Fueling Patience

Patience had been running off of diesel since Mary had gotten to SLC. We needed to find a place to obtain waste vegetable oil and take it. Here are some complications in this, for those of you who aren't familiar with veggie oil cars:

- you want to use waste oil, but you don't want to use really awful oil like that at McDonalds. No fast food sorts of places at all. I think it's also the wrong kind of oil, hydrogenated, partially-hyd... I don't know, but you can look this stuff up if you're that interested.

- the best places to get this waste vegetable oil is at Asian restaurants. Ideally, you want to get oil that has been used with minimal meat products and that was not used to deep-fry or fry many things. Japanese restaurants are rumored to most often be a success.

- the oil is filtered when it's pumped into the tank, so you don't have to worry about some contamination, but if the oil is black or, uh, generally ucky, it will overwork the filters and require them to be replaced or maybe clog them. All of this is obviously bad.

- at restaurants, waste oil is placed in the back alley just like the dumpster. It's generally right next to said dumpster. They're large metal barrels with lids. You want one that doesn't have a grate on top (you can't stick your suction tube into it) and that doesn't have a lock.

- it is technically illegal to take this from most places because (a) even trash belongs to the restaurant and (b) many restaurants have an agreement with biodiesel-producing companies who buy the waste oil from them, and they are contractually obligated to not let us take it from them.

Anyway, Mary repeatedly told her GPS to find "Food -> Asian" and hitting any random thing that popped up. We would scope out the alleys. If we saw a barrel, we would jump out and inspect. Most didn't have enough oil in them. Two of them were actually bone-dry, which Mary found unusual. But eventually we found some sort of Thai Noodle House that had more than half a barrel full of oil that was definitely not ideal, but it wasn't quite black, so Mary was willing to change out the filters in exchange for actually having fuel again.

I siphoned while Mary operated the pump and nozzle.

We took 30 gallons: 14 gallons into Patience's veggie oil tank, and 16 gallons into three large red gas cans that Mary could use to refill later.

Mary regulates the flow of waste vegetable oil.

The green bin there contains the pump.  The pump is powered off the van battery, in the sense that you pull up the back panel to show the engine (at the back of the van) and hook on little clamps like miniature versions of jumper cables.  Then there is a tube flowing in and flowing out.  I'm holding the intake tube in the first picture:  All I have to do is make sure that the tube remains below the level of the oil in the barrel, and it sucks it up through a series of filters.  It passes through more filter in the pump, and then is pushed out into a dispenser nozzle just like a normal gas pump.

After this, we celebrated with a success lunch and went back to Clay and Lisa's house.