Would this work - used oil refining device

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So this idea is most likely not original but it came to me in a dream last night (being 100% serious lol). I'm truly curious what you guys think and I'm open to suggestions.

If I made something like this, and ran used oil through a new filter that isn't on a running engine enough times, could the used oil be cleaned enough to be considered usable again?
 

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Google up "used motor oil cleaning machine" and you can just buy one ready made.
It's been marketed since WWI.
Yeah, I have great ideas and then find I'm not the first. Sort of takes the wind out of my sails. :cry:
 
Google up "used motor oil cleaning machine" and you can just buy one ready made.
It's been marketed since WWI.
Yeah, I have great ideas and then find I'm not the first. Sort of takes the wind out of my sails. :cry:
A lot of them seem to work with a centrifuge.

Do you think mine with a traditional spin on filter would achieve similar or better results?
 
A fellow from high school, back in the mid-'70s, used to claim he would put used motor oil in clear glass bottles or jars, and let it sit in the sun.

He claimed that over days or weeks the dirt would drop to the bottom, and he'd pour the clean oil off the top.

I never tried it.
 
You can get some very clean oil using a centrifuge that spins the oil very fast, solids settle to the bottom. Later on you can add a filter to removed any particles.
 
Oil is 25% (give or take) additives.

You've done nothing to replenish the additives, or get the suspended combustion byproducts out. Sure, you filtered out large particles, but so what? The stuff you're left with, after getting particles out, is suitable for, perhaps, gate hinges.

Even then, I wouldn't use it on gate hinges, because there are so many chemicals left over. I wouldn't want that junk getting into the environment near my house.

I certainly wouldn't use it in an any sort of engine, because the additives aren't replaced, the Ph is wrong, and the lubrication performance will be lousy.
 
I had a friend try this. He didn't try reusing it as engine oil though (as noted above repeatedly, that won't work). He was using it as a fuel in his Duramax. He was previously running the truck on waste vegetable oil and his supply started drying up, so he decided to start mixing in waste engine oil. Sometimes he would run WVO with WEO and sometimes he would mix diesel fuel and WEO.

Wear metals left in the oil were a concern. Metal + high pressure fuel system = injector seat erosion. He set up a filtration system using a pump and a high micron bypass filter setup for maximum filtration to filter the waste oil before it went into the truck tank.

He ended up destroying a set of injectors within a year. Coincidence? Maybe. He replaced the injectors and sold the truck.
 
So this idea is most likely not original but it came to me in a dream last night (being 100% serious lol). I'm truly curious what you guys think and I'm open to suggestions.

If I made something like this, and ran used oil through a new filter that isn't on a running engine enough times, could the used oil be cleaned enough to be considered usable again?

if that worked, we would just need to change filters on cars...
 
Back around 1960, I used re-refined oil in my old Pontiac. The product had been around for quite some time and one can still buy re-refined oil.


 
I know someone who tried something similar to kill weeds in a far corner of his garden. They grew more fierce afterwards, of all things!
Then he did it wrong - when I was a kid, we used it to keep the weeds down in a drainage ditch along the edge of the property.

Worked great. Not one weed grew where used motor oil had been applied.

Extra side benefit - all the pretty colors when it rained!
 
I used to dump our used oil in the woods behind our house growing up. Always dumped it in the same spot. A few years ago they tore that house down and were building a mcmansion in its place. I walked around the lot and went back in the woods. There is a 10-15 foot diameter area around where I dumped the oil that, 35 years later, still nothing grows there. Everything away from it was lush and green, but nothing but dead leaves and bare soil on the oil disposal area. I really hate to think what I was doing back then.... just didn't know any better.
 
To the OP: That system is way too complicated. How ever did you work out the details?
Why is the drum (lower right) connected to the used oil drum?
If your filter is like a aquarium filter just lead the filter's output back into the drum?

Installation of the rail siding for the carloads of additives is what'll set you back.
 
That said, shouldn’t all oil dumped from a correctly operating engine (with a filter) be clean?

No. There may be micro contaminants that are held in suspension by the dispersants. There is probably going to be unburned fuel (a dipstick and oil change always smells faintly of that) and there's other stuff going on in there that's not perfect. A

Re-refining waste oil has been a thing for a long time. I remember Wal-Mart used to sell an API certified oil made from re-refined motor oil. But as Panda said, it's probably distilled like crude oil with the contaminants removed. The additives are going to be removed in the process and they'll use new additives.

This certainly isn't something to try at home. The only thing I've heard of is people using waste oil heaters to legally dispose of used oil. But it makes far more sense to do it at an industrial level.

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