Vegetable Oil Road Trip

The National VegOil Board has had emissions testing completed on a car running vegetable oil at an EPA-certified lab. [pdf of complete press release]

The results are that emissions are the same or lower, for all components as compared to petroleum diesel.

Here are the graphical results of the test (blue = VegOil, red = petroleum diesel, green = EPA limit):

So, what’s the big deal with these test results?
This is the first step in getting vegetable oil as a fuel certified by the EPA for use in vehicles. A big deal, indeed.

Here’s something to do tonight: download a copy of the Freedom Fuels movie and give it to someone who needs to learn more about biofuels.

Be forewarned: Darryl Hannah licks the fuel cap of her El Camino. Yummy.

As I posted earlier, I’ve been struggling with getting the heating to work properly at high engine RPMs.

I looked through forums and my service manual, and found these excellent repair instructions from a different model Mercedes that has the exact same problem.

The problem is that Mercs have an automated climate control system controlled by a valve that sometimes wears out. You can purchase repair kits (consisting of the part that wears out) online for not much.

So, I ordered a new monovalve repair kit and installed it. After the repair, instead of running too hot or too cold, I only got mildly lukewarm air.

I reinspected my installation yesterday, only to find that (d’oh!) I left the cap of the coolant reservoir loose, thus releasing any pressure that might force hot antifreeze through the climate control monovalve.

The climate control is now working great, the valve responds perfectly to the control inputs and the automated climate control works like a champ, even when I bury the pedal in the floorboards, and go faster than the speedometer allows.

Thanks to the commentors who pointed me in the right direction!

I want to highlight the fact that what we’re doing here is by no means a completely original act: we stand on the shoulders of giants. And sometimes pirates. Sometimes, we also stand on the shoulders of normal people, but not if we can at all help it.

For the next few weeks, I’m going to highlight some of the shoulders upon which we stand. Most will be technical, but others will be literary, artistic, and philosophical. It’s our way of saying thanks to the many people who (knowingly or unknowingly) help and inspire us.

This week: computers, software, and general geekiness.

Google They Do Everything.
I’m certain they are blissfully unaware of this, but Google plays a huge part in our quest to publish and share information, gain sponsors, communicate, and do anything useful. Heck, they even let us use their bandwidth! We use Google maps for our mapping page (click the map picture and you’ll see a dynamic map of our planned route). Obviously we use blogger (owned by Google) for this blog, youTube (again, owned by Google) to distribute our videos (by the way: more to come), but we also use Google docs to organize our thoughts. This post was actually composed using Google notebook, and I do much of my research with Google’s RSS reader. I installed SketchUp just because they own it. In other words, I heart Google.

NVU Website Editor
I’m a true-blue geek, but I hate HTML coding – it’s tedious, slow, and a pain in the arse. There, I said it. Thanks then, to the wonderful folks who created NVU, a free, open-source WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) HTML editor that made slapping our website together a breeze. If they would make a WYSIWYG CSS editor, I’d be in heaven. Hint, hint.

Apple Computers
For making the svelte 12″ powerbook I’m using right this instant, and for making iMovie – the best software experience I’ve had in recent memory.

GIMP Image Manipulation
The GNU Image Manipulation Program. It’s like photoshop, only it’s free, open source, and it is easier to use when dealing with the internet. Need that picture to be 100×200 pixels? No problem for the GIMP.

NeoOffice Office Suite
When I need more powerful text formatting, or image generation, I use NeoOffice, the Mac OS port of OpenOffice.org. It looks great, and again, is free and open source.

Firefox Web Browser
It’s free, secure, and generally a better internet experience than anything else out there. Why aren’t you using this? Actually, if the website logs are to be believed, the vast majority of you are already using Firefox, so you know how awesome this thing is.

One thing we want to see in Boston is a building both identified by the Project for Public Space as the worst public space in the world and by historians and architects as one of the greatest buildings in American history. This building is Boston’s City Hall.

It is a massive concrete structure built in the 60’s by Kallmann, McKinnell, and Knowles. This building is an example of brutalist architecture (regular geometic style). Bostonians describe the interior is a expansive, sterile void while the exterior is oppressive upside-down pyramid. In 2006, mayor Tom Menino proposed to sell the space and move City Hall to a site on the waterfront.

Any building that inspires so many strong feelings is one we have to go check out, if only to see it before it gets torn down.

Here’s a picture from the side:

And an areal image (thanks to google maps) showing the inverted pyramid.

A few stories I’ve noticed recently over at my favorite environment meets the road blog, autobloggreen.com:

• Biodiesel blends now mandatory in the Philippines.
• Tyson farms are looking into converting chicken fat into biodiesel. To the tune of a half billion gallons by 2012.
• E85 powered Viper, anyone? The fastest ethanol-fueled car.
• India closes biofuel plants, but Brazil never seems to have enough.

Here in the U.S., last night was the president’s annual state of the union address. I’ve promised myself that I won’t delve into politics here, so I’ll let other people react to a certain recent speech by the commander in chief.

My more immediate concerns:

• I replaced the monovalve using a repair kit – my old one was clearly in need of replacement, but now I get any temperature I want from my heater, but only so long as it’s luke warm. I’ll reinspect this weekend and report to you all then (it’s dark and cold outside and I’m a wuss).
• In other climate control news… The doors leak lots of air, the seals are in great condition, but I think the doors are misaligned. Anyone have ideas for a cheap way to adjust them?

The best part of traveling is exploring the sights, sounds and tastes of new places. As we learn about new things explore, I will document them here. We have already heard about several interesting sites from friends and will begin to post them. They range from good food to structural feats to vegetable oil fuel landmarks. We hope that you will join us and also contribute suggestions for us to sample along our trip.

Please email us your travel tips.
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The Creating Long-term Alternatives for the Nation (CLEAN) act has passed through congress, headed for the Senate.

The act repeals some $14 Billion of tax breaks for oil companies, and makes that money available for use in alternative energies.

Link to the actual text of the act.

Via

It looks like New Mexico State University (NMSU), located in Southern New Mexico is getting onto the agae-as-fuelsource bandwagon as well. They have a 1/4-acre denonstration pond due for completion in March of this year, and a 100-acre pond will begin construction in 2008. It looks like they have everything they need: “we have sunlight and space, and we have a brackish and saline water supply.” Yummy, brackish water – sounds like heaven for an algae farmer.

Since we’ll be going through Las Cruces on our drive in late April, I think we should swing by the demonstration pond, talk to the researchers, etc.

Link to Las Cruces Sun News article.
Previously: Vegetable oil and biodiesel from algae.