest with a shorter East Coast visit. In the meantime I”m buried by work in preparation for this project. I”m still working on getting my travel vehicle set up. The July trip kind of eaten the majority of my prep time (and most of my money!), and I’m scrambling, just as I expected.

It seems like every other day I alternate time at Machine Shop down in West Oakland, and time up in Marin County where I actually live. What a contrast. We’re in the industrial dead zone down there, near the freeway that collapsed in the 89 earthquake. Out of the dead zone is typical inner city poverty. It’s grey- grey concrete, grey industrial warehouses, and drab asphalt siding on the homes you pass on the way over, with the occasional burned out car. Up here in San Rafael I live in a beautiful house on a hill, with treetops at eye level. Our place has skylights and glass everywhere. I’ve got a huge window with a view of the squirrels and birds’ playgrounds right from my bedroom. There’s a hawk that hunts pigeons in our yard. The skylights draw the bright green of the treetops inside, and everywhere you look in our living room is a riot of green year-round. Our windows overlook downtown and everything is within walking distance- if I wasn’t always getting in a car to drive to Oakland. Two of my three roommates are somewhat New Age, and the place is beautifully decorated. Machine Shop on the other hand is dark and greasy. You can’t sit down on any surfaces without getting dirty.

I can’t sustain the contrasts. I’m moving out of the Marin County household when I leave for my trip- it just makes no sense to commute the distance. I’m not making firm plans for where I’ll live when I get back, but it’ll have to be in Berkeley or Oakland again. Which can have it’s own peace, as far as cities go. I’m really looking forward to biking everywhere again.

In the meantime I’m trying to decide what I’m driving on that trip and how I’m paying for it -two weeks from now (yikes). I”ve got an elderly Ford pickup truck and a trailer- which would be the cheapest route, but I’m not looking forward to traveling in an open-top truck for two months, and I already know that things are seriously wrong with the Ford (ie smoking, stickshift tranny’s somewhat on the way out) . On the other hand it’s actually reasonably (well, sort of) fuel-efficient for a big vehicle that can handle all that weight- I got 20 mpg if I recall correctly, towing a heavy trailer, on the way back from my Southwest trip in May, with plenty of power to spare.

But I’m looking instead at buying a van in a hurry- so I’m off this morning to rural West Marin to go work on a ’short bus’- a 1990 van-schoolbus hybrid for $1500 (basically a van chassis with dually wheels in the back and a square short-bus box body). It’s powered by a GM 6.2 which isn’t something I’ve owned before. There’s a big ding on one side where they hit a tree, which makes it cheap.

I’m quite broke after the July trip and am scrambling, finding everyone who owes me $100 here or $75 there, and trying to hustle up some cash building biodiesel processors (hence part of the welding marathon). (And yes, I’m whining). I’m about 1/3 of the way to the $3,000 that I wanted to have to pay for the trip, and it only took about a week of work, so it’s looking manageable. My elderly computer is driving me nuts (when I try and do graphics work for Veggieavenger or elsewhere) and I’ll need to spend$ to get a better one somewhere on this trip or at least find some cheap RAM for it. Arggh. Somewhere in all of this madness is a class or two here, tabling (I think) at SolFest, work on a PowerPoint for another biodiesel project, and learning how to do websites. Arggh! Oh and making a few hundred gallons of fuel to pay my rent trade at Machine Shop for two months. Arggh! And making a couple hundred book copies somehow for the trip. Arggh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I decided somewhere on the last road trip that I am probably going to spend a couple of years doing these tours, so I”m looking at these wide-box-body vehicles with the long-term view in mind, and am looking forward to having a camper/RV setup inside. Even if I don’t buy this particular Chevy bus, I think I want to look for something similar for future tours (I’ve got to admit that I was considering the 55 mph Mercedes 0-309-D like Jeff got… but that’s not something to put together in a hurry we’ve learned) . My plan is to divide the shortbus van down the middle and have a little living area in the front, and store the class gear/fuel tanks/welder/tools in the other half (which leaves room for me to put the heavy stuff over the rear axle). I’m not looking forward to parking something this big (van-length, but wider), but it seems like a good tradeoff for the living space flexibility. I really want to have a desk while I’m on the road! I’ve been enjoying my organized space at home, and don’t want to try recreating this “organizing” on the bench seat of a non-king-cab pickup truck. I gotta admit that I was reading Jan Steinman’s blog about his VeggieVanGogh art fair van with no small amount of envy. Before Tom bought his GMC Savana that I delivered across country for him, he had a discussion list for Burning Man RV’ers called ‘Vanlust’ (they apparently talk about setting up their various RV conversion systems in there- the essential stuff like the laptop full of music, the GPS and the hot springs locator software. Computer Geeks… um, just in case someone takes this the wrong way, I wouldn’t do things that tech-ed-out myself and I think they’re just a little silly about the whole thing). I’ve got that Vanllust thing pretty bad, though with all my friends buying vans lately, it’s more starting to be more like ‘vanjealousy’.

Mark

Last week I was back to my normal (abnormal) Bay Area existence.
I did a day of paid work on a friend’s big homebrew system that I’m building. I ran into a stopping point where I needed to weld fittings onto some tanks before I could do anything else, and went over with my tanks to Machine Shop (see first Blogs and Bio-diaries thread for details, which have been changed to protect the guilty).

Machine Shop is where I make fuel and have my own shop/"tools staging area", and yes, we really do have a machine shop stocked with huge machine shop tools (lathe, mill, CNC mill, and much more) from a naval base that was decommisioned. The place has a lot of character, or rather, characters. Including the bad neighborhood’s street people and characters- a tweaker (that’s methamphetamine addict to you) showed up on our block last month with an oxyacetylene torch, and proceeded to cut our landlord’s very large military truck in half (granted, it’s a ‘parts truck that looks completely derelict, but that’s still the weirdest Oakland Tweeker story I’ve ever experienced…)

Unfortunately for my little welding project there was a two-evening art show/rock show slated for that weekend. In the days leading up to the Art Thing, everyone at the shop was hogging all the welders 24 hours a day, as they were, in typical artist fashion, all about five days behind on their sculpture projects for the show but there were only two days left. I killed time for two days in the midst of the chaos by making the biodiesel space functional again while I waited for an unattended welder to appear. Not a chance. The first thing that happened in my reuniting with the biodiesel room, was getting sprayed at high pressure with rancid waste vegetable oil when I cracked open a drum that had gotten slightly dented by a forklift. Oil in the eyes sucks- you can’t wash it out. Constant and embarrassing blinking gets rid of it hours later.

I had very much ‘stepped back’ from working on the biodiesel project over there after my Southwest trip in May, having completely burned out in the fall/winter/spring. Machine Shop biodiesel room is a theoretically 200-gallon-per-day facility (I do not in fact make that much). The equipment parts costs are paid for by a guy I call The Investor (since we’re not planning on making money with this thing, and since it’s not a business, he’s not really an investor, more like a landlord), and right now I’m the only participant. The project used to be the Oakland Biodiesel Brigade co-op, but Tom fired the other members after it took too much work organizing non-resident volunteers, then dropped out himself for the most part. So I’m stuck with a very heavy time investment into a project that was supposed to be a co-op but is now going no where, but don’t quite want to abandon it as that sort of throws away a lot of work I did for eight or nine months of the past year. I’m slowly continuing to work on the infrastructure, figuring that sometime it’ll attract people (who are hopefully also Shop renters) for a co-op. I think I talked a lot about co-ops in the other Blogs and Bio-diariesthread- they are an amazingly difficult thing to manage in the Bay Area, especially on a large scale.

Friday night art opening came and I was in the biodiesel room behind people’s backs, clandestinely making some fuel while well-dressed people whom I didn’t know wandered around just inches from (and on the other side of a wall from) the dirty greasy hell that is the half-abandoned co-op space. I had weird feelings all weekend about being at this show- These days, I am absolutely NOT social outside the biodiesel world- my biodiesel pursuit has swallowed up my social life- I never go to music events or parties or have any appreciation for art or go to anything like this- and this party’s happening in my metal shop. These are all Burning Man attendees (which may not mean much to most of you, just imagine several thousand weird-looking freaky artist stereotypes all in one campout)- and I always seem to have something else to do (activist-wise usually) on the weekend that that festival happens. Tom’s been trying to drag me into that scene with no success, trying to interest me with stories of the various mechanical wonders and engineering marvels that people build in the name of machine art. No luck. This year I’ll be on my way to my Midwest Tour during Burning Man. Anyway, it was weird to finally see those people. My life is such a contrast. I’m pretty humorless, and focused sharply on this biodiesel stuff (I do consider this unhealthy and temporary). The shop was filled with people dressed to the nines. Lots of top-hats. Interesting seeing it from an outside perspective- lots of people from my age (mid-30
s) to much older, who still look like punk rock freaks, and like I should be friends with them or something. San Francisco. Me, I hang out online and talk about conservative biodiesel hobbyists.

The Art had finally been (mostly) installed and finished, I thought. I showed up the following day, Day 2 of the Art Show/Rock Thing, and people were still working. Finally by mid-afternoon I was able to get to a welder. It was like a two and a half day wait. Jeez! My project involved welding pipe to barrels- and I’m a novice welder- so it required a long practice session first. Having already ruined a good barrel in the past, I’d recently made myself a practice piece- cut a barrel in half for portability, wirebrushed the paint off in places, and drilled about ten holes in it. Now every time I weld pipe to barrels, I first practice on the half-barrel scrap before risking ruining something useful- I’m still nervous about burning holes in these tanks. The halfbarrel is now bristling with spikey pipe pieces and looks like some work of art itself. Maybe I could sell the thing as art. Anyway, getting this job done was hours of work, especially since our metal shop had been transformed into sound equipment storage from the night before, and it took three times as long as normal to do anything in the shop since you had to find where it had been “cleaned up to” first. Eventually Rock people, their roadies, their sound people, their girlfriends, their music critics, their indy video camerapersons, were flooding the place getting set up for their shows. I moved the welder outside to the alley. It involved losing about an hour- messing with the power system first to find and then make the right type of 240V outlet appear nearby, and other delays typical of working at this shop.

There was a weird gambling phenomenon going on at the same time. The Investor had made noises about putting a pretentious sounding piece of Art in the show, and later procrastinated/wavered on getting it done (he has a history of hyping up his Art to our immediate circles, and then not getting it done!). One of the other Shop residents made a public bet that The Investor wouldn’t deliver and would’t finish his project- and a ferocious betting pool started with the whole circle of friends/tenants participating. The rules of The Bet were that we could help or hinder The Investor depending on how we were betting. We have an email list and the email medium just fired this into a total frenzy. Numerous suggestions were made on what form the hindering could take. I bet $2 against the success of his Art Piece. He was supposed to hang it by 11:59:59 on the last day of the show, and timekeepers were standing by.

