Over the years there have been a number of biodiesel processing related accidents and fires, even some serious injuries and a couple of deaths. Making biodiesel is inherently dangerous, you are working with toxic flammable liquids and strong caustics to make fuel. While we can not eliminate all the dangers, here are 10 basic safety tips that can help reduce your exposure to accidents and fires.

Tip No 1: Stay awake, sober and alert.

Your brain is your best tool for preventing accidents. If it's asleep or impaired, or just not being used, then you're an accident waiting to happen. If you were to fall asleep at the wheel and kill yourself in a car crash, everyone would consider it suicide. Making biodiesel is no different. Both activities can be lethal if you attempt them while you are not in full control of your body. The same principal applies to making biodiesel while drunk, it's suicidal, don't do it.

Tip No 2: Do not process in your home.

If you don't burn down your home, you can poison your family with methanol vapors. It's next to impossible to make biodiesel without releasing methanol vapors. If you process in your basement or attached garage, those vapors will work their way into your bedroom or your children's bedroom. The effects of methanol poisoning are cumulative. Repeated exposure at low levels can cause chronic symptoms to appear. It's even more dangerous to children as their small bodies can tolerate less poison than adults.

This is fuel we are making. It may be "safer" than diesel due to it's higher flash point, but it's still fuel. It will make any fire burn hotter and faster. In fact, once your oil and biodiesel start to burn, you only have a few minutes before it totally destroys your home. In most of the fires involving processors in the home, the house was a total loss before the fire department could even arrive. If you do decide to keep biodiesel or oil in your home, then follow the local codes for Home Heating Oil (HHO) storage.

Process in the middle of your back yard or in a cheap shed you can afford to loose to a fire. If you process in your home or attached garage, you not only put your home at risk, you also put your family at risk.

Tip No 3: Keep your work area clean and free of oily rags.

Spontaneous Combustion is one of the leading causes of fires in homebrewing operations according to fire investigators. Oily rags will burst into flames without an apparent ignition source if the conditions are right. Unfortunately the right conditions are fairly easy to replicate. Just pile up some oily rags. The oil will chemically react with the air in a process called oxidation, giving off heat. The rags act like insulation holding in the heat, letting it build up to autoignition temperatures.

The autoignition temperature is the temperature at which a substance will ignite without a spark. The autoignition temperature of vegetable oil is over 600F. The autoignition temperature of dry rags and paper is just over 400F. But like a wick in oil, the autoignition temperature of oily rags and paper is around 200F. Experimentation has shown that the temperature of oily rags with limited oxygen can build up to over 700F just through oxidation.

Spontaneous Combustion does not need oily rags, all you need is some oil and some kind of fibrous material to act as insulation and hold in the heat while letting in oxygen. There have been reports of oil soaked sawdust, oil soaked wool, and even oil soaked fiberglass insulation bursting into flames by spontaneous combustion.

Machine washing and drying your oily rags makes it easier for them to catch fire. The heat from the drier will raise the temperature enough so that it only needs a little oxidation to reach the autoignition temperature. Just like piling your rags up in a warm spot, or in direct sunlight will also make it easier for them to burst into flames.

Preventing spontaneous combustion is not difficult, It just takes attention to detail:

• Put your oily rags in a metal can with an airtight metal lid, or
• Put them in a bucket of water, or
• Spread them out so they can't build up heat as the oil oxidizes.
• Wash your oily rags by hand, and air dry on a clothesline.

Tip No 4: Don't stockpile glycerin.

Many homebrewers don't have a plan to dispose of their glycerin. Often they will put it in the plastic containers they collect oil in. Then just stack it up. Those containers become brittle and develop leaks when exposed to sunlight. The methanol in the glycerin will attack the thin hdpe containers and cause them to leak.

Biodiesel and vegetable oil in small quantities can be handled safely, but hundreds of gallons not only pose not only a fire hazard, but also an environmental hazard.

Tip No 5: Use timers on heating elements.

You never know when you may have to leave your processing area. Emergencies happen. If heating elements are left on while you're away in town, you run the risk of overheating your oil. In fact over heating oil on a stove is the most common cause of house fires.

The smoke point of oil is the point at which it starts to smoke and becomes a fire hazard. That's when it starts to break down into low flash point compounds. Over time as oil is heated for cooking it's smoke point will drop. Restaurants on a tight budget will use cooking oil until it starts to smoke in the fryer. That puts smoke points at under 350F for typical WVO used in homebrew. In fact anything that causes titrations to go up also causes smoke point to go down. High titration oils can have smoke points as low as 200F. We can easily reach these smoke point temperatures in insulated drums with the small heating elements we use in processing.

The solution is simple and cheap, use a timer on you heating elements. The big box stores sell spring wound timers rated for 20 amps on 110V. all you need is a double gange box, a timer, a short extension cord, an a wall outlet and you can hav a timed wall outlet to plug your elements into. Use a timer even if you are regulating the temperature with a thermostat. Thermostats do commonly fail in the ON position and a timer would back it up that could prevent overheating your oil. Sping wound timers can also fail in the ON position, so its important to keep a close eye on your thermostat and processing temperatures and replace faulty electronics right away.

