cold reactions or Drying Potassium methoxide.

[Chug]

yes Dave, I tried washing to remove the lime from bio after use and demeth n settle and multiple filtering but not much improvement if any then I spilled some of the lime in me toolbox and I remember whilst clearing it up and issuing profanities thinking this was to try and find an easier and better way and it aint working for me so that was when I gave up.

[dgs]

Sorry to hear that Chug but at least I know the lime (or whatever) isn't only a problem to me. On the one hand I want to call a halt to this, but now realising all the water that I'm dumping into the processor with the potassium methoxide I will try to get it to work. It does seem that the woodchips are the answer but talking to David (who has persevered a lot more than I did) with water washing it seems to be working for him.

[countrypaul]

Seen this reference on infopop regarding calcium soaps http://biodiesel.infopop.cc/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/9411061471/m/276102893
Not actually backed up with any evidence though.

[dgs]

I have just completed the flame colour test as recommended by Paul. I dipped the nichrome wire in the cloudy bio and indeed after a second or so the flame turned a brick red colour.

Having left the 2x cubies i have left of the 1st batch a few days, the Calcium soaps do very slowly settle to the bottom.

Just giving this method a little more thought, instead of removing/pumping the bio out of the settling tank into cubies, then dry washing them through woodchips, an 'in tank' woodchip filter could be set up and the bio just recirculated through the woodchips in the tank. A very slow pump could be used (something around the 5lpm volume) and just left to pump until the soap showed zero. As the woodchips work with warm or cold bio there is no reason why both the filtration and drying cycles could not be done simultaneously. This is a similar method to the one IMB employs, just hanging his drywash basket in the processor after de-meth and settling.

[dgs]

All may not be lost after all!
Mark imisides has just seen that there has been some activity in his oid thread on infopop and says he will post a slightly modified method when he has time.

Here is his post;

               
Minder
Member
   posted February 13, 2016 01:55 AM   
quote from dgs  -------------------------------------------------------
In this respect this method worked extremely well. However, I found one large drawback, the process produces some calcium soaps. Not a great deal, but they are very difficult to remove.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

It's amazing what you find when you Google your name. I haven't visited this forum for some time, and there have been several pages of discussion since I last visited.

I'll plough through them when I get a chance, and answer as many questions as are appropriate. In saying that I face the problem that most of you don't understand much chemistry (exception is WesleyB). This is complicated by the fact that a couple of self-styled experts have popped up who think that they do, and have done nothing but confuse people with their uninformed comments.

The bottom line is this - the explanations I have given will make perfect sense to a chemist. If they don't, then I'm afraid I don't have the time or inclination to conduct online chemistry tutorials. The method was written for the layman. All you have to do is follow the method and it will work. I'll happily answer any questions directly arising from the method, like this one.

Also, I have now simplified the method even further, but I'll get to that later.

To answer this specific question, if you got soap in the batch, it's because the oil wasn't dry. This method is anhydrous, and will work best with dry oil.

I once got lazy with this, but never again. I had a batch that I knew had some water in the oil, but went ahead anyway. The result was that the method didn't proceed at room temperature - a bit of a problem when you make 1000L at a time.

So I whacked a water heater in it overnight, and by the time the temperature got to about 30C it commenced.

Afterwards when it settled there was a yellow layer of soap sitting on top of the glycerol, which I guess is what dgs is referring to. The problem that this caused was it greatly increased the settling time when I tapped off the raw product into one of my settling tanks. Never again.

Shortly I'll repost my method modification. Also, for those of you living in Perth WA I'll be doing a public demonstration of this method soon.