Anyway before the show started I was still welding and I was feeling guilty about the fact that I was working visibly and the show was about to begin- it seemed like a rude thing to do to the organizers, like I was in the way or detracting from the atmosphere or something. The Investor came through the alley and asked if I’d be out of the way when the forklift had to come through (for his project). It was 8 pm, right before the show start time, so I felt even more guilty because of the reminder. Then I realized that the conversation he was in the middle of at the time was about how to actually ‘hang’ his betted-against Art Piece (a hanging ice sculpture actually). He was still on the ‘what metal are we going to use and what should the order of installing it be’ sorts of details. I didn’t feel so bad then, about being in the middle of work and not contributing to the party atmosphere when I realized that his project- part of the show allegedly- still involved ‘planning’ with four hours of the show left of the weekend.

Anyway, at 11:40 pm, The Investor and the all the people who The Investor was able to bribe into helping him, were finally ready to hang his stupid sculpture, which he had finally finished. The Metal Shop crew inadvertently divided up into teams- Bettors Against and Bettors For. (I was loudly on the Betting Against team) At 11:40 the forklift (it’s a 35 feet tall, massive diesel monster) was driving through the art crowd. 20 minutes of art show left and he’s finally going to install the art piece. A total madhouse erupted in the alley where the thing was being installed- with people from both teams competing in some sort of sick Help Or Hinder Marathon.

Most of the well-dressed people inside, in the shop where the actual art and music were happening, had no idea that all this madness was happening out back. My clue came when someone asked me if the shop had a spare car battery, which didn’t seem like a proper request for a high-heels-and-costumes (um, not on any of us shop residents though) sort of evening. I walked out to the alley to see what the commotion was. There was a boisterous mob surrounding the huge forklift and they were jeering, hiding or stealing his tools from his helpers, trading insults, pelting The Investor with ice cubes, squirting him in the head with a spray bottle set on ‘jet’, all while he maneuvered the giant forklift into position. Since he was our authority figure in some ways, it resembled some sick ritual or something- make an effigy of the king, dressed in sackcloth and have a mob throw tomatoes at him, one day a year??? Someone jumped on the forklift, turned it off, and stole the keys. The Investor demonstrated his redneck reflexes and hot-wired the forklift. Meanwhile someone else stole the battery from behind him and ran. The “Bettors For” somehow produced another battery. The moment he got busy with the sculpture again, “Bettors Against” stole this second battery too.

I dove right into the fray and manned the water sprayer. At some point he fought back against the crowd by revving the engine repeatedly and filling the alley with acrid poorly-burned biodiesel exhaust. Biodiesel as a weapon…

I spotted my friend (now a traitor, having switched to the “Bettors For” team) bringing over the sawzall so they could free the ice sculpture from it’s fiberglass mold. I grabbed the sawzall away from him and a wrestling match for the sawzall ensued in the middle of the crowd- someone else grabbed me in a bearhug and I couldn’t see who it was- so I found myself fighting to keep from being dragged towards the Other Team by the first guy, while holding onto the sawzall, and trying to elbow or otherwise inflict harm on the person bearhugging me. It turned out the guy bearhugging me was on my team and was actually trying to help keep the sawzall from falling to the Investor’s team. We ran off with the sawzall. The ‘Betters For’ persevered with hacksaws allegedly.

“Bettors For” and The Investor prevailed, and actually hung the ice sculpture exactly two minutes before the bet was up, in spite of our best efforts. I realized that a few ‘firsts’ had occurred- the first time I’d actually attended any of the Machine Shop ‘scene’s art events, the ‘first’ time in a couple of years that I’d been to a rock show of any sort, the ‘first’ time I’d been seen “purely socializing” in about three years, and on a related note, the ‘I can’t remember the last time I had this much fun’ (since I don’t’ ever go anywhere to have fun) feeling.

I continued on my welding marathon the next couple of days while everyone else was recovering from their weekend madness. I basically made myself a bucket of wirebrushed pipe halves, and welded every scrap barrel in sight into various pieces of equipment, untill I finally got better at the thick-to-thin sort of jobs- which still did not reduce the pile of metalwork that the biodiesel room needs done, by all that much. I stayed for two days working at the metal shop, making fuel, organizing the stupid space- and degreasing. Today I had to drag myself home and forcibly leave the tools in Oakland. Which backfired when I spent the evening working on someone’s van that I’m considering buying for the tour… aaahh, vaaaan… Hope I can get it running

August 6th biodiesel.infopop.cc blogs thread:
**************
Steve Howell had made a board meeting presentation earlier from the NBB Technical Committee which identified obstacles within the ASTM biodiesel standards development process (mostly applies to B02 and B05, and B20- there is varied work being done to include B05 in the petrodiesel standard (ie trying to get ASTM to agree that the properties of petroleum diesel stuff aren’t widely changed when 5% biodiesel is added to it, which I think is the case in the European standard or at least in some European coutries’ rules around petrodiesel use. Yes, feel free to yawn. Lyle wrote all about how boring industry meetings are in his blog at http://www.biofuels.coop/blog/archives/000106.html).

-There is unprecedented resistance within ASTM to including 5% biodiesel in the petrodiesel standard. The resistance is coming from fuel injection equipment people, engine manufacturers, petroleum people… you name it. Their concerns are that you there isn’t a ‘good’ test for testing the blends level (there’s one in the European specs, but the US won’t accept it as adequate, MN Department of Commerce was one of the culprits in objecting to this test within the ASTM committee apparently if I understand right). God forbid someone should buy some B06 by accident. Another major concern is the lack of an oxidative or thermal stability test. We are something like at least a year from having an acceptible test developed.

- Another good piece of info to get ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’ is that Steve Howell reported that ASTM D-6751 WAS designed for pure fuel (ie B100) use in mind, even though it’s labeled as a ‘blendstock’ spec and there is no current B100 standalone spec. This stuff is all important to us Californians because the difference in wording (ie blendstock versus standalone pure fuel spec) has led to regulations that effectively ban B100 sale unless you jump through some serious ‘variance’ bureaucratic hoops first. There was talk of applying these regs to the rest of the country throught he National Conference of Weights and Measures, but the NCWM decided differently recently (after lots of education by people like Jennifer, Hope, Kumar, Kimber, Kent Bullard, and the BCC I may add, along with the NBB which sort of takes all the credit in it’s own view).

-There is a move toward updating D-6751 (in terms of tightening up the regulations on acid number which are pretty lax in the US standard [they discussed what happens when they’ve done teardown tests on fuel with high acid number (like 1.3, and they found that gums, varnish, and polymers form on some types of fuel injection system components)], and tightening up the viscosity spec, which would bring it closer to European specs).
Fuel Injection manufacturers are requesting adding (or tightening up) a spec for Ca/Mg to the specification as this material can clog some new filter types (I think this is something that turns up in the wash processing with hard water, no? I have a poor understanding of this mineral residue issue), add a Na/K spec for the same clogging reason. Europe controls sodium to 5 ppm I think.
There’s another request form the FIE’s to add a 2 micron filterability spec to both the biodiesel and the petroleum diesel specs. Also there was a report that B20 has a negative effect on some fuel/water separators- which I presume also means B100??? (though that wasn’t tested of course).
-There is no real motion happening on developing the stand-alone B100 spec.
-without a B20 specification, more original equipment manufacturers are unlikely to issue statements supporting biodiesel use. Getting OEM recognition for biodiesel (B20) is a major goal of NBB work at this time.
-there were some heating oil studies mentioned in the tech committee report. They show a NOx decrease (!) with some technologies which can be used by industry as a way to ‘offset’ overall Nox increase from onroad vehicles running biodiesel.
-they mentioned some SVO studies (I didn’t get a change to ask but assume that this was SVO done improperly, ie unheated) that were done, which showed increased aldehyde and formaldehyde emissions due to the glycerine content. I will bother Steve about this in the future to get more information.

August 6th biodiesel.infopop.cc blogs thread:
**************
Steve Howell had made a board meeting presentation earlier from the NBB Technical Committee which identified obstacles within the ASTM biodiesel standards development process (mostly applies to B02 and B05, and B20- there is varied work being done to include B05 in the petrodiesel standard (ie trying to get ASTM to agree that the properties of petroleum diesel stuff aren’t widely changed when 5% biodiesel is added to it, which I think is the case in the European standard or at least in some European coutries’ rules around petrodiesel use. Yes, feel free to yawn. Lyle wrote all about how boring industry meetings are in his blog at http://www.biofuels.coop/blog/archives/000106.html).

-There is unprecedented resistance within ASTM to including 5% biodiesel in the petrodiesel standard. The resistance is coming from fuel injection equipment people, engine manufacturers, petroleum people… you name it. Their concerns are that you there isn’t a ‘good’ test for testing the blends level (there’s one in the European specs, but the US won’t accept it as adequate, MN Department of Commerce was one of the culprits in objecting to this test within the ASTM committee apparently if I understand right). God forbid someone should buy some B06 by accident. Another major concern is the lack of an oxidative or thermal stability test. We are something like at least a year from having an acceptible test developed.

- Another good piece of info to get ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’ is that Steve Howell reported that ASTM D-6751 WAS designed for pure fuel (ie B100) use in mind, even though it’s labeled as a ‘blendstock’ spec and there is no current B100 standalone spec. This stuff is all important to us Californians because the difference in wording (ie blendstock versus standalone pure fuel spec) has led to regulations that effectively ban B100 sale unless you jump through some serious ‘variance’ bureaucratic hoops first. There was talk of applying these regs to the rest of the country throught he National Conference of Weights and Measures, but the NCWM decided differently recently (after lots of education by people like Jennifer, Hope, Kumar, Kimber, Kent Bullard, and the BCC I may add, along with the NBB which sort of takes all the credit in it’s own view).

-There is a move toward updating D-6751 (in terms of tightening up the regulations on acid number which are pretty lax in the US standard [they discussed what happens when they’ve done teardown tests on fuel with high acid number (like 1.3, and they found that gums, varnish, and polymers form on some types of fuel injection system components)], and tightening up the viscosity spec, which would bring it closer to European specs).
Fuel Injection manufacturers are requesting adding (or tightening up) a spec for Ca/Mg to the specification as this material can clog some new filter types (I think this is something that turns up in the wash processing with hard water, no? I have a poor understanding of this mineral residue issue), add a Na/K spec for the same clogging reason. Europe controls sodium to 5 ppm I think.
There’s another request form the FIE’s to add a 2 micron filterability spec to both the biodiesel and the petroleum diesel specs. Also there was a report that B20 has a negative effect on some fuel/water separators- which I presume also means B100??? (though that wasn’t tested of course).
-There is no real motion happening on developing the stand-alone B100 spec.
-without a B20 specification, more original equipment manufacturers are unlikely to issue statements supporting biodiesel use. Getting OEM recognition for biodiesel (B20) is a major goal of NBB work at this time.
-there were some heating oil studies mentioned in the tech committee report. They show a NOx decrease (!) with some technologies which can be used by industry as a way to ‘offset’ overall Nox increase from onroad vehicles running biodiesel.
-they mentioned some SVO studies (I didn’t get a change to ask but assume that this was SVO done improperly, ie unheated) that were done, which showed increased aldehyde and formaldehyde emissions due to the glycerine content. I will bother Steve about this in the future to get more information.