Tip No 6: Use Secondary Containment.

If you have a major oil leak, secondary containment can reduce both environmental and fire hazards. It is used by commercial brewers as cheap insurance against big spills reaching rivers and streams. Cheap that is when compaired to the cleanup gosts and the fines slapped on poluters.

For home brewers it keeps spills contained until they can be cleaned up. When an oil spill soaks into the dirt below your shed, it will quickly go rancid. The only way to get rid of that awful smell is to tear down the shed so you can dig up and haul off the contaminated soil.

Secondary containment really pays off in a fire by preventing hot burning fuel from spreading the fire.  The common thread among fries involving biodiesel and oil is how rapidly the fies spread.

Oil that spills during a fire will feed the fire as did in this 2006 fire in Cambey OR. Secondary containment would have prevented 500 gallons from being dumped into the fire.

Tip No 7: Use GFCI Fault Protection.

GFCI stands for Ground Fault Circuit Interrupter. It's pretty much required by code any place water and electricity are in the same room. Kitchens and bathrooms often have GFCI outlets. You can spot them by the reset button. They are designed to shut down the power to the outlet if there is a grounding fault. They look to see that the hot wire and the neutral wire have the same current on them. An imbalance of current of more than 0.05 amps is an indication that a short to ground exists and the GFCI will trip. If the circuit is leaking less than 0.05 amps, it will not trip the GFCI and you can still receive a painful shock, just hopefully not a lethal one.

Since making biodiesel often involves both electricity and water we should also be using them. Our equipment is often not properly bonded. Bonding is a term that means there is an electrical path between all the metal components of our processors. Bonding is used to prevent metal components from building up a charge that could shock you. With the improper bonding found on most home biodiesel equipment, it becomes all to easy for the operator to be the path of least resistance to ground. Particularly if the floor is wet. We walk up touch our processor and complete the circuit. ZAP!

There are a couple of choices for GFCI. You could use an existing GFCI outlet, but those are usually only found in your home. You could wire in a new GFCI outlet, but wiring a GFCI is tricky and best left to the professionals. The best solutions seem to be the use of a GFCI adapter or GFCI extension cord. These plug into an existing outlet and still offer the GFCI protection for up to 15 amps per device. One important tip: Test these devices out before each batch by pressing the test button. GFCI devices of all kinds have been know to fail under much the same conditions we have near our processors.

Tip No 8: Don't use a drill and paint stirrer for mixing

Back in the bad old days we used drills and paint stirrers to mix biodiesel. It was a cheap easy way to mix both biodiesel and methoxide. The problem is that it's excessively dangerous. Methanol at any temperature and hot biodiesel being processed give off methanol fumes. When methanol vapor concentrations around the drill reach 6%, the sparks from the drill will ignite the methanol. It will form a fireball centered on the drill. Since your hands are holding onto the drill they receive 3rd degree burns as do your forearms. Your upper arms, chest, neck, and face receive second degree burns and any exposed chest or facial hair instantly become ash.  The next thing you know, your on your way to the hospital to get treatment for burns that cover a quarter of your body.

One of the first developments in the bad old days was to hard mount the drill. That way when it exploded, at least you were not in the center of the fireball. But that didn't protect your shed from burning to the ground. The early developers then found that if they semi-sealed their processor with a lid and ran the paint mixer through a small hole, then they could process with less methanol being lost to evaporation. This of course meant it took longer to reach explosive levels. The key is that it took longer to explode, it did not prevent the explosion.

Very Plainly - Drills and Methanol do not mix - they EXPLODE.

Tip No 9: Don't make test batches in a blender

You see it all over the internet, in videos and websites, people making small batches of biodiesel in a food processing blender. The practice goes back to the beginning of homebrew biodiesel and it’s time for it to stop. Food processors and blenders were designed to process food. Methanol, lye, and biodiesel are very aggressive chemicals that attack rubber and seals in different ways. In fact we find that most of the seal material that is good for biodiesel, will not hold up to methanol. The reverse is also true. There are only a few seals that will hold up to biodiesel, methanol, and lye. So what happens is the seal in the bottom of the blender pitcher or container eventually starts to leak. When it does methanol drips onto the electric motor below. The electric motors used in food processors and blenders use brushes and spark heavily. It’s inevitable that if methanol or even methanol laced biodiesel is dripped into sparky central that a fire will occur.

I’ve heard time and time again, horror stories about blenders catching on fire when making a small batch. The lucky ones intuitively understood the risk and had the blender outside in a fireproof area. The unlucky ones melted down a blender on their wife’s kitchen counter top, not a good thing.

So what is the alternative? Use either a magnetic stirrer or shake by hand. The smaller the batch, the easier it is to mix. A one liter batch made in a glass jar or HDPE container and physical shaking can be used without any problems. www.kitchen-biodiesel.com explains one way of making a small batch without using a blender.

Do yourself a favor and don’t make biodiesel in a food processing blender.