Old thread retrieved from another forum I posted this on:

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I was getting rather fed up with filling up my cars from 25L containers, so I thought I'd do something about it. I came up with this, which is mainly from spare parts to keep the cost down.

The frame is made from a couple of old pallets which I cut down to size to be as small as possible and still fit the drum and pump on. The pump is an old mains powered centrifugal water pump that had previously been doing duties on my reactor but had started to leak (since repaired).

It filters through the blue cartridge filter, which has a 5u filter in it at the moment.

I took some of the upper planks off so I could mount the pump lower down than the drum. This helps with priming and draining.


The wheels came from a scrap metal yard (2 fixed and 2 articulated), with a brake on one of them to stop it rolling away down my drive! I got the biggest wheels I could find as that makes it run nice and smoothly over my rough drive and on the grass.

The handle is an old curtain rail wedged into a couple of towel rail brackets.


I graduated the drum with a soldering iron in 10L increments, which can just about be seen here (better in the reflection!) so I can keep tabs on how much biodiesel I'm using.

It is a 120L capacity drum (or 130L if you fill it right to the brim ), which is perfect for me as my reactor makes 120L batches. I thought of using a 205L drum I had, but it would have made the whole thing unneccessarily bulky and very heavy to push around. I was quite surprised how even the slight incline of my driveway makes it quite hard to push when full.


It works great, filling 60L in less than 2 minutes.

I also use this drum for drying the biodiesel. I just drop my aquarium bubbler in and stick a fan over the top which dries it nicely in a few hours.

It might have been better to have a DC pump and battery for portability, but apart from the expense I already had the AC pump and just roll out the extension each time, which is probably less hassle than charging batteries etc.

I also added a trigger switch to the nozzle, for automatic switching of the pump when I squeeze the trigger. I took the nozzle apart and found a perfect spot for my switch inside the handle. I mounted it in a block of wood to hold it in place, and routed the wire through to the back.


To keep the mains voltages safely out of the way of the nozzle, the switch is on a 12V circuit (powered by an old plug pack I had), controlling a 20A relay that switches the mains powered pump.

The black wire at the bottom comes from the pump and the white one goes to the mains. The thin grey one comes from the trigger switch.

The long thin thing on the right is the original heatsink from the power pack, which I flattened and screwed into place.


Job done! I poked the original power pack LED through a hole in the lid. All the nasty 240V safely tucked away in the box, and the switch wire heading out towards the nozzle on the right, zip tied along the hose.

I'm trying to recreate the original thread following the recent forum outage. Here are some of the original replies as retrieved from Google Cache (which for some reason could only find posts from page 2-3):

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