Breaking Oil Emulsion

[broncc]

I have had this idea turning over in my head for a while to lessen my environmental impact. I have taken the short trip to watch the sad site where my sewer dumps into the ocean. Every time I wash my hands with an orange pumice cleaner or degrease a part, I can't help but feel a little weird about that all going down the drain. It does an excellent job getting oil off my hands and into the water, but could there be an easy way to reverse it?

Setting up some system to decant is probably out of the question since its a good emulsion. Maybe there is some way to do a centrifuge like the people who reuse motor oil? I am not sure if it could keep up with the rapid change in demand. Does anyone here have advice or experience?

 

[Brain75]

I thought every state had laws in place on sewage treatment that made it so clean it was cleaner (no kidding) than the water we drink.... leave it up to the treatment plant to handle the issue and sleep happy knowing your tax dollars aren't all being wasted at least a tiny fraction of your hard earned money does something useful.

 

[lil_Blue_Ford]

Decent restaurants will put a grease trap on their sink drains to catch the oil and grease. I actually put one in for a restaurant once. They had a screen trap to catch big chunks then the grease trap which was just a box thing with dividers. You just open the tap on the side to drain off oil and grease and you can pull the top off to get to the big chunks but the screen trap they had caught all of that. Not sure how much oil you actually put down the drain just washing stuff off and any treatment plant should filter that stuff off anyway.

 

[superj]

and if you mess around and wash lots of oil off, they will come to your house and talk to you about it, anyways. they will start tracking if they get an imbalance of oil in the system. they do here where i live, at least.

the treatment plant is at the end of my street, right before the bay. they do a heck of a job cleaning the sewer, that is for sure.

 

[85_Ranger4x4]

Setting up some system to decant is probably out of the question since its a good emulsion. Maybe there is some way to do a centrifuge like the people who reuse motor oil? I am not sure if it could keep up with the rapid change in demand. Does anyone here have advice or experience?

Ship fuel systems have a centrifuge to get out whatever seawater seeps into their fuel bunkers... if you want to talk about something with high demand.

 

[sgtsandman]

An option is an oil water separator. I've only seen them in industrial applications. I have no idea what is available on a small scale, like a small shop or a private home.

 

[broncc]

I guess I'm more worried about the fairly possible situation of moving out of the city and having both well and septic. I'll see if I can get some time on the centrifuge at work and try to break an emulsion. "Just move the well deeper" isn't a permanent solution. I have been looking at the ground water flow reports on the local superfund sites too much to sleep well at night.

 

[Brain75]

Don't know about your area but my mom's 92 yr old boyfriend just had the well at his hobby farm run dry, quote from a real reputable driller was in the multiple 10's of thousands (like $65k)... drilling a well is basically just impossible anymore. And that price wasn't a fixed quote that was the first 500' and every 100' after cost more $$$. You pay till you hit water or you run out of money.

They wont let you drill shallow wells anymore because septic (with leach field) and well combo means you are basically drinking your own sewage. Wells must be a minimum of so many feet.

Unless you are looking at getting a hobby farm with an existing well that is in good health, I might investigate how much it is even possible to stay "off the grid"...

 

[Curious Hound]

Soaps and detergents are supposed to break down the oil. That's how they get it off your skin in the first place. But, there are other ways to separate it.

The grease trap works, by having 2 chambers. They are divided by a wall that doesnt go the whole way to the bottom of the tank. So, the mess comes into the first chamber, which should be big enough to slow down the flow and allow the oils and grease to float to the top. The clean water is heavier and flows under the partition and out of the tank through an outlet near the top, but below the top of the divider. Grease then cool and coagulate and form solid bodies that can be pulled out. Oils just collect there. It all must be manually removed before the oily mess reaches a depth sufficient to go under the divider.

Oils can be removed with a skimmer. This is usually a motor-driven flat belt that dips into the tank. As the belt rotates back up out of the water, the pil attaches to it. Then the belt runs through a "squeegee" that scrapes the oil off and funnels it to a different container. The belt just keeps doing this continuously. Probably a less expensive operation than a centrifuge.