August 6th infopop biodiesel forum:
**************

As I said earlier, the Piedmonts and Jennifer Radtke and Bill Levitt and I mobbed Steve Howell during a break, and peppered him with questions. While on the topic of ‘important trends’ in my opinion, I want to point out that I feel there’s a huge distinction between the corporate business folks like some of the soybean board people within the NBB, and tech nerds in the industry. We can exploit the differences between purely tech people and businesspeople, I think, especially if we know what we’re talking about when it comes to this biodiesel technology (and economics for that matter).

I think that Steve is quite an NBB company man of course- most of his engineering consulting business is doing technical work for the NBB (I’ve heard anyway), but my impression is that talking with him about a topic like B100 (which he doesn’t support) is a little different than talking with a corporate Public Relations person like Joe Jobe or Jenna Higgins, or with the Soy Board wonks, whose job is justifying B02 (or P98, as in, Petroleum 98%).

In trying to identify pressure points within the NBB where we B100 supporters can have impact that eventually might lead to positive gains for B100, I strongly urge dealing with laboratory people, engineers, and other tech geeks. They just can’t resist discussin hard facts, and I’ve found that even the ones that disapprove of small producers or of B100 as a strategy for biodiesel acceptance, generally are somewhat openminded about it since they can’t resist hard facts (and really, some of our hard direct experience in the homebrew world and in the California B100 supporters community, constitutes much more ‘hard facts’ than some in the industry like to give us credit for). On the other hand, the PR guys’ job is to ‘present’ (ie twist in my admittedly biased opinion) facts in the ways that further the current Industry’s marketing strategy.

August 6th, infopop biodiesel forum:

*******************
I think of Bill Levitt as being fairly typical of what I suspect the homebrewing population/grassroots biodiesel enthusiast world looks like. He’s a middle-class guy with college-age kids, has been running a small business for 25 years, and is politically conservative without being ‘far’ to either end of the spectrum. Bill started out with an environmental science degree, and went promptly into a career related to ‘environmental’- in the sense in which the word ‘environmental’ is applied to industrial health and safety (as opposed to ecology). He business provides equipment to the wastewater treatment industry.

I have met a number of biodiesel-interested people his age with environmental science degrees who made the same sort of career choices- there just weren’t many jobs in ‘environmental science’ 30 years ago but lots of schools in the 1970’s offering degrees in this line of study. I’m not sure those jobs are really available now either. So it looks to me like there are a number of ordinary people in the US with a sort of frustrated professional interest in environmental science who jump at the opportunity that biodiesel industry potentially provides to (potentially) get their beliefs in line with their livelihood. While checking out ‘what does the grassroots biodiesel scene REALLY look like’, I sort of filed this in my head as ‘important trend to watch out for’.

Bill went the ‘internet information overload’ route to biodiesel- lurked on the forums for a year, printed out and saved assorted info on homebrewing, and eventually started making liter batches, working his way up to 5-gallon buckets. He’s a handy engineer type, with his experience in a plumbing-related industry- and when me and the Piedmont folks visited his warehouse, everyone was quite impressed with some of the gear he’d already collected for his larger future biodiesel setup.

Bill found out about the U-Conn (university of Connecticut) presentation on biodiesel last year, and promptly drove the gazillion hours up the evil I-95 highway, to attend. If I’m not mistaking it for another New England biodiesel event, I think that conference was an industry presentation about how well everything is going in biodiesel. Keith Champa of World Energy was telling people at the U-Conn thing that ‘quality control has been great in the industry and the few problems we’ve found were ALL caught before making their way to vehicle-use consumers’ (dig around at forums.biodieselnow.com for details, Mike Briggs wrote a reportback to the forum on this event). At the same exact time (a little earlier actually) Graham Noyes of World Energy was apologizing to Northwest passenger car biodiesel users for accidentally selling them product high in glycerides and messing up their cars. The World Energy ‘quality control problem’ predated Keith Champa’s speech in which he reported that there have been no real problems. Hmmm. I swear I’m not making this up (asuming I got Keith Champa’s involvement with this correct, it might have been his replacement at WOrld Energy).

Bill went into this event as an open-minded newbie from the forums, met a bunch of other East Coast biodiesel enthusiasts, and then made a visit to Tom Leue’s homebrew setup (I think before Tom’s fire???). Somewhere down the line he got fired up about someday getting into the industry someday too. Yay. He also took an interest in the small producer issue, and like many other ‘ordinary’ people who also happen to have a good solid business sense, also thinks that there were a few problems with the NBB’s approach and that there is some merit to having different business structure and marketing strategy than the NBB pursues.

Anyway, at the NBB board meeting he was right alongside us needling Joe Jobe (well OK, sort of, I admit I’m exaggerating SLIGHTLY, I don’t think he was intending to needle anybody but we as a crowd kind of looked like we were at one point). At one point he walked up to Joe to say ‘well we’ve all been reading your NBB membership rules book that Mark has, may I get my own copy please?”. I watched Joe look slightly nervous (joe told Bill to contact the office after the board meeting). The industry and the NBB, (and I’m not speaking for Joe in particular), still has NO IDEA who we ‘grassroots’ people really are, and part of me suspects that many of them (again, not claiming to speak for Joe or anything) still have the stereotype that many of the supporters of B100 and of smallscale producers, are impractical raving lunatic idealistic hippies who know nothing about business. They haven’t really seen us at their events in any sort of numbers until recently, and the damn small producer scene is famously tight-lipped about what plans they are all actually hatching (ie no one wants to stick out their neck and talk about their business plans until they actually come to fruition, so none of us really have any idea of how many people there are out there actually trying to start up small biodiesel businesses or really of who they are. Maybe the ISU biodiesel course instructors have a better idea of this than anyone else).
I secretly find it amusing (and of course enheartening) that we turned out to be a more diverse bunch than the stereotype holds, especially since I’m sure I fall squarely into the stereotype myself just by virtue of having the stereotypical leftist SF Bay Area lifestyle. I also want to ‘out’ Bill for the fact that he was acting nervous around us and our ‘clique’- he asked me repeatedly whether it was OK for him to be tagging along with the Piedmont Biofuels folks and me and Jennifer. Some of them are young enough to be his kids.

So anyway, spending a few days hanging out with Bill and the Piedmonters, I’ve got some other vague idea forming in my head that I’m tentatively filing under ‘important trends’. It’s so vague I can’t even describe it without long rambling. It’s something about the importance of diversifying the ‘grassroots’ politically, without either side having to compromise about any of their ideologies. I think it’s quite easy within the context of the biodiesel industry specifically.

The Biodiesel Council of California and other groups I’ve worked with in California (the Berkeley Biodiesel Coop for instance) are pretty un-diverse politically. We are aware of this fact. At the CBCC conference (ie the shadow conference to the NBB convention last winter), it did come up in some of the California debates that we should not set up the BCC with completely far-leftist assumptions, language and other strategy, because even though many of the people involved in biodiesel business and advocacy in Northern California agree with this sort of language use, the Southern California biodiesel contingent is in general much more mainstream politically and actually includes conservatives unlike the groups most of us Northern California people were working in. Kalib and Spike kept playing ‘devil’s advocate’ during our CBCC ‘California statewide biodiesel organization’ discussion, kind of presenting the fact that some of the more radically leftist language just wouldn’t fly in So. Cal. I was squarely with them despite my own politics (actually all three of us are quite far-leftist I think). It just seems like it’s a stronger movement (within the development of the biodiesel industry) if it doesn’t polarize people. On the other hand, anytime you’ve got radical leftists and radical rightwing folks talking to each other, you get arguments. The Yahoo biodiesel and biofuel lists are a good example, as is the politics forum here at infopop occasionally (and parts of tdiclub once in a while). Early on in the Berkeley Biodiesel Coop we used to get rather conservative people trying to join who all thought we should run our operation completely differently (ie as a business) and it took a while for it to all “shake out” (without any fighting though) before we figured out our identity- but the conservatives never stayed. I think for industry/policy groups like the Biodiesel Council of California, we need to figure out how to diversify without all getting on each others’ nerves.

August 4th Infopop biodiesel discussion group:
*****************
One thing that probably doesn’t ‘come across’ very well in my writing on the forums is that although I’m pretty far-left politically (I’ve almost never voted for instance because I don’t support ‘the lesser of two evils’), in real life I tend to get along with people from all sides of the political spectrum, and depending on where I live, I sometimes have as many conservative friends as radical leftist friends. My current boyfriend is a corporate dropout libertarian who at one time worked in the Alaska oil fields and therefore supports drilling in ANWR (um, we don’t talk about it). (and while we’re on the subject of political parties and political labels, I suppose I’d be called a ‘leftist agnostic’- as in, heck if I know what’s right for others?)

In addition to my political beliefs, I also have a pretty oddball background as a New York City high school dropout, and live an obviously pretty odd lifestyle (ie the fulltime biodiesel work for instance, no cell phone, tend to live with huge households of roommates, am involved with a wildly strange Burning Man artist enclave despite not being an artist, don’t work a 40 hour a week job, no credit card, used to ride freight trains and still occasionally hitchike, have run businesses and have also been a street musician, no savings, woman construction worker’s pretty unusual in my trade, no health insurance.) I think that I’m about as ‘weird’ as most people will encounter. Hopefully I have good enough communication skills that this doesn’t stop me from being friends with people who don’t fall into the same category. I have exactly three months of ‘college’ behind me- in my mid-20’s I tried it out after being deeply immersed in being a musician and in folklife study for many years – and during ‘college’ (AB Tech in Asheville, NC) the people I hung out with at school were Fundamentalist Christians which is quite far from my own background. I was fascinated by their faiths, visited their churches as a sort of anthropology/music thing, and mostly neglected to tell them a few things about my real background, which regardless of my politics, is pretty unusual (I grew up in New York City so it’s gotta seem unusual for most people in small-town North Carolina). One day it kind of came out in the creative writing class we took- me and the Fundamentalist Christians had a sort of study group at lunch- one of my Fundamentalist friends asked me to help edit her essay on Christ, and I let her read my essay, which just so happened to focus on a (heterosexual) junkie friend I had in high school whose tragic heroin addiction was driving him to (homosexual) prostitution which had been quite world-shattering information to 16-year-old me when this was all happening in real life. After reading my essay, the fundamentalist lady was kind of a bit more restrained around me to say the least. But we were still friends.

Anyway, I got involved in biodiesel after years of assorted leftist activism, and like many of us, I’d been wanting to ‘do something’ about energy misuse for years. I spent many years trying to find myself a role in ‘energy politics’, after I discovered that renewable energy is attractive to both left-wing people and right-wing people.

I discovered that if you prod ordinary people about solar power for instance, they’ll generally say that they support development of it and would use it as long as it doesn’t impact their pocketbook too heavily- and that if you ask the same people about some more touchy environment subjects like Endangered Species Act restrictions on logging, they generally have far more emotional opinions that keep us polarized to the left and the right. And renewable energy is even more attractive to some of us because of the economics involved—everyone’s affected by paying a power bill and knows what one looks like intimately, whereas not everyone’s affected by logging jobs nor has necessarily met any real-life loggers, and the two topics are therefore less and more polarizing.

