Diary of a Mad Scientist

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.