In The Future Home Heating Oil May Be Replaced By Used Cooking Oil
Research is being carried out at the moment as to whether we could heat our homes in the future using recycled cooking oil instead of regular heating oil. Boston University in the US is currently turning cooking oil into biofuel and plans to use this to cover their heating needs in the university. They are doing this to try to create a substitute fuel as the university are using 5000 gallons of oil each year at the moment. Everyone would love to have a cheaper source of fuel so this project is creating a lot of excitement and many people are buzzing about it.
Now before you begin pouring vegetable oil into your heating oil tank it is worth pointing out that it is not that straightforward. There is more treatment that would need to be done to cooking oil before it could be used as a source of heating fuel. The jets inside a boiler which work to turn heating oil into a mist would not be able to deal with cooking oil and would have to be altered accordingly. The fact that cooking oil is also more expensive than normal oil would also have to be addressed. The possibility of using used cooking oil exists so long as it was filtered specially first. You would more than likely end up with a huge mess if you just put used cooking oil into your tank.
The reality of using used cooking oil for home heating is probably going to be a long way off for most of us. But the fact that there is so much used cooking oil that is just wasted means that it would be a shame not to develop some way of utilising it. A restaurant would normally use enough oil to be able to use it as heating oil when they were finished with it. And a school canteen could also provide enough oil for the heating needs of more than a few classrooms. And these biofuels are much more environmentally friendly. It is hoped that these developments will be in the UK before too long.
Some people spend a lot of money heating their homes in the winter. Fuel such as electricity and gas show no signs of coming down in price. Clever people are switching to heating oil as a fuel though. When they do they always need their tanks filled with Boilerjuice to make sure they don’t run dry in the cold weather.
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