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. In Boston University in the US, there are scientists who are hoping to create a biofuel to heat the university from recycled cooking oil. Apparently the college uses 5,000 gallons of oil each year. Alternative cheap heating sources are always in demand so there is a lot of excitement surrounding this possibility.
But do not make the mistake of just getting a bottle of vegetable oil and pouring it straight into your heating oil tank as it is not as simple as that. Cooking oil just has not been created for home heating and would need to be optimised. 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. And there is also the issue with the fact that it costs more to buy cooking oil at the moment than it does to buy normal oil. Used cooking oil would offer cost savings but this would need to be specially filtered before it could be used. If you were to stick used heating oil into your tank you would likely end up with one big mess.
The reality of using used cooking oil for home heating is probably going to be a long way off for most of us. There is so much of the stuff created though that just gets wasted that using it for heating makes sense. A whole restaurant could be heated with the amount of cooking oil it uses. The school canteen would also be able to provide enough oil to heat a few classrooms. And these biofuels are much more environmentally friendly. Hopefully it won’t be too long before all cooking oil in the UK is being used in this manner.
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. Savvy people are changing over to oil as a home fuel though. And when this happens they have to ensure the tanks re always full of heating oil to ensure they never run out.
Leave a Comment