The chart above shows the simple transesterfication recipe in this particular chart the recipe is very accurate to two decimal places. For the average homebrewer there will be no need to measure to this accuracy nor will you have a way to without blowing your budget. The homebrewer will find that 1lb of oil will yeild 1lb of biodiesel, or 1L of oil will yeild 1L of biodiesel if the oil is reacted correctly.

You should also note the amount of methanol is 20% by volume of oil, therefore if you have 100gal of oil you would use 20gal of methanol and if you had 1L of oil you would need 200ml of methanol. As you begin to produce fuel you may find that your proccess is better using 21% or perhaps 19.5% methanol. Often times this small difference in the amount of methanol used can keep the biodiesel from becoming gell or perhaps the humidity forces you to change this number. There are many factors that go into this small difference in the amount of methanol like, humidity, air tempature, feedstock, loss of methanol during transfer and mixture. Methanol is currently around $4 per gallon and as you can see there is quite of bit of what is called excess methanol about half of the methanol you used to produce the biodiesel. This methanol is free and ready for you to take back. You can reclaim it by heating your biodiesel to boiling point of methanol and much like an old moonshine still you can distill the methanol vapors that boil out of your biodiesel. Often times these vapors are condensed into methanol that is not pure enough to just reuse therefore you may have to distill the distillant again to get a better product.

The next ingredient is NaOH or KOH either of which are suffcient. Either of these ionically bonded chemicals are mixed with the methanol in an amound determined by the titration. The titration is a way to measure the amount of NaOH or KOH needed to convert a specific oil to biodiesel. See the titration page for more info on this topic and how to perform the needed labwork.

This brings us to our next topic which should you use NaOH of KOH? The answer is completely up to you both chemicals will do exactly the same thing however with KOH you will not produce the amount of soaps that are produced with NaOH. Both chemicals are salts and both are basic, you should base your decision on which one to use based on the avialability in your area and the costs. However you should be sure to do your titration with whatever chemical you are using for example if you are using KOH do all your labwork with KOH not NaOH.