The_Yellow_Ardvark
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Back in 1989 in London a lot of the Black cabs did that, 6am after a night out was not all fun.
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8ob
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I dont know who is out there to police the use of Bio, we get HMRC in the yard dipping my trucks and they test for two things. One is kero or a dilution of and the other is red or rebated fuel. A percentage of each is allowable because of the cross contamination in the delivery tankers. No test for veg oil so they would probably have to be watching you.
Bob
Omniata
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I dont know who is out there to police the use of Bio, we get HMRC in the yard dipping my trucks and they test for two things. One is kero or a dilution of and the other is red or rebated fuel. A percentage of each is allowable because of the cross contamination in the delivery tankers. No test for veg oil so they would probably have to be watching you.
Bob
The density will be different, all they need to do is drop a hydrometer in a sample and it will show clearly...
123hotchef
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not if it is let down with petrol
Omniata
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Either petrol or diesel, the density won't match pure road use petrol or diesel, they can measure density to within 0.001 with a manual hydrometer.
They can also do mobile calorimeter burn tests, each type of fuel sold has a specific range.
Also, by using a refractometer they can analyze the light passing through a prism, any differences from pre determined values and the fuel is sampled and sent for further verification and siezed...
8ob
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I understand what you are saying but putting bio in your fuel is not illegal so who is out there to police the quantities folk are using? HMRC road fuel units only test for dye and a chemical thats in kero , I dont think they do anything else with the samples.
Bob
123hotchef
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like i said it is perfectly legal to use up to 10000l tax free
The_Yellow_Ardvark
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I got red diesel in my van now, but got the paper work to say duty paid.
Omniata
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https://www.gov.uk/government/publi...tice-179e-biofuels-and-other-fuel-substitutes
You are required to declare anything over 2500 litres in a 12 month period...
Remember, with HMRC, the word "suspicion" is a very grey and dangerous area, if they "suspect" you of anything, they can enter, sieze, and remove what they class as evidence, until you can prove otherwise...
Rule of thumb here, document "everything"...
123hotchef
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less that i thought!
Omniata
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Their "12 month period" will more than likely be the tax year too, not when you start...
You have to be using about 50 litres per week to reach the threshold...
Quite ironic given that we order fuel for site equipment and it comes in 205 L drums, was it someone trying to win an argument rather than go and check what is valid and what isn't.
For domestic use this is limited to 2500 litres per annum and your year begins when you produce your first batch and runs for a full 365/6 days. For domestic use you need to keep all your paperwork and you can buy one machine and anyone can use it to produce transesterificated diesel from the one machine for any number of private vehicles and records need to be kept for each vehicle.
For commercial use you can only have one machine for each vehicle, if you have 10 company vehicles which run on bio you must have 10 machines; you are allowed the same 2500 L per annum, per vehicle, and after you use that you pay a reduced rate of duty for a certain amount which rises on a scale, basically the more you use the more you pay in duty.
That is out of date information and as the EU dictate the legislation their documentation shows the following:
E5 will remain at 5% bio/ethanol content for the time being.
E10 should be available on request, or at the discretion of the fuel retailer and is not mandatory.
E7 is to be introduced in 2017 for diesel, along with E10 for petrol.
E7 means raising the nominal percentage by volume to 7% with the current two point tolerance which actually means nothing really changes with the allowable tolerance as the nominal tolerance is that, nominal; in real terms it means the nominal percentage can drop by two points to 5% by volume or be raised by two points to 9% by volume from the current standard which is 3-7% by volume.
They also admit that they don't think it will be introduced as some (German) car manufacturers have kicked up and they don't want it introduced.
The EU proposals are to have all fuel to E10 standards by 2020 for diesel and petrol and they are changing their minds again with the introduction of what term as super biofuels for diesel engines which they introduce and once again this is subject to the X2 rule which means you only need to put in half the bio element into the fuel, hence E20 diesel wouldn't have 20% of bio element in it if it was declared a super biofuel, it would only have 10% bio element in it.
This is why you have to keep your paperwork Bob, HMRC know the approximate quantities of chemicals you need to transesterify 2500L of bio oil and if you suddenly produce receipts for producing 4000 litres of bio diesel and they look at what you have left and it doesn't tally up then its trousers down time. They back it up with checking with a supplier and their accounts to check the suppliers invoices match yours as suppliers of transesterification chemicals have to keep their own records.
Omniata
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Mee, with all due respect please read the article to which I posted a link to relating to this again, the 2500 litre limit before declarations are required is for either produced "transesterified" bio diesel, or, bio diesel substitute, or total volume of both used.
Legally, you can buy as many machines to produce transesterified bio diesel as you want, and run them as often as you want, without declaration, so long as your total produced and used volume of both de-esterified bio diesel and bio diesel substitute doesn't exceed 2500 litres per annum.
You cannot allow someone else to use equipment solely owned by yourself, in doing so any volume produced by them would form part of your total production for that year, irrespective of what paperwork states.
