Local farmer tinkers to create heat from last night’s dinner.
By Cindy Stauffer
Published Nov 01, 2005 13:34
The price of diesel is $2.84 a gallon.
Glenn Brendle has both an oil furnace in his 1750s stone farmhouse and a 1985 diesel Mercedes-Benz in his garage at his 15-acre organic farm outside of Gap.
And he has to heat two greenhouses, where he grows English seedless cucumbers, hong vit radishes, Thai basil and other unusual herbs and vegetables that he delivers every week to tony restaurants in Philadelphia.
And yet, Brendle is smiling these days. He’s warm, too.
Sometimes just too darn warm.
“I tell my wife, ‘Open the door!’ ” he says.
He chuckles gently, then adds, “I just do that to tease people.”
Brendle, 64, heats his house and his greenhouses and soon will power his Benz with an unusual, cheap fuel source: used french-fry oil.
It’s not that hard, he insists. In fact, he says other farmers could do the same economical, environmentally conscious thing.
“I just really enjoy the fact that stuff doesn’t get wasted,” he says.
OK, that and the fact that he is heating his Green Meadow Farm for the bargain price of about 30 cents a gallon.
Brendle ran across his unusual heating fuel a few years ago, while delivering his produce to a Philadelphia restaurant.
Literally.
Outside the restaurant were jugs and jugs of used french-fry oil.
“I practically stumbled over them,” Brendle says. “I said, ‘Tom, what are you doing with all this oil?’ He said, ‘Do you want it?’ ”
“My mind started thinking...” he says.
Now when Brendle starts thinking, stand back.
This is a sort of Renaissance man, a restless dreamer who has an engineering degree but has worked in advertising, printing and farming.
He’s also a tinkerer, who once ran a 1962 Ford flat-bed pickup truck on coal during the gas crisis in the ’70s.
And he’s a Dumpster diver and a committed recycler, who outfitted his sunny kitchen with reused materials, including a stainless steel sink he bought for $5 at a public auction and a funky 1928 gas stove he salvaged out of a house on Howard Avenue in Lancaster.
When Brendle first happened upon the used french-fry oil, he brought some home with him. He used it to power a kerosene heater, which he modified.
That worked fairly well and got Brendle thinking of how he could use the french-fry oil to heat his house and greenhouses.
“I just had to bite the bullet and put the system in,” he said.
Three years ago, he invested $10,000 to do just that.
He modified an outdoor heating furnace, the type that farmers often use as wood-burning stoves. But Brendle hooked his furnace up to a crank-case-oil burner, modifying that to burn vegetable oil.
“My motto is: whatever works,” he says.
This sort of a Rube Goldberg contraption is hooked up to barrels of used fryer oil, which sometimes feature cornbread crumbs still floating on the top.
He sends two of his employees to Philadelphia once a week to pick up 300 to 400 gallons of the oil, which he gets for free from restaurants, making his only cost their time and gas money.
Brendle’s furnace is housed in a small wooden building near both his home and his greenhouses. On cold days, it emits a warm odor that smells, naturally, just like french fries.
The furnace sends 170-degree water through pipes that run underground to the greenhouses, emitting the heat through a radiator.
Underground pipes also carry the hot water to Brendle’s home, where they feed a hot-water radiator system and the home’s water heater.
Within a month, Brendle hopes to have a separate fryer oil tank installed in his Mercedes-Benz. With some modifications, he will use the oil to power that vehicle as well.
With the millions of gallons of fryer oil generated by restaurants across the county and state, Brendle envisions a day when others can do the same thing he is doing: turning waste into fuel.
In fact, he’s applied for energy grants so that he can show others what he’s done but has not yet obtained approval.
“I’m thinking, if I can do this, any farmer in Lancaster County can,” he says.
In the meantime, sometimes when Brendle takes his hot shower, he thinks about it being warmed by the oil used to make someone’s chicken or fish dinner, or their order of french fries.
“It’s just better,” he says, “if you don’t waste things.”
