Hello all!
Long time lurker - first time poster!
I have a powerline 6/1 that I run 24/7 from WVO. It has approx 6000 hours on it and going pretty strong! - thought I would share my experience
I change the oil once a month and in between add a liter or so every sunday and check / adjust the valve clearance - other than that - I don't really do a darn thing.. it just keeps chugging away and I do not really think about it. I dump the waste motor oil into my WVO tank thats waiting to be filtered by centrifuge which I do once per month
The waste vegetable oil that I use is delivered to my farm once per month for free! I then let it settle for a couple of months and then run it through the centrifuge. I do it in 1000L batches at a time - once per month
I paid about $1200 Canadian dollars for the listeroid and about $400 for a 5KW chinese ST genset - pretty cheap if you ask me. I have that coupled to my solar power system via a bridge rectifier and a capacitor bank that then gets fed into my charge controller 300 feet away in the house. I cranked the voltage up on the AVR to 250V before going into the rectifier. Under no load the charge controller sees about 360VDC. I do not care much about frequency or voltage since the charger can work with upto 600V and will auto adjust for the best efficiency. Under 3600W load the voltage dips down to about 275VDC.
I have a 10KWH capacity battery bank as well as a net metering contract with my utility company. I keep the batteries topped up 100% and send the excess into the grid for credits. The grid and batteries act as a capacitor when large loads come on that the solar + generator cannot support
Since a full rebuild kit is less than $400 - my plan is to run it into the ground and then rebuild it when it dies. So far it has more than paid for itself, my electricity bills used to be ~$600 per month. They are now $0 with net metering credits to spare!
I run the engine with high compression since most of the time it does not see a full load. At night my loads go down to under 1000 watts while during the day they can average 3,000 watts. My solar system allows me to communicate with it via Modbus over TCP. I wrote a small python script running on a raspberry pi that will constantly adjust the charge rate of the generator's charge controller in order to maximize my solar when its available. With that in place - my fuel economy is fantastic - I average 0.75L per hour during a 24 period
I made several modifications to run with WVO
1) I advanced the injection timing to 25 deg BTDC
2) I Increased the injector pressure to the maximum
3) I preheat the oil with a copper coil wrapped around the exhaust pipe which the oil flows through before the pump
Basically I followed the findings in this paper I found:
https://www.slideshare.net/XZ3/a0018-12759205I also use the waste heat from the head and the exhaust to heat my house. I put a stainless steel swimming pool heat exchanger on the exhaust and buried 300 feet of Logstor insulated pipe from my barn to the house. The coolent starts in an old hot water tank, enters the cylinder head via a thermostat or goes though a bypass, then into the exhaust heat exchanger, then to the pipe to my forced air furnace where I have a heat exchanger that is the same size as my old filter, it then loops back to the hot water tank. Last winter it cost me close to $6,000 on propane to heat my house. This year it has only been approx $1500. A major savings! The lister is not able to fully heat my house in the coldest of days but it does a great job most of the time. I keep the furnace fan running on low 24/7 in the winter. My house is 2900 sq/ft
This project has been a great deal of fun and I love being "off the grid". Thanks to all of you who have posted to this forum - I have learned an incredible amount from it and cannot wait to do the rebuild!
Let me know if you want more details about my system
John