Everyone loves the idea of biodiesel or biomass/farm grown fuels- whether they say ‘great idea- it’ll keep us from giving money to the oil corporations’ or whether they say ‘great idea- it’ll keep us from giving money to the terrrorists’, the subject touches on the same thing whether you come from left or right, though it tends to be said in different words. Control. Empowerment. Whatever you want to call it, I tend to think of it as ‘choice’. And Im hoping that the movement for local B100 as biodiesel, rather than faraway B20 as we have it now, is going to continue to offer that choice, for sale.

There is a stereotype in the biodiesel homebrew community that says that the folks who are homebrewing are a bunch of idealistic hippie fringe dwellers. Lyle Estill keeps referring to biodiesel activists as ‘the nipple ring crowd’ and to the biodiesel industry as ‘fat white guys’. It makes for easy ‘straw man’ setups for his essays. (and to my absolute horror, people on this forum sometimes think that his essays are my writing!)

From reading the boards like this one, I suspect this is stereotype is pretty bogus. The majory of the homebrewers I hear from seem to be middle of the road conservatives or middle or the road liberals, generally with some small bit of disposable income to throw at hobbies, and this biodiesel hobby fits squarely into the good old American Car Hobbies routine. It simply takes too much work and routine, for unstable hippies to do it well (or maybe I don’t hang out in hippie circles enough to see this).

Biodiesel brewing or SVO’ing also happens to make everyone feel somewhat better about not sending their fuel dollars to “the oil corporations or the terrorists”. Face it, whatever your politics, oil is on everyone’s minds the past couple of years in the US, left and right. And it just so happens that the overall impact of all these little hobbyist brewers or SVO filterers is much greater than the amount of petroleum that their efforts displace- in terms of press coverage, and of educational impact. But the stereotype persists that it’s a liberal or far-left bunch of people who do this biodiesel thing.

I think I said already that part of the point of me going on the road and doing a ‘tour’ is to sort of map out the biodiesel brewer landscape for myself- I want to see who these anonymous names on the forums actually are. I suspect that they’re mostly ‘normal’ mainstream folks (well OK I sort of avoid the few who write me who I think might be wackos). More importantly than setting the record straight on homebrewers, I’m interested in seeing just what we can do with a more united sort of homebrew network, and in seeing if it’s possible to make the biodiesel ‘local b100’ (ie locally controlled biodiesel business) sort of activism a little more politically diverse than it is in my circles in California. I don’t know what that would be like. There’s a lot of unknowns and i-don’t-knows and no-easy-answers to left-right politics in this country.

Jeff got in the passenger seat and started trailering. We got on the freeway-
And the truck started fishtailing immediately.

The truck swung from one end of the lane to the other, looked for a moment like he was going to regain control. I saw Jeff let off the pedals and steer. Then the fishtailing doubled in amplitude and we were swinging wildly from one side of the road to the other. No one was in the other lane- but we were on a bridge over another highway. I found myself wondering if we hit the guard rail, would it slow us or would we break through and go over?

Suddenly we were no longer heading ‘forward’ and were going into a wild spin, the trailer swinging the truck around. For part of the spin we were sliding head-first towards the concrete guard rail at the edge of the bridge.

Then we spun 180 and jackknifed the trailer, and came to a stop. A sports car pulled over and turned out to be a cop on another call, who was quite a bit more shaken than we seemed to be (almost immediately someone else nearly ran him over while avoiding us). No one was hurt. We’d somehow avoided hitting anything. Jeff had done an amazing job of steering through the accident.

I want to point out that Jeff always talks about being dyslexic, and occasionally gets left and right backwards. And that for anyone, backing up and steering with a trailer is a difficult task if you’re not used to it. Jeff was looking in the rear view mirror during the spinout, steering the truck to follow the out-of-control spinning trailer while it dragged the truck, and did an absolutely flawless job of steering, dyslexia and all. He says that the trailer began to flip as well while we were on the bridge (I didn’t feel this myself) and that he was steering to avoid the flipping. Had we flipped we would’ve been over the bridge guard rail.

August 1st, infopop biodiesel forum continued..

U-Haul rents car towing dollies for cheap. They also have a computerized system for determining if your vehicle can tow the desired load, and will absolutely refuse to rent you the tow dolly if the system shows that your towed vehicle exceeds the safe weight for the one doing the towing.

But U-Haul isn’t the only company that rents trailers. The tow dolly was too narrow for a van, and Jeff kept calling other companies. Some budget-priced local place reassured him that the car hauler flatbed trailer they had would fit the van and that doing this tow was safe according to their calculations.

We loaded the van onto the trailer in Reno at 11 pm. I’ve never been so happy to see my own pickup truck in my life. I was a little concerned about how small the flatbed was, and whether it was really designed for trailering a van…

This is also incidentally when I discovered that my pickup truck was missing a battery. Crackheads had broken into it between the time I flew to the East Coast and the day or two later later when Jeff drove it home from where I’d parked it at my shop. They’d broken a wing window but it wasn’t obvious to Jeff what was stolen. I expected that I’d find something and was disconcerted that it all seemed to be in place. I opened the hood to check the oil… and one of my two batteries was gone. Quite by chance the battery cables (ie connected to the other battery, and the entire electrical system) were hanging in mid-air by some random hose, and would have probably shorted out the whole system and perhaps killed the other battery or the alternator if the crackheads hadn’t accidentally left it dangling ‘just right’.

I was having somewhat of an energy meltdown and wasn’t prepared to think of other options to the trailer questions I had. I got in the passenger seat, ecstatic about not having a steering wheel in front of me anymore.

August 1st continued
**************

The Savana had taken up the habit of running rough and of stalling intermittently at highway speeds. Such as 85 miles per hour, which is how fast I was traveling through Wyoming or Nebraska (not that it’s legal). The ‘trouble light’ was showing about 4 fuel system related codes and a crankshaft-position-sensor code. I’d long stopped feeding it biodiesel due to another fuel system problem, and was trying to eliminate as many variables as possible while playing an on-road game of ‘guess what causes that car trouble’, rather blindly. The trouble light also liked to come on in the middle of road construction, the kind of road construction where there is no breakdown lane. I had no tools or time, and don’t know anything about these engines or their electrical system/electronic controls- and couldn’t find a manual or electrical diagrams for that vehicle. Ironically enough given my concern with quality fuel and my dislike of petrodiesel, a gas station had sold me some bad petroleum diesel when I first picked up the van. I was draining water and sediment out of the fuel filter for a few thousand miles. My main worry was that crap had made it past the filter or that the IP screen (assuming that this IP has one, which it might not) was clogged, doing lord-knows-what to the actual IP itself. Uphill seemed like one of the commonalities to what caused the van to break down. Ahead loomed the Sierra Nevada mountains- and quite a lot of Up.

Eventually, I limped it to Reno (on the edge of the Sierras) after calling The Men to come deal with the predicament they were partially responsible for. Tom was rather easy-going about the fact that his van might possibly be on the verge of puking an injection pump to the tune of several thousand dollars (though we all understood that it might not be anything that bad either) but was in court for jury duty and wouldn’t be able to do anything about my problem before the end of business hours and the start of rush hour. Jeff felt quite guilty about dragging me on this trip that I didn’t want to be on, and agreed to take my pickup truck, rent a trailer, and meet me in Reno so as to trailer the poor van over the Sierras for the last 200 miles of my trip.

August 1

In the end I went up and down the East Coast and collected Jeff and his new vehicle, and then watched it break down. Then drove my 3,000+ miles by myself in Tom’s new vehicle.

Jeff was back to California before I was, and I was limping the nice new GMC Savana across the Great Plains and the desert, with daily breakdowns or repairs. I thought ‘fix or repair daily’ was supposed to be what FORD stood for, not GMC? The poor van was sick. I was spectacularly sick of driving, I’ve gotta say. It was Tourist Season, and all around me were peopel driving for fun (the one time of year everyone justifies their SUV’s, there really should be an SUV rental agency for this ten days or whatever vacation they get).

This is from the infopop forum blogs thread, and it was dated
22 July 2004 . Not to be confused with my current East Coast trip (I’m posting it in feb 2005 and editing the timestamp so it goes back into the archives back when this particular blog didnt’ exist yet).
*********************

I’m sitting here on the other side of the continent from home, and I’m on a road trip I didn’t plan to do. I had no intention of going to New England anytime really. Oops. Going home tomorrow.

Jeff Biosmell talked me into coming out here with him to pick up /fix up a van he’d bought via eBay- it’s one of the Mercedes 0309-D buses that are supposedly all over Europe but which are oddities here. They’re 19 feet long- the size of an airport shuttle bus, and are powered by a cute little 4-cylinder diesel. This one, a 1975 model, came with custom license plates that say “Turtle” and a speedometer that rather optimistically goes up to 80 mph. I think that perhaps the importers didn’t do the math right on their kilometers to miles per hour conversion or something- everyone I’ve ever talked to says these trucks have a top speed of 50 mph top speed or so.

Anyway Jeff wanted me along to help him get this thing running and to help him drive it back across country - it’s been sitting for about two years and is in “restoration project” condition. We live about 3,000 miles from it’s current resting place. I really, really can’t afford the time or the expense or the lost wages of being on a road trip right now, especially as I’m going off on a huge long teaching trip at the end of the summer. I’m supposed to be home, working to pay for the ‘other’ trip, and also just working on the organizing logistics- something that involves internet access and a phone, not easy to do from a passenger seat 3000 miles away. I tried really hard over the past few months to weasel out of the trip, but in the end everyone else whom Jeff asked along backed out too, and I agreed that we could tag the trip onto what was originally supposed to be my short jaunt to the NBB meeting in Washington DC in mid-July.

from July 22

The following morning was a frantic re-costuming into business clothes costumes for that afternoon’s National Biodiesel Board board meeting. You see, the meeting had a dress code, and today was Business Casual (the next day was more formal ‘business attire’ as that was the day we were supposed to meet with our Elected Officials, lobby them about biodiesel, and impress them with our ability to wear business clothing). I’d been wondering for days just what Business Casual means for women’s clothing, and watching commuters on public transit to try and decipher the code. Of course I flew out here with three bags of tools and books, and brought almost no extra clothes due to the ‘weight of luggage/getting around on public transit’ issue (but I brought along some high heel shoes that I’d dumpster-dived), figuring I’d stop at a thrift store or some Sweatshop Clothing Outlet or something and buy the appropriate costumes that day. Fortunately we were now staying with another Takoma Park woman who dresses like a model, and she had a closetful of Business Costume to loan out. She lent all four of us (including the men) the appropriate clothing, and off we went in appropriate Business Casual (theirs all involved mustard yellow Piedmont Biofuels shirts, so they made quite a uniformed crowd once we hit the board meeting). Socially retarded that we are, we were making fun of each other for not being dressed in our usual grease or workclothes. Oh and talking about tanks if I remember right.

