Vegetable Oil Candle
 

Well, I have been doing so much research on SVO, WVO, and blends, that I bought a bottle of Walmart vegtable oil. As usual it's taking forever to get this VW diesel I have been trying to buy, so I sat around experimenting. I took one of my wife's burned out candles, votive or whatever they call them and took a piece of twine and inserted it into the wick holder and put in one table spoon of SVO and lit it. It burns beautifully, no french fry smell, a little yellow hue to the flame, but it works! So now of course I want to fuel up the old miners lantern and see if that will work too.

Also just thinking, this is a natural non petroleum candle, essentially an oil lantern. The package it came out of said they are 5 hour candles, so I'm timing it, it seems to burn at the same rate, it's been an hour now and the fuel level is the same, so we'll see when it burns out.

Here is a simple example of the potential of cooking oil, you can fry things with it, put it on a salad, or run your car on it. This little experiment turned out to be so much fun. I hope this is an inspiration. I also hope that my attachment worked, took a picture of it, if the picture didn't turn out, I may need help. I sat there stairing at this thing burn, like I never saw fire before.

Sweet, now who do I see about patenting the wheel :D

VOC Test Data
 

Here are my findings for my VOC vegetable oil candle, it burns about the same rate that wax candles do. However during the test, at 2 hours the VOC burned about 50% of it's fuel, keeping with the 5 hour candle performance. It had a wick made of twine, I didn't have braided wick available, so twine worked. 2 hours in the twine wick unwound, creating 2 wicks, this produced a flame 2 inches high and smoking. The VOC burned up its fuel supply in 30 minutes. Conditions for the test were 78 degrees and 56% humidity.

Aside from stairing at a candle burn like a moth, vegetable oil is a fuel and I'm tickled to death about this stupid little candle. So I tell my girl of the things I did on my day off. She tells me about her floating candles that she had since the 70's, essenially cognac glasses with little wicks floating in the middle. I come to find out their filled with vegetable oil, this lead to an absolute accidental reading of a commodities report about the middle East. I thought for years that the little lanterns that burned in B.C. times were filled with pitch or some sort of petroleum based oil. I was wrong, different types of grass and oilve oils were used in their lanterns for thousands, were talking 8000 plus years.

So this little experiment turned into quite a learning experience, that natural alternative fuels are available and have been for quite some time.

Yup, the big JC would have been talking about veggie oil when he talked of bridesmaids trimming their lamps, and lamp oil was mentioned in the lists of supplies required to be gathered before the Jews set out in Exodus. I've heard that the ancient Egyptians began cultivating lettuce not for salads, but for it's oil bearing seeds.

Vegetable Oil Candle
 

My farrier says a cheap alternative for hoof oil/ conditioner is vegetable oil.

I use this every day and its cheap as chips

I use olive oil as a bakelite conditioner/polish. Better than anything commercially available.

-Jay

The olive, most likely the plant of choice, is a fruit, not a vegetable.
Semantics.

I found that biodiesel (not veg oil, but the transesterified portion of the veg oil) didn't work well in an oil lamp, so I gave up on that.