Mother of All Grease Fires (1994)
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Re: Mother of All Grease Fires (1994)
#2Another stupid part of this: used cooking grease has positive market value! Quite a few companies, even in expensive places like Palo Alto, will happily supply you, for free, with barrels and such to hold your grease, and they'll come empty them when they're full, and I think you can even often negotiate to get paid to give these companies your grease.
It gets recycled into various non-tasty but still useful commodities.
(The economics work out at restaurant scale but not necessarily at household scale. If you deep fry a lot at home, you might be responsible for transporting your own grease to someone who wants it.)
Re: Mother of All Grease Fires (1994)
#3Another stupid part of this: used cooking grease has positive market value! Quite a few companies, even in expensive places like Palo Alto, will happily supply you, for free, with barrels and such to hold your grease, and they'll come empty them when they're full, and I think you can even often negotiate to get paid to give these companies your grease. It gets recycled into various non-tasty but still useful commodit…
Was this also the case back in 1994?
Re: Mother of All Grease Fires (1994)
#4Love how many people were called over to provide expert advice on figuring out why diners couldn't enjoy the lovely outdoor seating without an adult on their nostrils.
Re: Mother of All Grease Fires (1994)
#5Another stupid part of this: used cooking grease has positive market value! Quite a few companies, even in expensive places like Palo Alto, will happily supply you, for free, with barrels and such to hold your grease, and they'll come empty them when they're full, and I think you can even often negotiate to get paid to give these companies your grease. It gets recycled into various non-tasty but still useful commodit…
Was this also the case back in 1994?
Re: Mother of All Grease Fires (1994)
#6Another stupid part of this: used cooking grease has positive market value! Quite a few companies, even in expensive places like Palo Alto, will happily supply you, for free, with barrels and such to hold your grease, and they'll come empty them when they're full, and I think you can even often negotiate to get paid to give these companies your grease. It gets recycled into various non-tasty but still useful commodit…
In the old days people would convert diesel trucks and cars to run on "biodiesel" which was lightly processed used cooking oil. You could tell who did that because their cars always smelled like french fries.
Re: Mother of All Grease Fires (1994)
#7Another stupid part of this: used cooking grease has positive market value! Quite a few companies, even in expensive places like Palo Alto, will happily supply you, for free, with barrels and such to hold your grease, and they'll come empty them when they're full, and I think you can even often negotiate to get paid to give these companies your grease. It gets recycled into various non-tasty but still useful commodit…
In the old days people would convert diesel trucks and cars to run on "biodiesel" which was lightly processed used cooking oil. You could tell who did that because their cars always smelled like french fries.
In the UK, all the used oil from MacDonalds is converted into biodiesel. I often walk past the plan where they do this and there's usually a lorry waiting to be allowed in through the gates.
A few years back there was some eco-warrior protest outside trying to stop the lorries going in. Not really sure what they were trying to achieve with that as it seemed counter to their aims.
Re: Mother of All Grease Fires (1994)
#8Minor nitpick, transformers are sized in volt-amps, not watts. Apparent power is measured in volt-amps and actual power is measured in watts, the ratio between the two is the power factor.
Plus, “one mega volt-amp” sounds way cooler than “a million watts” :)
It may have been a 1MVA transformer with a 480V three-phase secondary, that’s the properly sized transformer, but the utility may have undersized it at 500kVA based on calculated load.
That transformer was already oil-cooled, so adding a couple thousand extra gallons probably didn’t hurt the transformer too much lol.
Re: Mother of All Grease Fires (1994)
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the old days people would convert diesel trucks and cars to run on "biodiesel" which was lightly processed used cooking oil. You could tell who did that because their cars always smelled like french fries.
In the UK, all the used oil from MacDonalds is converted into biodiesel. I often walk past the plan where they do this and there's usually a lorry waiting to be allowed in through the gates. A few years back there was some eco-warrior protest outside trying to stop the lorries going in. Not really sure what they were trying to achieve with that as it seemed counter to their aims.
Occasionally people in the UK get caught putting cooking oil in their (diesel ) cars, which is not illegal per se - but technically if you do it, you should pay fuel tax, which they generally don't. McDonald's are large enough that they will be, knowing that they would inevitably be caught.
Re: Mother of All Grease Fires (1994)
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the old days people would convert diesel trucks and cars to run on "biodiesel" which was lightly processed used cooking oil. You could tell who did that because their cars always smelled like french fries.
In the UK, all the used oil from MacDonalds is converted into biodiesel. I often walk past the plan where they do this and there's usually a lorry waiting to be allowed in through the gates. A few years back there was some eco-warrior protest outside trying to stop the lorries going in. Not really sure what they were trying to achieve with that as it seemed counter to their aims.
Many eco-warrior types, not every single one but many, have... how to put this gently... not thought things all the way through. To name just one example I can think of: protesting an oil pipeline being constructed and/or extended. Well, what will happen if the pipeline doesn't go in? People will still want gasoline — protesting the pipeline isn't going to do anything about people's desire to drive their cars around — so that oil is going to get transported to the refinery somehow. If not in a pipeline, then it'll get transported by train or truck. Which will 1) burn a lot more fuel than transporting the same amount of oil through a pipeline, and 2) be more prone to accidents and oil spills (a tiny chance per truck, but that adds up fast when there are thousands of trucks per month), therefore very likely to spill more oil than the pipeline would have. In other words, blocking that pipeline is very likely to cause more ecological damage than having it built would have caused.
The eco-warrior types protesting the pipeline probably think that they're reducing the use of oil. But they haven't thought it all the way through.