The first thing to greet me coming out of the Metro in DC was a giant sign that blared “THIS BUS POWERED BY CLEAN NATURAL GAS”. Oh brother. Biodiesel’s not even on the map as far as marketing goes. Then I passed a billboard for “Clean Energy From Coal” and remembered that I was in DC where it seems that half the (middleclass that is) residents seem to have some sort of government consultant job and that their opinions help shape the government that covers all the rest of the country. And that there were about a bazillion special interests vying for their attention and for that of the Elected Officials (and their aides and their aides’ consultants). Biodiesel was supposed to do it’s best this week against the clamor of other Special Interests.

The NBB meeting started with some routine work and then proceeded to the small producer issue which we were partially there to witness. They voted on the new NBB compromise policy (cutting the dues for small producers in half), after announcing that they’d struck the small producer workgroup’s recommended “quality testing requirements for all members” before it went to the vote . Wow, that was quick, we’d been demanding something along the lines of that compromise, in the NBB convention hallway just six months ago, and I was insisting that the NBB could make the issue go away “ at the stroke of a pen”. I’d known that this compromise was likely to be the change in policy for a few months now (Joe Jobe had been promoting “$2500 a year, with a deal on BQ 9000 certification” for about six months). Right after that, a guy from ADM had the appropriately clueless industry kneejerk reaction and stood up to proclaim that it was tragic (well he didn’t really say tragic) that allowing small producers access to the market was going to doom them to selling B100 where quality matters much more than in blends, and that there’s no way that these small producers can afford the safety equipment and quality control to make quality fuel “the way we [bigger producers that is] can”. He also mentioned something about 1970’s European biodiesel plants having explosions (I think) in this context of our lack of safety equipment. As Mr. Kneejerk sat down, I spied in front of him the NBB member whose company had made and sold to us some offspec fuel about a year ago.

Me and Jennifer and the Mustard Yellow Shirt Crowd and Bill Levitt all filed out to the hallway to have a huddle on how we felt about the compromise issue. Joe Jobe followed us out to ask the same. I of course immediately played my self-appointed role (as “bad cop”) and asked him why the “quality testing for all NBB members” rule got struck. He said that the NBB’s concern is that they don’t want to become a policing organization or something along those lines. Waahhh! This could have really been a revolutionary change in the biodiesel industry had this rule become policy. It’s really kind of amazing that forcing the small producer issue resulted in a much greater issue coming to light- that of quality control and large scale producers. I had the feeling that we were somewhat playing roles- The Piedmonts took the opportunity to tell Joe that instead of giving the NBB $2500 last winter they’d instead spent it on a tanker truck to sell B100 from, and several of us waved my copy of the NBB membership agreement in his face and asked him questions about how the new ruling affects some of the other NBB regulations (the NBB really doestn’ like giving these out). I occasionally got the feeling that some of us like pointing out to the NBB that sometimes, well, we are in a position to do ‘an end run around the NBB’ on some issues that the NBB would rather be leading all us sheep along on.

The rest of the day was interesting because much of it was dominated by committee presentations, which some of us techie heads liked. Steve Howell, the Technical Committee Chair (I think) presented a lot of great info about where NBB research is going. At lunch we followed him out like a flock of mustard yellow polo shirts, and surrounded him with questions.

I was bugging Steve about the justifications that are used in the auto/Fuel Injection Equipment/petroleum industries for opposing biodiesel based on “distillation curve” specifications grounds, and on viscosity grounds. At one point I mentioned the point that Dr. Van Gerpen’s always makes about the fact that biodiesel’s greater viscosity doesn’t actually impair operation or equipment lifespan, since the same FIE equipment is designed to operate on petrodiesel in winter temperatures which can have the same viscosity as biodiesel has at it’s lowest usable temps, since biodiesel stops being usable (ie clouding/cold weather filter clogging and gelling) long before it gets more viscous and gets outside the normal diesel viscosity range. Steve sounded glad to hear this argument again but pointed out that Delphi asserts that they have had injector pump seizures where shafts snapped on biodiesel in cold weather. He happened to mention them as “Delphi, formerly Lucas”, which rang a bell for me about viscosity and those injection pumps.
I told him that it’s well known among SVO enthusiasts worldwide that Lucas/CAV pumps are inordinately sensitive to viscosity and that they are prone to failures on SVO but that other pumps don’t have the same experience. He was surprised to hear this, and I realized that some of the technical experience we have with pushing the envelope with SVO and biodiesel can actually be useful in the work that he and others do via the ASTM standards development and other work that involves answering to fuel injection equipment manufacturers concerns. Essentially I think that this sort of exchange on technical issues is something that the NBB needs to hear.

I’d already been planning to join ASTM and to get on the biodiesel committees, but this Board meeting really brought home the importance of having more of us do this. Jennifer talked with him about the same subject, and about trying to work together on making more quantitative and useful the ‘data’ that Biofuel Oasis has to collect on it’s customers for the California Department of Measurement Standards (a huge issue in California is that they just made B100 sales illegal other than through variances and ‘coops’ and that Oasis and others have to apply for this variance until such a time as B100 standalone standard becomes available… and at the meeting that day, Steve admitted that the project of the B100 standalone standard wasn’t even on the table at ASTM anytime soon…)

also from July of this year:

Piedmont Biofuels arrived from their long journey from North Carolina at the crack of midnight, and I got to go out and meet the Van I was to drive for the next couple of weeks. It’s a beauty (1998 GMC Savana). Oh and the people attached to the vaaan were Rachel and Leif, who among other things teach a three-month biofuels class at a community college, and Chris Jude, who is starting a biodiesel project at Appalachian State University in Boone and is the Piedmont summer intern, starting that day. The Piedmonters were mumbling something about tanks they’d seen on the way and probably something about plumbing when I walked out to meet them. Uh-oh, The Geeks Have Landed, I’m not alone now.

I shook the poor Piedmonters awake after about four hours of sleep and headed down to class, still having no plan for how we were organizing the syllabus for the day between four teachers.

As expected, people were piling in to the parking lot about an hour early. We locked them out of the workshop space and made them drink coffee and entertain each other while we frantically arranged the last-minute labware that the Piedmonters brought, and gave the syllabus half an eye. Co-teacher Jennifer Radtke arrived at the last minute, from a redeye flight from the West Coast, and 30 other people crammed into the shop room to be educated (and entertained.)

Class was absolutely awesome! We did OK with all the hands-on stuff, blasted through almost all of the promised curriculum (with the exception of acid-base process). Ethanol and KOH and various equipment topics got covered, and everyone got hands-on and titrated and made various engineered failures and successes, and tested Bill’s fuel, and made a batch in the reactor, and bubblewashed a couple of five-gallon oil jugs full of two types of fuel to demonstrate emulsification. Jennifer was there to add biodiesel distributor experience to that of Piedmont, as well as her extensive homebrew teaching experience. It’s weird how much me and Jennifer’s experiences as “full-timer” biodiesel educators parallel Rachel and Leif’s- Jennifer and I also taught some three-month courses together just like they did, and we’re all going absolutely off the deep end with our nerdy obsessions with tanks and plumbing and pumps, to that point where I think we can’t really relate to normal people anymore (or at least it seems this way to me). I’m really impressed with Rachel and Leif’s teaching skills and knowledge of this topic.

People were there from several states. There were a few environmentalist organic farming hippie leftwingers with antiwar leftist stickers and there were right-wing people with “Get the US Out of the UN” bumper stickers as well. I’ve had the feeling, sitting in leftist California biodiesel circles, that unlike California , homebrewing is not a hippie hobby in other parts of the country, and the two classes I’ve done recently outside of California really bear this out- this is a more diverse movement than many people who haven’t met us in person often assume (Lyle’s blog at www.biofuels.coop/blog stereotypically refers to homebrewers as the ‘nipple ring crowd’ but I somehow doubt this is true for the large number of the middleaged conservative gentlemen in the room)

About 9 hours later we were back to Takoma Park at a party, hiding in the back like the socially-challenged tanks-and-plumbing crowd that we are, and it was time for… a meeting! Yep. It never ends. We had a meeting to design the curriculum for the five-day Biodiesel Intensive workshop we’re teaching in September at Piedmont. We’ll be building equipment at that class, using it, working on methanol recovery, making full batches and taking them through the entire wash process, and more, with far more student ‘contact hours’ with the material than our shorter classes can offer.

also from the blogs thread at the forum and from July 22 2004

I woke up in the morning to meet my host, and shortly figured out that we had met in the past (outside of biodiesel). Small world. She had been running SVO since about 1998, and was a very sharp, efficient organizer. Their coop was an informal ‘cell’-like affair with a beautifully built plastic processor and absolutely great basic infrastructure on a deck in the back of her garage. They’ve got the Host Institution connections (ie parasitising the waste that comes off of research facilities, just like we do in the Bay Area with lab salvage) and had nice lab gear. They kept apologizing for it being unprofessional!
The plumbing layout for this reactor/wash tank was exactly like the Appleseed reactor, but it preceded Appleseed and was nicely TIG-welded in stainless steel. It looks like we’ve hit on the lowest-common-denominator pump-mixed reactor, since everyone keeps arriving at the same place with how to plumb these things.

Nadine introduced me to her 4-year-old with a “This is Mark- she makes biodiesel”. The four-year-old immediately got an extremely disturbed look on her face and hid behind her mother. “ she knows biodiesel’s the competitor for her mother’s attention” Nadine explained. I can only imagine, knowing how much time the stuff can take in a co-op setting!

We spent that afternoon making fuel and having a workday with a few folks from the co-op. What a nice feeling. People intermittently asked quality control and KOH questions , and we worked on making fuel with their reactor. They had the same experiences as we do out West with the coops- lots of curiosity and general interest from people, but many people without much time to put into the process. It seems that for them too, no great idea stands out about how to compensate people (ie in fuel) for their different levels of time involvement and oil collections contributions, and they also had a small listserve that served as an informational point for the locals. They started the group with a bunch of people putting in $100 (Team Canola Co-op was the same)

They’re using a 110 gallon reactor and mistwashing in the same tank, and are on a fairly slow schedule as far as their production schedules go. They also gave me a water heater and a barrel for my travel processor. I told them about standpipe wash tanks and about using multiple tanks to speed up production capacity. They had good titration technique and low-ffa oil, but had some inexplicably soapy samples. They are using the ‘heat and let settle’ method for dewatering, which doestn’ always work well. Since they have a plastic processor they can’t actually bring the oil up to ‘boiling off water’ temperatures. They also work outdoors and had trouble working with sludg-ey oil in the wintertime. I suggested building a preheating barrel out of an upside-down drum (ie turn a closed head barrel upside down, cut off the former bottom, then thread a water heater element and an adaptor into the former 2” bung, along with a ball valve in the smaller bung. Insulate the daylights out of the barrel. Wire some cable to the heating element, ground the heating element using a c-clamp and attach a plug on the other end. Voila! Dump in gloppy WVO Slush all you want, and heat to liquify so that your processor can handle it.)

In the middle of the workday I sat on the lawn with my book for 25 minutes and tried to figure out where I’d gone wrong in the soap titration info which I’d printed all over the web and in my book this spring. I called Kalib in California, and we both took out calculators and re-worked the formula we came up with. Eventually it turned out to be a fraction accidentally inverted in a formula, and I’ve got that squared away enough to correct the information.

