Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Home Biodiesel Production Part 1: Sodium Hydroxide Test Solution



Home Biodiesel Production Part 1: Making your 0.1% sodium hydroxide solution.
You will use a few drops of this per titration, so a liter should last for hundreds of batches of fuel.
As you can probably tell, I did not rehearse this. If I had done so, I would have learned a couple of shortcuts that would have made it faster and more accurate. I believe it will be accurate enough anyway, but if it is not, I will let you know.
In fact, 1 cc by volume is really close to 1 gram, and if you use the same dipper for oil fuel production that you use to make your test solution, any inaccuracy will be cancelled out. Besides, those dippers are safe enough for measuring gunpowder for reloading; surely they will work for this purpose! Knowing this saves one having to buy a scale. Fortunately, I already had one.
NaOH is really bad stuff if it gets in your eyes or mouth, but it is only an irritant to your skin, as long as you wash it off quickly. Nevertheless, I must strongly recommend that you wear rubber gloves IF you try this stuff. In fact, I don't recommend that you try any of this stuff, but if you do, I recommend that you wear one of those full-body biohazard suits that you have to enter through a hole in the back, and that has an oxygen line trailing behind you everywhere you go. I would do that (it would look really cool on my videos), but I don't have money for those kind of things (you can donate on my webpage, if you'd like to help me with that problem).
Stay tuned for more videos and articles about biodiesel production; I intend to document the entire process in little snippets like this so anyone can follow along.

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