anyone else heard of using liquid NaOH (50%) for homebrewing? Supposed to react around room temp (75-80deg) cost here looks like $278 for drum weighing 680lbs. 1gal supposed to be equiv to 1lb lye?

That stuff is bad news for biodiesel brewing. Reason being the other 50% is water. You don't want water anywhere near your process.

Now if you could find 50% NaOH in MeOH, you'd be in business, but I can't imagine anybody would be selling that in drum quantities.

you wash it with water, won't it seperate out?

you wash it with water, won't it seperate out?

Don't forget you wash AFTER the process has taken place. I have been warned about a million times about trying to make BIO out of wet oil, which would be the same thing, I guess.

:exactly:

You're prob right there, just curious to see if anyone else had tried it?

I think I sometimes come across as abrupt (to put it mildly), so I want you to know I mean this in the nicest way possible. But, if you are even considering using water-based sodium hydroxide to make bio with, it is apparent to me you have a lot of research to do on the science of what's going on. I know, I know, there are dozens of processor manufacturers out there that sell their machines as "plug and play" operations, but I think it's imperative to know at least the rudimentary chemistry of what's going on. Spending a few hours learning now pays off greatly down the road.

I don't want to get into the specifics of the actual reaction mechanisms involved (a google search will give you those if you're interested), but basically the reason you don't want water around is it will support a saponification reaction (which produces soap) rather than an esterification reaction (which produces alkyl esters-usually methyl esters for biodiesel). I'm guessing at the product ratios, but if you use 50% NaOH in water, you're probably going to get about 95% fatty acid sodium salts (soap) and maybe 5% methyl esters. That's probably even generous unless you had a ton of methanol in the batch to drive the reaction.

Having water present before transesterification will result in your batch turning into goo.