Everyone gets excited about the ‘new’ (to homebrewers) soap test, I’m finding. It’s the test whereby you titrate a sample of unwashed biodiesel against a solution of hydrochloric acid in the presence of bromophenol blue (sp?) indicator, and it is one of the few quality tests that homebrewers have which is qualitative and gives you hard numbers you can compare to another brewers’ numbers. It helps troubleshoot just what it is that causes washing problems (ie emulsification). In general my quality testing goes something like this: do a wash test (shake a jar of biodiesel and water and see how long it takes the stuff to separate again after emulsifying), then try and discern what caused any emulsification. It used to be that looking at the color of the water and testing it’s pH was the way we guessed at soap causing the problems, which isnt’ terribly accurate. We would also perform a reprocess test to look for underconverted material (which could be the other emulsification-causing problem). Having one solid concrete set of numbers to work off of to eliminate one variable was a great step forward.
From talking to these guys and other homebrewers I’m also finding that a number of people don’t know about ‘drying’ their washed biodiesel and are often using it while it’s still hazy.

I met a guy who is working on a Bus Project (this one is an Independent Media machine with video production facilities) in Long Island, which is encouraging as I don’t think of NYC as a place that gets much biodiesel/SVO ‘live’ info.

posted 24 April 2004 06:59 AM
School of Hard Knocks And To-Do Lists

After the equipment class, I launched myself into full-on battle against my to-do list. The list is so huge it fills a looseleaf binder. Arggh. Jeff’s doing a heavy carpentry job (we generally work together) and my arm injury blew out completely after the equipment class, so I haven’t been working as I can’t quite handle anything heavier than minor electrical work at the moment. It’s depressing being out of practice with carpentry, and depressing being injured. I instead tackled the plant problems and my self-organizing, one-armed, while I wait for the return of light-duty electrical jobs which stress my injury a little less.

I used my enforced underemployment to attack the ‘plant’ for several days in a row and made some boring but important progress. No co-op this time, no volunteer coordinating, just several days straight of grimy, boring labor by myself, which means I got a lot done- but have very little to show for it that is interesting.

I’m leaving for the Southwest in two weeks to teach some classes and tie up loose ends from when I first got sick a few years ago. I’m coming back a month later, hopefully working, then off again in august for a biodiesel class tour extravaganza. In between, I’ll be moving out of my house, dealing with jobs, working on vehicles, dealing with fundraising/equipment finding for the August tour and trying to knock a few biodiesel projects off my to-do list, including a waste oil burner I haven’t yet built, building the larger-scale reactor at the site, picking up some welding skill for working thinner metal which I’m currently awful at, and stuff like that. I’m hoping to do a website after I get back from the southwest- so for the past couple of weeks I’ve been trying to write up material for it which is a painful process for me to complete. I feel pretty oppressed by the to-do list.

But to start a bunch of those interesting projects I’ve still got an Infrastructure monster at the Oakland Biodiesel Brigade to contend with. I put up a ‘lab table’ and shelves for labware- inching closer to being able to actually do controlled experiments at the shop instead of just production- built and put up a whiteboard (the better to manage the day’s to-do list). Cleaned up and degreased even more stuff- it’s amazing how much polymerized oil I’ve scrubbed off of things in the past couple of months. I’m making headway against the grease and dirt. Built a waste water holding tank. Plumbed and wired a few more utility pumps for material handling. Put up a dedicated shelf to the utility pump and of course had to replumb the pump to make it fit. It’s amazing how much time this project can eat up, all on boring mundane tasks. I built a 24 foot high countercurrent wash column (want to experiment with gravity-only countercurrent before going on to a series of tanks or a series of more reasonable-length pipes if it works), then ran into problems attaching the column to the building because of all the obstacles (my full barrel collection) that were in the way.

At the Machine Shop, and also likewise at Tinkers Workshop in Berkeley, we’ve all joked about getting yellow ‘police line’ tape and making a ‘no-fly zone’ around parts of the building, or around equipment or workbenches, where piling up of crap would be forbidden. Somebody already got to the biodiesel shop wall with a forklift full of crap first, so there’s an immovable Pile along the shop wall and now it’s In My Way and needs to be dealt with.

I degreased some more oily plumbing fittings. Degreased some more of the containers I store said greasy plumbing in. Degreased some more old pumps and other equipment from last year. Degreased my grease tools yet again. Degreased the cords the equipment ran off of. Went through the glycerol collection (I have 150 gallons waiting to distill) and pumped off all kinds of useful biodiesel that’s been seeping up out of the biodiesel. Started a new wash on that stuff- easy wash, since the soap has been settling out of it for months. Stayed up all night at the shop last night, and consolidated all the glycerol and oil barrels that were in the way of installing my 24 foot countercurrent wash column. Tried to spend a few hours a night writing up equipment articles for my biodiesel guidebook, which is like pulling teeth since I’m terrible at focused writing. I missed a couple of my own deadlines for the articles, and I’ve been on bizarre schedules, working at the OBB shop till 10 pm and then pulling a few hours writing. Tom and I go on ‘work dates’- he telecommutes and works vampirically odd hours as well- and we sit in a cafe with our computers and write till they kick us out at 2 am. This is my current idea of a date, which I suppose is better than if moving oil drums at the OBB shop was counted as a date.

The Machine Shop went through a massive email flame war with the Investor as a result of the Machinists’ meeting last month (basically the Investor acted immature and insulted everyone over email after some criticism of his management style). It’s disturbing to watch even though it’s not my business, disturbing in light of some of the rifts within the online biodiesel community and people’s tendency to flame and go nuts online. I stayed out of it, but keep thinking of the Machinists’ problems in light of coop issues in general- they’ve got the same crap to go through- communication, and a job that’s overwhelmingly large because we’re trying to do business-sized shop work on a volunteer basis

The Machine Shop is a little like School of Hard Knocks, mechanical engineering department. I’m enjoying being around those people and everything they know, and picking up a little of it by osmosis.

I sat in on a meeting in the shop last weekend about designing a one-wheeled vehicle to try for the one-wheeled vehicle land speed record (current record for a monowheel is 57 mph). Jake’s trying to build an EV version of his existing onewheel vehicle. A few days later I happened to mention to our ex-NASA engineer shopmate that we should schedule a CAD tutorial on the new shop computer sometime. He launched right into it- I’d opened a fascinating can of worms. The conversation started on a level I could sort of follow- drafting and rendering, basic stuff I hadn’t thought about since high school (Solidworks is a pretty fascinating looking tool, since I can’t draw to save my life). Then, from the depths of the shop appeared machinists, programmers, and a computer animation professional with an advanced degree in computer graphics theory (ie some branch of math if I understand correctly). I watched the conversation veer off into High Geek places I’d never been- into computer talk, production talk, and on to CAM and machining, then back to the real world issues of our CNC and things that people wanted to make on it and how to design them. I’m getting a bit of a ‘tip of the iceberg’ sense of skills they use every day, and I’m becoming a big drooling groupie of these people and their skills. We once had a meeting at the shop to discuss some interesting electrical issues with a planned generator someone was looking at buying and some offgrid equipment- it involved weird stuff around three phase power, offgrid applications, and how to hack the electronics of a particular type of inverter not designed to do this- and the meeting ran till 2 am, with none of us even noticing the time, we were so embroiled in a big puddle of brain cells and electrical concepts. You could just about hear the skulls stretching and the brain cells popping like overloaded circuit breakers as everyone tried to wrap their minds around the problems we were trying to solve. It’s a School of Hard Knocks I’m overjoyed to be a part of, and am still trying to figure out how to make biodiesel fit in to the general knowledge-sharing going on there without expecting everyone to put in the same kinds of stupidly boring hours as I just did last week. Tough puzzle, since the degreasing and shelf-hanging and barrel-moving is a much less satisfying activity than what they’re doing with the machine shop- some of them put in insanely long hours at the shop or at their projects- but at the end of the day they’ve got some art or some vehicles or some equipment to show for their efforts, and at the end of the day, I’ve just got some gallons of fuel that’s going to just get burned.

Mark

Equipment Class, Santa Cruz, APril 10 and 11

Phew, what a week.

About a week ago I started the hellish descent into Class Preparation. This was for the Biodiesel Equipment Intensive workshop I scheduled for Easter Weekend.

This equipment class was the first “equipment build” I’ve done for the general public. I was worried about how well the equipment info would come across by itself. I always include an equipment discussion/show-and-tell as part of all the classes I do, but that comes after several hours of chemistry. I did another equipment discussion in San Gregorio in December but most of those folks had already attended another homebrew class at the same site.

I was uncertain about how the weekend seminar for the general public was going to work- who would attend? Would they have enough experience with homebrewing for the equipment-only class to make sense?

Somehow I thought we’d build only one of each item (reactor, wash tank, methanol recovery equipment, mistwashing rig, plastic bubblewash aerator, testing rig, oil pumps).

I must have been on crack when I imagined that we’d only build one of everything- as soon as I sent out a preliminary class announcement, I was deluged by interested people who wanted to participate and wanted to build their own gear at the class. It was very exciting to see all this serious interest in homebrewing. I spent about two weeks talking nonstop to various people who had to figure out which of the options would work for them. Thank God I don’t have a cell phone.

The other prep was insane. I had a new article to write about the reactor design, and a big chunk of every day to deal with the other class logistics. I camped out at Tom’s for several days, sleeping weird hours, running home for an hour or two at a time, running all the pre-class errands, ordering oil pumps at the auto parts store and returning the not-quite right ones, trying to stay on top of the article writing and the class organizing work at the shop. Somewhere during all this time the Machine Shop Collective exploded into a huge argument with the Investor over co-op issues, which is a whole ’nother story that’s quite ironic in light of the last blog I wrote on the issues of volunteer coordinating. I stayed out of it as best I could and tried not to think about biodiesel co-ops either.

Last Monday I started the parts shopping and the planning. It was INSANE! We had 6 or 7 homebrew systems to build, and about $1500 to spend. This was going to involve multiple trips to the stores as no one store was likely to have enough of the weirder plumbing items in stock. Jeff ran to one of the Harbor Freight stores for me and picked them clean of ball valves and pumps. I eventually drove to Sonoma County and started heading south from there, stopping at all my preferred hardware stores and buying everything they had in stock, cleaning out the other Harbor Freight store, keeping a massive chart of what I needed, wondering if I had calculated enough money to pay for it all and otherwise driving myself and the cashiers a little batty. Id’ show up at the cash register with a 5 gallon bucket full of varied tiny plumbing items, dump it on the counter, and they’d have to sort and figure it all out. I got really sick of the question “so what IS it that you’re plumbing?” At 9 pm on Friday night I still didn’t quite have everything. Tom and I woke up at 3 am that night to do the final loading-up of everything onto my truck, and I made him inventory all the plumbing at this helllish hour. friggin slave driver.