Furthermore, the same applies to commercial aspects.
In either case, there are no restrictions on the number of machines you can purchase, own or use, except what you premises size and your wallet allow.
Unless you can provide links to disprove any of the above.
By legal definition, equipment for production constitutes anything in which one, or more ingredients are mixed and changed by way or cause of a reaction to produce a product.
In layman's terms for the purpose of this thread, a bucket and spoon constitute a "machine".
Homemade bio diesel, as per recipes from the internet using methanol and caustic are nonsense and fairy tails. All you will effectively produce is soap, nothing more. Because you won't economically produce anhydrous conditions effectively without significant expense, were talking tens of thousands of £'s here for specialist distillation and processing equipment.
To produce bio diesel by transesterification correctly you need to use sodium dissolved in anhydrous methanol to produce sodium methoxide, a very powerful organic base, with a remaining amount of anhydrous methanol as the majority solvent/liquor.
I have attempted producing this at home on very small scale, around 250ml, and it was a nightmare I never want to entertain again.
Besides being so aggressive it dissolves human tissue raplidly and deadens nerve endings so you don't feel it!
This is how it's almost exclusively done in industry, and has been for many years.
I have attempted producing magnesium dimethoxide in methanol, that was nearly as bad, if not worse than using sodium. I filled the round bottomed 1litre flask with a foamed mixture of magnesium carbonate and oxide, it was a horror to get out.
If you produce soap via the caustic process, the by-product for reacting with methanol would be sodium hydride, that isn't going to happen, ever. Not in aqueous solution, let alone in alkyl solvent, it's not thermodynamically possible.
"E" values for fuels were a maximum value originally, not nominal, please link to where this has changed.
I want to see links to the information you've posted so I can verify the same.
There was a brief discussion on pistonheads here:
http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?t=1591359
NB:"bio diesel substitute" refers to WVO for the purposes of this post in reference to the previous 179e notice posted.
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julianf
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As someone who runs all their cars on bio, and had a vicious enough neighbour (in the past) who would call every authority that she could think of, I have some experience in both the chemistry, and the legal details of making bio.
Now, Im not going to offer justification for my next comment, as it will just go on and on, but, unfortunately, a considerable amount of this thread is nonsense.
If anyone should really want to get involved, I would enthuse them to join one of the UK based forums where people, inc myself, actually do this stuff, rather than just regurgitate previously read misinformation.
Again I do not want to get drawn in to an discussion (argument) on specifics, as I don't have the energy or motivation - sorry.
Now, Im not going to offer justification for my next comment, as it will just go on and on, but, unfortunately, a considerable amount of this thread is nonsense.
If anyone should really want to get involved, I would enthuse them to join one of the UK based forums where people, inc myself, actually do this stuff, rather than just regurgitate previously read misinformation.
Again I do not want to get drawn in to an discussion (argument) on specifics, as I don't have the energy or motivation - sorry.
Clearly you have misunderstood several things and made numerous assumptions, nowhere have I stated anything about the number of machines you may buy, particularly how much you may or may not produce, only the fact that if you are a private producer the limit is 2500 litres before duty is payable.
You can allow as many people as you like to produce as much fuel as they like from your machine as long as they are producing it for private use only and each producer keeps their own documentation for what they produce, HMRC have confirmed this numerous times, and it clearly states this on their website.
Commercial production is different and you have to keep more detailed paperwork and depending upon the volume you produce you also have to conform to more detailed fuel sampling.
It also confirms that if you are a company using bio diesel you have to have one machine per road going vehicle.
This is a large leap here as nobody with their own machine would be using "recipes from the internet", small scale production machines all have their own ways of producing bio diesel and some may have powdered or liquid ingredients which you measure and add to the machine while others opted for a minimal handling approach and pre packaged their ingredients to form chemical packs which you simply prise the tops off and screw them to the machine so there is no handling of the loose ingredients, only the containers which house them. I buy the ingredients in this form, i.e. as a chemical pack which is why I referred to them in this way.
This is even more ironic as working in an FLP environment for many years and looking at the various sites using open containers with boiling alcohols giving off highly flammable fumes and watching the posters informing people to use a domestic drill with clearly visible sparking motors in such an environment filled me with dread; and explains why I was so vociferous in highlighting the dangers and dismissing this process due to the safety aspects.
It was clearly stated that E values were in reference to the EU documentation and if you actually read them instead of referring to Pistonheads forums you would have read their definitions and interpretations information sheets and this fully explained the terms used in their documentation along with their 2 points systems and X2 definitions.
daleyd
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Mee do you have any links to this as all the info I look up to do with this says "up to x%". Nowhere is it stated this 2 point margin.
As an example here is an extract from the AA on biofuels -
This doesn't mean that all fuel actually contains 5% biofuel, only that it may contain anywhere between none and 5%.
*Waits patiently....
As an example here is an extract from the AA on biofuels -
This doesn't mean that all fuel actually contains 5% biofuel, only that it may contain anywhere between none and 5%.
*Waits patiently....
