Research is being carried out at the moment as to whether we could heat our homes in the future using recycled cooking oil instead of regular heating oil. In Boston University in the US, there are scientists who are hoping to create a biofuel to heat the university from recycled cooking oil. They are doing this to try to create a substitute fuel as the university are using 5000 gallons of oil each year at the moment. Everyone would love to have a cheaper source of fuel so this project is creating a lot of excitement and many people are buzzing about it.

But it is worth knowing that it is not as simple as just going out to your tank and pouring a bottle of vegetable oil into it. Cooking oil would have to be treated and optimised before it could be used as a heating fuel. The jets inside a boiler which work to turn heating oil into a mist would not be able to deal with cooking oil and would have to be altered accordingly. And there is also the issue with the fact that it costs more to buy cooking oil at the moment than it does to buy normal oil. The possibility of using used cooking oil exists so long as it was filtered specially first. If you were to stick used heating oil into your tank you would likely end up with one big mess.

The reality of using used cooking oil for home heating is probably going to be a long way off for most of us. But the fact that there is so much used cooking oil that is just wasted means that it would be a shame not to develop some way of utilising it. A whole restaurant could be heated with the amount of cooking oil it uses. Plus there could be more than a few classrooms heated up with the oil that the school canteen could provide. And these biofuels are much more environmentally friendly. Many of us are eagerly anticipating the time when these biofuels are used in the UK as well.

Getting the home heated up during winter can be very expensive. Fuel such as electricity and gas show no signs of coming down in price. Clever people are switching to heating oil as a fuel though. After the changeover they have to make sure that the storage tanks are always full of Boilerjuice to ensure they never run out.