We took over the front yard of the hippie house that hosted the workshop- they have a nice big covered shed that already has hosted a small biodiesel coop and an SVO filtering station. About 12 or 15 people showed, most of them coming from very far out of town. About three unrelated carloads of people from Southern California drove the 6 hours to come. Most of the people hadn’t homebrewed before, but they did their research meticulously and none of my worries about the info making sense to newbies were justified. There was a small forest of water heaters ready to convert to biodiesel reactors.

Jess Burge, a larger-scale homebrewer in that area, was there contributing his experience, and my chemist friend Kalib whom I’d met at the Iowa State University classes, was there to share industry perspective. I did lecture for the first half day, and after lunch, we busted out the water heaters and launched into the build. By the end of that day, they were nearly done with the reactors, other than electrical wiring and adding whatever the stores were out of stock on. Jeff was fantastic at assisting everyone, running the last hardware store errands, and managed to rebuild his own reactor during the weekend.

The more ‘hippie’ workshop attendees stuck around at the house for the night, and Dave Shaw pulled out a projector and showed a couple of biodiesel films, Fat of the Land (1994), and a biodiesel documentary he made for a film class.

We covered the entire syllabus during the weekend- methanol recovery, washing, commercial techniques discussion, heating, heat exchangers, heat integration, solar discussion, babington and oil burner discussion, material compatibility, pump types, methoxide mixers, etc. People built wash tanks and got to do the ‘climb inside the greasy barrel and thread plumbing together’ act that always gets a good visual. I tried to stress the drawbacks of the water heater reactors as well as their advantages, and to make it clear as often as possible that different equipment is appropriate to varied situations, that in biodiesel homebrewing there’s no ‘one size fits all’.

I got home and been asleep for about two days straight or at least it feels that way. Real life starts again tomorrow.

posted 06 April 2004 03:32 AM also from the infopop forum blogs thread
Disclaimer: while I hate it when people lie online because it’s anonymous and “they can get away with it”, I gotta do the standard disclaimer “details were slightly changed to protect the guilty”. It’s as accurate as I can make it and still keep some people anonymous.

Cults of Grease and Heavy Machinery

The Machine Collective are another group whom the Investor supports, and they were a sort of model for his choosing to start the Oakland Biodiesel Brigade. The are a loose group with nice equipment and organizational growing pains, and the difference between us and them is that more of them are very skilled in their subject (plus there’s been probably 100 years of people developing standard shop safety and teaching it in high schools, compared to biodiesel’s 5 years of homebrew infosharing. Shop skill is obvious to a larger group of people than biodiesel shop safety is for instance)

The Machinists bought a bunch of auction machine shop equipment a while back, and started a coop to share, maintain, and, frankly, to worship these machines. The equipment would make some of you so insanely jealous that I won’t even describe most of what we have available- for the use of our hobbies and passions (I sure as hell don’t have time for hobbies though. Tell me what’s music again?). Anyway, let’s just mention that a CNC mill tutorial is coming up at the shop and I’m super excited)

The machinists have about 8 or 10 people in the collective, whose skills range from machine shop pros, to former professional welders, to metal artists, to ex-engineers who only use their engineering kung-fu for evil (building robots and battlebots for competition and fun), to a retired NASA engineer who knows the ‘why’ behind everything you might care to ask, to people with more motivation and less or no machine shop experience who want to learn in a non-school, non-work environment. And there’s Tom and me, the lowly junior occasional borrowers of the MIG welder, who merely pass by the lathe with awe on our way to the microwave and do not touch the precious monster.

There’s the Machines with a capital M, and then there’s the droolworthy metalshop, (brand new plasma cutter, big Miller MIG, older Lincoln MIG, and my friend, the little ultra portable fluxcore wirefeed that I can take to the roof if I needed to attach something metal there. Not to mention cutoff saws, bandsaws, drill presses, a torch no one uses since it’s much more fun to cut metal ‘lace doilies’ with the new plasma cutter instead of firing up the torch. Huge taps and dies, both right and lefthand thread, that were found for pennies at the machine auctions, a 4 x 8 x 3” thick steel welding table, various industrial and electronics related “obtainium”, and a lack of a few frustrating common tools. And that’s just the commonly owned group stuff. Which I have no time to learn to use cause I’m in the back alley cleaning out greasy buckets half the night, dammit.

But communism sure looks fun from where I stand (in my own personal grease pit at the back of the property…).

Me and Tom are their Machinists’ biodiesel coop neighbors, and we are the least weldingly skilled people at the site. The other, nonresident OBB members (tom and I both have personal shop space) don’t really use the shop and therefore have even less weldingness to them, so they don’t get to go to the Machine Meeting nor hang with the Machine Maintenance cult..

Anyway, Tom and I been discussing on and off for days how our OBB situation parallels the Machinists and how it’s unique. Yesterday the Machinists had a meeting/barbeque (there’s that magic word again) and we were at it by default as their co-tenants. Oops, I should point out that as masters of “free stuff at any cost” , the Machinists had to spend the first 30 minutes of their meeting grinding down and re-welding and re-assembling the free barbeque grill, before we could have a cookout and meeting, but… Maybe my greasy bucket cleaning routine doesn’t look so inefficient after all.

It was interesting watching some of the same group dynamics come up for the Machinists as I see within biodiesel coops. I keep watching all this stuff come up within biodiesel groups that I think is common to all big biodiesel groups, and I keep assuming it only happens within biodiesel.

. But the machinists- with their ultra-skilled engineer volunteers- they’re the opposite of us in terms of resources and skills, and scale of money involved, and potentially rewarding nature of their work - and yet they’ve got some of the same dynamics and questions coming up about how to organize their group time so that tasks get done and no one gets hurt and everyone’s properly trained and everyone remains contented.

Participation. Training. Bringing everyone up to speed on safety. Getting everyone in the group “on the same page” as far as the shortterm, medium, and longterm development plan for the site. Finding money to pay for equipment work. Compensating people who are taking on more than others can. Not taking advantage of those who ‘seem’ to have more availability due to a lack of day job or excess of helpfullness. How to compensate those who correct the emergencies. How not to turn what is supposed to be a nice hobby into a repressive cult of machine maintenance (greasy bucket cleaning session by the back door, anyone? How about some WVO-collections pump disassembly?)

Oh, and, don’t try to work this out on paper first. Meetings aren’t fun and meetings about theoretical situtions are a useless way to start a hands-on project. The Machinists and we all started in on the work first, and now that the meeting’s full of questions around ‘how do you compensate, train, etc?’ there is actually some experience to deduce the answers from.

Things that you take for granted in a job environment, you really can’t expect in a volunteer group. Including training, skills, participation, compensation. Phew.

And I feel like there’s some fine line that we can dance along, between running it all with overambition and chaos, and running it like a job when you don’ t want to operate as either. I don’t want the four-person Team Canola to look like a jobsite. I want Team Canola to make lots of fuel and still keep it looking like a hobby, to be rewarding without everyone having to become a professional biodiesel plant owner. I don’ t want the machine maintenance to take over our lives there in order to make it work out.

And I think the Machinists have the same thing going on. No one wants to be janitor, but you need teamwork for the janitor’s job to be absorbed by the entire team efficiently enough for the janitor’s job to eliminate itself. Team Canola’s a small enough group that this issue isn’t a problem. Let’s see if it stays that way through Season Two of Team Canola operating, let’s see it stay fun and rewarding.

The Machinists and the OBB are big enough to resemble a workplace and I’m afraid that’s what a lot of coops are ending up looking like.. If you don’t have the time for full workplace-style participation, then the workplace will fail, as happened with the Berkeley Biodiesel Coop. But if you can make it run as something other than a workplace, such as by scaling down to a less-ambitious level, then… ?

Well, we spent a few hours and a couple of grilled chickens brainstorming over having the same issues within our two groups, including unique stuff like our general complaints about the Investor (absent for the meeting!) and about things like, er, um, skills, training, participation, compensation, erm hmmm. Though no one specifically brought it up at the meeting, seeing the obstacles within both their and our ambitious projects, as the issue of “at what point do you have to run a volunteer effort like a workplace and where do you take something workplace-sized if you can’t run it that way?” was the big eyeopener that I came away from this with.

I still think that as-yet undiscovered equipment and process will move us along to where it will get easier to have an ambitious coop without having to run it like a workplace. I’m not talking about novel catalysts or centrifuge technology. I’m thinking we still haven’t tried everything, and we in the biodiesel coop world on the west coast sometimes cling to some preconceived notion of what it should look like based on the fact that the Berkeley Coop did it this way.

I still think there’s room for cells and coops and informal nonbusiness biodiesel producers to create a substantial amount of fuel and meet some others; needs- for instance, our Investor was getting a big chunk of free fuel per month, almost $900 value at commercial Oasis fuel prices, entirely as my own volunteer output. While this was unsustainable of course, someday we’ll get past the technical hurdles and will have a 200 gallon per day, repeatable, open-source design of a plant dialed in, and me and tom and the Machinists hope to have some kind of role in this open source design. And I do think that this equipment will prove useful to people like the Investor’s operation, or other construction companies, or other heavy users who can partner with cells or coops. That’s the part that’s got me fascinated and plugging away at the process- surely there’s something about this coop structure thing that we haven’t discovered yet?

also from the infopop blogs thread…
posted 03 April 2004 02:41 AM

I was laying in bed after work the other night, dog tired. I was so dead doggone tired that I had trouble even forming coherent sentences when I got home (this is that illness thing). I was all ready to pass out and aim for 12 hours of sleep… and then Mr Wonderful (who is going to be so absolutely creeped out about getting that name) from the OBB co-op calls, to talk co-op. So suddenly I’m wide awake and having to remember English well enough to articulate just how frustrated I am over some co-op behavior or another, and to try and strategise about how to deal with our skilled volunteer problem. Additionally, the behavior of our ‘investor/landlord’ was what really set this off, but I had just hit some sort of critical mass whereby I suddenly don’t want to go forward with building this thing any further. Between the investor’s needs, and the more pressing and serious problem - that we have all these underskilled volunteers and that coordinating them and trying to get them trained, is more work than doing the entire job by yourself- I think that coop bit off more than it could chew, mostly in not looking realistically at the labor involved in building the plant they wanted. And boy is that not any sort of new experience in the wide world of biodiesel coops.

I can see my 12 hours of sleep going out the window- after this ‘co-op frustrations’ conversation, I know I’ll be up for hours thinking about the stupid little plant project. Jeff comes in, overhears the conversation, and starts laughing. He’s heard this before, in the Berkeley Biodiesel Coop- the ‘people can’t just expect to waltz in with no skills, volunteer whenever they feel like it, and expect that they can be helpful’ discussion. Jeff’s reaction about all the unskilled flakes at the time was this “*^*% them, let them pull themselves up by their own bootstraps” sort of reaction. I felt a little more charitable towards people at that point.

I know I’ve had the ‘what to do about the amount of work involved in a coop” conversation with several other co-op ‘overachievers’. Jennifer Radtke and I became very good friends after going through it at the BBC. The BBC eventually stopped trying to make fuel, and Jennifer started a distribution business that is MOST CERTAINLY not a co-op. I was having that same exact discussion with her about a year ago and Jeff was standing there saying ‘let them flounder’ back then. I keep saying, no, I want to see this co-op theory work. Really. Surely there’s something we haven’t tried yet.

