Distill ethanol fuel at home?

[pscot]

The device is based on the Butterfield still

What if you could fill up your car's gas tank with fuel you made at home from food scraps, old newspaper and the remains of last night's Cabernet?

That's the idea behind E-Fuel, a 25-employee Silicon Valley startup that recently started selling a small-scale ethanol production system for turning household compost into high-octane homebrew. Such compost is abundant: Americans throw away some 30 million tons of food scraps each year......

It's based on two primary units, each about the size of a washing machine. The first component, called the MicroFusion Reactor, reduces organic waste to sugar water, then ferments it into a soup of alcohol, water and bacteria. The second part, called the MicroFueler, processes this beery mixture into ethanol.

To make one gallon of ethanol, the system requires about 3 kWh of electricity. Each gallon of ethanol produced contains 23kWh of energy. To put that in perspective: The average American home uses about 30kWh of electricity each day.......

This summer, Foodlink, a food bank in Rochester, N.Y., launched a pilot program with E-Fuel's system. Two of Foodlink's top five recurring expenses are waste disposal and fuel. Now Foodlink takes its waste -- everything from pineapple tops and damaged produce to expired milk -- and turns several tons of it into ethanol each day, generating 100 gallons of fuel each week

http://money.cnn.com/2011/02/11/smallbusiness/e_fuel_ethanol/index.htm

[mike_c]

1. assuming that the source of electricity is fossil fuel, is there any actual saving...

...(of fossil fuels) or does this device simply shift the fossil fuel dependence to another portion of the fuel cycle? How much coal or natural gas is typically burned to produce 3 kWh at the home line? Of course, if the the electricity is produced with solar or wind power, this need not be a problem, although it's not clear to me whether most homes are likely to be able to produce sufficient electricity from rooftop PV arrays. The data that I've seen suggest peak output of 4-5 kWh for rooftop arrays in southern California, one of the best solar electricity regions in the nation (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V2S-50S8BTD-2&_user=521384&_coverDate=10%2F31%2F2010&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_origin=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1638595308&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000059563&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=521384&md5=b0cc5d4b299508f87ead23f425a3ca65&searchtype=a). This would probably be sufficient to produce a couple of gallons of EtOH daily if there are other household electricity uses simultaneously.

[Jackpine Radical]

2. This guy is 'way ahead of the curve…

[MineralMan]

3. Get you a copper kettle....

Get you a copper coil...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r5thGMkts0