 

[SenorNoob]

Those skimmers are great. We have 2 at work on a 300 gallon tote. We have a lot of oil and water spills in the pits.

 

[superj]

Don't know about your area but my mom's 92 yr old boyfriend just had the well at his hobby farm run dry, quote from a real reputable driller was in the multiple 10's of thousands (like $65k)... drilling a well is basically just impossible anymore. And that price wasn't a fixed quote that was the first 500' and every 100' after cost more $$$. You pay till you hit water or you run out of money.

They wont let you drill shallow wells anymore because septic (with leach field) and well combo means you are basically drinking your own sewage. Wells must be a minimum of so many feet.

Unless you are looking at getting a hobby farm with an existing well that is in good health, I might investigate how much it is even possible to stay "off the grid"...

Here it would be so expensive to drill to fresh water. People just drill so they can use the well to water their yards and stuff.

 

[85_Ranger4x4]

I guess I'm more worried about the fairly possible situation of moving out of the city and having both well and septic. I'll see if I can get some time on the centrifuge at work and try to break an emulsion. "Just move the well deeper" isn't a permanent solution. I have been looking at the ground water flow reports on the local superfund sites too much to sleep well at night.

If the people that put in the systems do it right there will be no issue with sewer and a well.

Around me wells are crap because of farm fertilizer in the water table. Someone knocks in a old farmstead and farms it without properly sealing the well... there is a straight shot for whatever to seep into the water table. People used to have wells all over with windmills out in pastures that are now fields because nobody has cattle on farmable ground ever anymore... same story.

 

[Brain75]

If the people that put in the systems do it right there will be no issue with sewer and a well.....

Problem is, (and this is the problem with the well that just ran dry on the old guys farm) is they were put in around the turn of the century and only 50' deep.... (we live on a limetone plate, so there is "shallow" water and "deep" water... shallow is like 10' deep starts around 500). Pretty much all the wells that run dry around here ish are the shallow ones and personally I would say unfit for drinking.

 

[JohnnyO]

I thought every state had laws in place on sewage treatment that made it so clean it was cleaner (no kidding) than the water we drink.... leave it up to the treatment plant to handle the issue and sleep happy knowing your tax dollars aren't all being wasted at least a tiny fraction of your hard earned money does something useful.

It's not cleaner than the water we drink but it's cleaner than the raw water that goes into the water purification system.

 

[Brain75]

I actually researched this a TON (had to - paper for a health class I had to take in college even though I tested out past Bio 2 and my major was math)..... anyhow 30 years ago this was true so it might not be anymore, but mining tail-ings (like gold, silver, copper, lead mines from the 1850's-modern) contain all kinds of nastiness. They processed that stuff with acids and bases and they also just exposed tons of locked up minerals out on the surface... That crap goes into the water table and rivers ends up in the drinking water (stuff like antimony and zinc). At least in Colorado (a big mining state) the laws on 'acceptable levels' of a bunch of those are so low that what the sewer treatment plants expel is far far lower than what comes in to most people's drinking pipes. When I was researching I found that states like KY (coal), WV (coal), CA (gold) had as bad a problem if not worse, and of course by extension the states downstream of them in the river basin. Name a state and it has drinking water problems.

Most recently (in TX not more than 5 years ago) a buddy of mine worked for the water treatment plant for the city of Austin. He said repeatedly that bottled water was way worse than the drinking water (at least from Austin's pre-treatment plant) because there is no laws regulating bottled water and they just take that out of "clean" sources (like a Colorado spring up in the mountains).
Not to mention the BPA and other such toxic stuff that leaches out of the plastic that that water is bottled into.

The cleanest water (coming from him - they guy who worked for the City of Austin) was the water that big beer (think Coors for example) bottled to give to FEMA for emergency use. Those breweries use a reverse osmosis system before putting it into the beer/emergency canned water and monitor it as good or usually better than most cities.

Like I said, this could have changed and it could be way different - that was 30 years ago. But I can tell you the water I drink tastes horrific of Calcium (a big problem of eastern CO, we sit on a limestone plate...) Old wells draw from the shallow water above the plate - and taste like raw sewage. New wells draw from below it and taste like "hard water" cause that's what it is.