I thought at one point about starting a Disgruntled DepotMasters listserve just to get the conversations we’re all having, over onto one place. Depot Master is what the SVO coop calls the people in charge of managing their distribution site or something like that. Their depot master complains about nonvolunteers just as much as we do. Perhaps it’s just because the organizing model for a lot of these groups was exported from the Berkeley Coop by people who thought our organizing model was attractive, I think. Anyway, the Oakaland group has it’s own set of problems that are rather unique…

Among other things, we are expected to eventually (the eventually is open-ended) provide 300 gallons per month of fuel to the investor (and that’s of course in addition to whatever we want to make for ourselves). We are no-where near that at the moment as a group.

I spent all fall making that amount of fuel in my spare time for the investor all by myself in a tiny 85 gallon reactor that wasn’t really finished and was terribly inefficient, while building other equipment at the same time, trying to get basic infrastructure work (ie electrical and plumbing and containment) to be finished (it’s still not finished), collecting oil, and unfortunately, coordinating a crew of enthusiastic but non-skilled volunteers. And the fuel production was getting royally in the way of the plant building process. Note to self: pilot plant should not be located in the same 8’ by 20’ shop as where your ‘real’ plant is being built.

The reason why I made such an idiotic martyr out of myself was because I was also trading rent on another space (my wood shop) owned by the investor, and couldn’t stop thinking delusional thoughts about how I couldn’t afford the woodshop if I had to pay money rent for it. And that I couldn’t afford to live in my house, if I didn’t have the shop to keep my copious tools in. Bad. Of course I was so busy with the coop and with my rent trade that I wasn’t actually doing anything productive in the woodshop…

One day I woke up and realized that I’d actually missed a few days of paid electrical work during that time as a direct result of problems at the ‘coop plant’, that this work was worth quite a lot of money as lost wages- and that the time I was spending there making fuel for my shop rent trade, could have been much better compensated if I had just hustled more of this well-paid electrical work for myself instead. DUH! She smacks forehead.

I had gotten pretty much blinded by the internal chorus of ‘I couldn’t afford this, I couldn’t afford this’, and somehow wasn’t paying attention to the big picture beyond the next barrel of fuel- that the project, the rent trade and the coop organizing, had sneakily taken over all my time (it should again be noted that I’ve been unemployed for about a year due to illness, which is in part where these weird circumstances come from, I’m not usually quite that stupid about time management)

So back to the coop, which is supposed to inherit my dumb fuel-for-rent-trade situation as per the investor’s grand plan. In return for this 300 gallons of free fuel, the ‘investor’ is supposedly paying for the equipment and providing free rent. We’ve got some pressure to get it done so that the free rent stops being a problem for him. We are trying to build a pretty big plant by homebrewer standards- it’s not like some crappy 55 gallon plastic conical. We’re aiming for compatible materials- all stainless steel, for commercial techniques, and for 275 gallon batches. We already have a generator to power the thing, which is pretty nice after worrying about the costs of electricity for years, and we have enough robot-building enthusiasts and computer wiz electronics nerds in our circle of friends, and access to great scrap medical research industry equipment, to actually automate the thing someday so that parts of the process are automatic. Or so goes the theory.

Trouble is, the labor that goes into building a biodiesel coop on our usual volunteer basis doesn’t normally enter into the equation for these coops. And the reality is that the labor of starting a large-scale biodiesel co-op - all the time put into training, into becoming a team, into figuring out how the schedules and the connections are going to work- can really dwarf the tiny amount of money that the equipment parts cost if you’ve gotten them from the scrapyards like we do.

The Bay Area has the best industrial scrap you can imagine, and the biotech industry/university laboratory wastefulness being responsible, along with the nearby wine industry and other food processing sources. The Midwest is probably similar minus the nifty automation equipment. I can sit here and say that we’re going to do all this stuff above, and the reality is that it’ll probably only cost about $2,000 to $4,000 and be made of proper ‘compatible materials’- because the medical industry, the food processing industries, and the research industrial complex is so busy throwing compatible materials away for us to find/buy this ridiculously cheap from various sources. I could be wrong about the cost of the automation part- the cost of solenoid valves will bankrupt you and I don’ t know what they cost on the salvage market.

But, will we ever get there- with all the labor that this massive project involves, without becoming a business and somehow figuring out how to pay ourselves?

Last year about this time, I did a calculation on how much time it takes a homebrewer to make and bubblewash a batch of fuel, and what did the equipment cost to do it this way. It added up to 3 hours of attended labor (timers, gravity, etc did the rest of the job while you aren’t looking), mostly in the form of 15 minutes here or there on your own time. This calculation didn’t include “oil getting” since that varies so much from location to location. From my experience with Team Canola I’d say that you can achieve these same numbers up to about a 100 gallon reactor, assuming it’s in your own backyard and you spend those occasional 15 minutes draining or filling or cleaning up here or there while you’re going about your home life. In short, it’s not a difficult task to work around if you’re modest in your fuel needs and the work doesn’t require traveling to a central shop location like we do.

I also have made a lot of simple reactors in about 2 hours of assembly work, and about 2 hours of shopping for parts. A wash tank (see www.veggieavenger.com/media) takes another half hour to build, at least if you’re not socializing and running for the camera while your friend crawls inside the tank to fasten the fittings.

These look like great numbers. It should be even better if more people work on the stuff in a democratic coop setting right?

Wrong!

Kumar and I talk a lot about how the homebrew setup just doesn’t upscale to a commercial setup. I think I just discovered the point at which it stops being applicable.

To be continued…

This is from the original infopop blogs thread also..

OBB co-op… been working for about 6-8 months on starting up a largish scale homebrewing coop- largish meaning plant volume, not largish meaning lots of people. Been there, done that- Berkeley Biodiesl Coop had 12 people trying to make fuel in a small sea container and that took a ridiculous level of organizing (and we werent’ very successful at it, hence Berkeley coop no longer has a worksite).

I’ve been in about three of these co-op things now and keep finding the same frustrating problems with organizing volunteers, the huge array of things that people have to learn before they can really be useful as part of a team running a ‘plant’, the importance of everybody being at a similar point in their learning curve at the same time. The huge teaching load involved in bringing everybody up to speed, unless the students run a selfstudy course/curriculum.

It’s been interesting seeing how different people learn. But that little plant took over my life, very little for me to learn from this experience at this point since I’ve been doing it for the past few years. It’s hardly left me time for experiments or working with interesting feedstock, and it’s frustrating seeing the same people mistakes/difficulties repeat. Like figuring out who has big vehicles that can be used for the volunteer biodiesel cause- oil getting, who will do it, how, who can pick up that huge tank that’s been sitting in san leandro for weeks, etc.

waah.

This gruntwork of volunteer organizing isn’t exactly rewarding, and somehow the OBB’s in a rut where the volunteers aren’t organizing themselves (we’ve been building infrastructure for 6-8 months, and I’m the only one who makes or gets fuel out of the experience). Tom finally called off our weekly workdays last week out of the same frustration that we are not going anywhere.

The coop is located at a site with a few interested residents, we’re now talking about restricting the coop membership to people who live there. It just doesn’t make sense to make fuel with people who’d have to travel 45 minutes across the Bay to your city to do it together, the basic tasks can’t get done unless you live nearby.

Getting better: I’ve had a serious chronic health problem for about three years now, and have been pretty seriously disabled for part of that time. Generally if you see me on the lists a lot, I’m sitting around the house being sick, and if I’m off some of the lists, I’m usually doing better (out doing jobs and being more active). Recently I’ve been doing a lot better. It’s been interesting watching ‘life’ come back. Been working about two days a week, which is a lot more income than the past year. Whooeee! I almost have enough energy to start looking up all my old friends and reexaming this ‘no life outside of biodiesel’ thing. Got hold of a couple of them already- I dropped out of the leftist activist scene about three years ago when I got sick, found it a lot easier to deal with new people than to keep explaining to my old friends what it is that I’m sick with. But that’s a whole other story. Anyhow, I’m planning a couple of trips (which revolve around teaching biodiesel classes) and have to look up my people all over. Getting some serious shivers thinking about it.

Of course the first thing I did when I felt like I had a lot more energy all of a sudden, was to start cramming my time even more full of plans and projects. sigh…

Starting to plan a tour of the Midwest to teach some classes next august… and going to Tucson in May. Hoping to do equipment builds at the different places, hopefully to inspire people to start… the same coops I’m complaining about here (smacks forehead).

I’m planning an incredibly complex processor building workshop in april, it’s two days of equipment class/workparty and we’ve got a lot of people driving up from LA even for it. I’ve done equipment builds as part of the three-month Biodiesel Internship course that me and Jennifer used to do, but this will be different- in the Internship people already knew what they were in for and what the gear is for. In the April class, folks are coming in who have never made biodiesel and they’re trying to hand me $250 to go buy them parts for one of everything. I really hope they all are successful with the systems and that it turns out to be what they need for their home setup.

Our lovely Team Canola Co-op- four people, a biodiesel homebrew plant and and a barbeque, has been on hiatus all winter but is now making noises about reforming now that the winter rains have stopped (our site is outdoors). Jeff and I went out to the Team Canola site one night last week to rebuild the reactor with some fancier plumbing (the tankenstein fluid transfer manifold I do now). We inaugurated the Biodiesel And Barbeque season by grilling a homemade sourdough pizza out at the rather industrial and abandoned Team Canola site while reassembling the reactor. Aaaah. Bliss. I do love working on biodiesel in groups, as long as they remember to have fun (and barbeque!) and everyone’s on the same page about what they need to know so it’s a work experience, not a teaching experience.

Been working for a couple who paid me to build a reactor and wire up the 220V power to it. They bought a generator and want to set up a generator/battery system to power their house. It’s an interesting puzzle for me to design the system- there’s a lot more riding on a system like that (generators have huge fuel consumption) than there is for someone with a small car who only needs to make fuel occasionally…

Fell into a new relationship with a wonderful guy from the OBB- the other person at that co-op who was always at the plant obsessively working, go figure. I couldn’t possibly date people outside of my biodiesel life- since I don’t have a non-biodiesel life.

But I’m not embarrassed about my lack of a social life since there are enough other people here who are just as badly ‘socially handicapped’ by their biodiesel pursuits. My friend Jennifer of Biofuel Oasis keeps joking about her imaginary personals ad: ‘lesbian with big tanks of biodiesel seeks woman with TDI’. And she’s not embarrassed to joke like that, I at least (usually) pretend I am not quite the biodiesel geek that I really am. I keep finding that people from our last Internship class are now also socially handicapped by their biodiesel knowledge, at least when there’s a few of them together somewhere- there have been a few times recently when some of our students and us have been out to parties (put on by normal people) and no matter how much we try to mix with the normal people, the students inevitably wind up in a corner in a nerdy little clique, talking about biodiesel like the wallflowers they are. I keep trying to enforce the ‘no talking about biodiesel after 8 pm’ rule on everyone I date, and failing. Damn. they didn’t warn us about these hazards of homebrewing.

Mark