How to Filter Waste Vegetable Oil

Filtering Waste Vegetable Oil (WVO) for use as an automotive fuel (in diesels ONLY) is as simple as 1, 2, 3. And equipment costs are only a couple of tanks of fuel away from payback.

There are numerous ways to filter oil. Some prefer the “Sock” method where the oil is poured into a container and slowly filters through a mesh filter. This method takes a few days to get enough fuel for a tank, but the tradeoff is, it should cost less then ½ tank of diesel to get started.

The method I’ve documented is simple, quick and in the long run relatively inexpensive.

A $70 sump pump, a few dollars worth of iron pipe, a good large diesel filter / water separator (Parker Hannafin makes a brand called Raycor), a 5 gallon buck, and a fuel can.

You can add a pressure gauge to better know when to change the filter, but I don’t think the cheaper sump pumps put out enough pressure to damage a good filter. If you damage a filter, you are looking at an eternity of changing fuel filters on your car, every couple 100 miles or so, see my ebay guide on burning WVO in a diesel Mercedes.

Best to filter down to 10 microns or finer, I only filter to 30 microns, and seem to be doing fine this year. A lot depends upon the quality of your feedstock. If the oil you are trying to use in your car is dark like coffee, you’re going to have problems down the road,,, literally.

After collecting WVO in the white "cubies" containers, let it settle a few days so that all the heavier food particles sink to the bottom. The last thing you want to do is transport WVO and filter it immediately, it needs to settle. When you pour WVO from the container, only pour 2/3's to 3/4's of a full jug. This will keep most of the bits of food and heavier animal fats out of the bucket. This works out OK when using a 5 gallon bucket and a pump in the bucket. Basically, you can fill the bucket and there will be a little WVO left over, which gets poured into a cubie to let it settle.

Keeping that one cubie (that get's the remaining WVO after each pour) aside, mark it so that you know it's remnants of other jugs of WVO. When pouring that last cubie be extra cautious avoid pouring the junk from the earlier cubies that is in it.

Here are some pictures of what I’m taking about.

Pour the Oil into a 5 gallon bucket

Pumping oil from the 5 gallon bucket

Fuel can now full of filter WVO

Ready for Cruisin'

Good Luck and Please check the box below about being helpful.