Blog/Articles

I reached out to a local solar company to find out the answer to the question: How much does it cost?  I need a 10kw (grid tie) system and the quote came back at $35,000!  They were quick to point out the 55% tax credit and that my payback would be 7.6 years.    Also with financing, I could continue to pay the same amount.  So good deal right?  Maybe not so much.

We are all the DIY sort of people here so I dug into how much I can just buy the pieces for and things got interesting.  Short answer: about $10K.  And I found more efficient panels and didn’t skimp on the top of the line Solar Edge Inverter and the standard Iron Ridge mounting system.

So what gives?  Is it really worth $25K to plan and install a solar system?  This is not complicated stuff, the information on how to layout, plan and install is all available.  When it gets down to actually lifting things onto a roof: if you don’t want to do it, a local contractor will

The first is that we are going to be doing a website refresh and I wanted to get some pictures of our products “in the field”.  Raffle runs through month of July 2014

SO, looks like a great topic to do another raffle.
- 1st Prize: $500 WVO Designs Credit or $250 Cash
- 2nd Prize: $250 WVO Designs Credit or $120 Cash
- 3rd Prize: 1 Bar of our world famous WVO Designs Soap
- “Tickets” are exchanged for Product Pictures, You can send in multiple pictures of multiple products.
-1 ticket per picture per product per person. Ie 10 pictures of two products – 2 tickets. 1 picture of 10 products – 1 ticket.
- Pictures must be in focus and of decent quality (of anything that we sell)
- I will also take videos, upload to youtube or vimeo and send the link. Video is worth 5 tickets.
- Email pictures to support@wvodesigns.com

Our first raffle of the year will be drawn February 28th and the topic will be Waste Motor Oil (WMO).   So please send in pictures of centrifuges cleaning motor oil, filters, pumping systems, vehicles and furnaces whatever you have.  Essays can also qualify for the Guest blog.  All pictures must include some words describing the pictures.   Grand prize will be a $600 HD Oil Transfer pump..  I will dream up some other prizes too if we get a good response. I will get up a page to show off all the entries and will send the link you before the raffle is over.

Get your ticket:
Pictures with description- 1 Ticket
Videos - 5 Tickets
Essays and designs - 10 tickets.

Send entries to support@wvodesigns.com

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Below are the entries.  Lots of great stuff down ther

I’ve been processing WMO since day one. I’ve never processed anything else (WVO was just too hard to find and all the sources were already spoken for). My setup includes some safety devices for processing. I’ve been processing WMO for 3 years with my primary mix being 70/30 (70% WMO and 30% D2). I run it in all my vehicles (all of which are diesel including my bobcat) year round here in mid Florida. I have 2 VW Jetta TDI’s (2000 and 2001), a 1996 Mercedes E300D, 1999 F250 Superduty Crew Cab 4x4 (customized setup with a 1990 7.3 IDI motor with Banks Turbo), and a 2000 Excursion with a Powerstroke 7.3 (my wife’s “bus”). My 1999 F250 Superduty Crew with the IDI setup can run straight WMO after I process it through WVO Designs Centrifuge but I run the 70/30 mix for convenience. My Jetta’s can run WMO at 98.5% and 1.5% Pure Gum Turpentine (to boost the cetane for starting and burning) but I stick with my 70/30 mix to keep it uniform. The Mercedes and The Excursion both prefer the 70/30 mix a

Our first WMO filtration setup was outdoors due to limited space inside of the garage. This was accomplished by setting a 275 gallon tote on top of another and positioning the WVO Designs centrifuge on top of a 55 gallon barrel so the top tote would be the dirty “settling” tank and the bottom tote the clean tank. The 55 gallon barrel was for draining the sludge into and also there in case the power shut off unexpectedly and the oil was draining straight to the barrel instead of into the clean tote.

After moving, I had space inside a garage to setup a more efficient cleaning system. I didn’t want it to take up as much space, and found that having over 500 gallons of capacity wasn’t needed in my case. We decided on using 2 55 gallon barrels in place of the 275 gallon totes. This would allow me to keep my footprint smaller in the limited real estate of a garage. I also decided I wanted a secondary containment that would hold over 60 gallons in case something sprung a leak in order t

WVO Designs started in 2008 and has never been a sideline or a hobby, it's our job, we take it seriously and will continue to serve you, our customers, for many more years. At the end of 2013 Jason who managed our customer support moved on to his own enterprise and I have taken over handling technical customer support. I look forward to talking to many of you again. We have a new product line in our industrial centrifuges and also, we have a few new programs to help with the original mission of WVO Designs; To Share Knowledge of Alternative Energy Designs and Methods.

Products:
We have been the leading manufacturer of small solid bowl centrifuges with our Raw Power Centrifuges since we started. We have seen them used for Waste Vegetable Oil, Waste Motor Oil, Cutting fluid, Algae Harvesting, Virgin Oil and countless other small scale applications. To expand to small scale industrial we have a new series of heavy duty industrial centrifuges:

Rick Gives us an overview of a simple stacked tote setup for centrifuging WVO to use as fuel.

Here are examples WVO to Fuel Centrifuging Setups:

Yes, there were Fords diesels made before the Powerstroke 7.3.   They are the 6.9 and 7.3 IDI(indirect injection) engines.   The 6.9 was made from 1982-1988.   The first 7.3L was produced from 1988-1994. The original 7.3L diesel was a non-turbo charged indirect injection (IDI) engine, followed shortly after by a turbo charged version. It was very similar to the previous 6.9l IDI diesel engine, which was simply bored out for more torque. These trucks have  proven well running on WVO.   The weak link has been the lift pump,which regulates at 4-7psi.   These pumps are not robust enough to push hot, high viscosity vegetable oil so they must be upgraded.   The issue is that most robust pumps aren't regulated down to the 7PSI that the IP requires.   The solution is adding an external regulator after the pump.  Customers have success with Aeromotive part#13301, made form SS, aluminum and viton.

WVO Designs raffled off a 25gpm Monster Pump in October.

We tallied up the raffle “tickets” and used a random number generator to select the winner of our Monster Pump Raffle.   The winner is Daryl K, from Manitoba Canada!

Daryl is the proud owner of the biggest, baddest electric WVO pump around, the 25GPM Monster Pump.   Daryl submitted diagrams for a 12V cummins conversion and electrical WVO Switch wiring along with some other ph

According to an article in VOA News, Propel Fuels did a month long test of Algae Based Biodiesel at 4 of its 7 stations in the San Francisco Bay Area.   There were no reports of issues with the fuel and sales actually spiked 35%.   Prices were kept the same as the "standard" Biodiesel.    The oil feedstock for this special Biodiesel was sourced from San Francisco based Solazyme, which has a patented algae-oil technology.  Instead of growing algae with light in large ponds, Solazyme ferments plant sugars with high yielding algae, in the absence of light.   With this process, the microalgae's natural oil production time is accelerated to "just a few days".   Solazyme is rapidly moving out of testing phase, and into full scale production with the construction of two new plants in Illinois and Brazil.