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RE: A day in the life. Suesa's Science Challenge!
Wow, sounds like you have done some really interesting things! I was particularly intrigued by your work with algae and biofuels. My dad runs his diesel engines on veggie oil, but I always encouraged him to think about how to grow his own fuel once waste oil caught on more, which is what happened. Now it is harder to get for free or cheap and so the hay day is over. So glad to find this post through @suesa ! will check out more of your links, and perhaps nibble on your dissertation. nice work @johnniec ! Will Resteem so others can find out about your goodies here. Cheers @ecoknowme
Thanks @ecoknowme! Yeah, the waste oil phenomenon was magical, but it is good news there are enough interested people out there that the demand has surpassed the supply (at least for the cleaner stuff)! I wonder what the easiest oil to produce at home is. I think it is still tricky to get large amounts of oil out of algae and into a usable form, but don't know which plants are any easier at a small scale.
Honestly, as far as sustainable bio fuels go, I'd say Biogas from food, animal and wood wastes are most accessible, then ethanol could've been the way we developed our infrastructure like Ford had envisioned, then lipids from algae. While I have seen products making the first two simple and straight forward, I've yet to see something you can buy for growing, harvesting and extracting oil from algae, big companies sure, but something you could setup on a window or in a greenhouse, not yet. But if anyone reading this knows of anything like that, I'd love to know. There is a great Ebook someone wrote about how to DIY your own fuel system from Algae for biodiesel, but you have lots of work to get started. :/
Yep, that is my take as well. Biogas seems to be the simplest and with the least energy inputs. I stayed in a demonstration house once where the stove used gas from animal waste. The setup was pretty simple: put hog/rabbit/etc waste in a tank, run a pipe from the top of the tank to the stove. I'm sure there are ways to make it so smell isn't a risk, but I didn't notice anything since we were burning it anyways. Whatever remains in the tank can eventually be used as fertilizer.