Titrated Awesome

I keep hearing, "You can make your own biodiesel at home for $1 a gallon!" and finally decided to get off my arse and look into it (metaphorically; reading about it on the interwub I was actually still on my arse). I knew the basic gist of the esterification reaction: TRIGLYCERIDE (a.k.a. lipid, a.k.a. fat or oil) + 3ALCOHOL ----> 3ESTERS (biodiesel) + GLYCERINE. But reading this how-to got me all excited. The basic reaction is an esterification, but it also uses a strong base (NaOH, found in lye) to catalyze the lipid breakdown. And how do you figure out how much NaOH to use? You do a titration! If I end up teaching chemistry I can SO use this as a lab. A lab that teaches a practical skill! How awesome is that? As an added bonus, the recipe linked above calls for solid NaOH, which gives me the opportunity to teach students that some salts, such as NaOH, are deliquescent, meaning it has such a high affinity for water that it will suck the moisture out of the air to dissolve itself, and as a result you never know the exact concentration of your NaOH solution until you've done--guess what?--ANOTHER titration! [The recipe leaves that step out, but in a lab setting will I? NO!] Two titrations and an esterification in ONE lab!! Wooooo!

So the recipe basically goes:
1. Dissolve & titrate sodium hydroxide to create known NaOH solution
2. Titrate NaOH with lipid/isopropanol mixture to determine reactant ratios
3. CH₃OH (methanol) + NaOH ---> Na⁺CH₃O^- (sodium methoxide) + H₂O
4. LIPID + 3Na⁺CH₃O^- ---> 3METHYL ESTERS (biodiesel) + GLYCERINE
5. Let sit to separate
6. Profit. (If I can figure out how to purify the waste glycerine I can use it in the lab as a glassware/rubber tubing lube, saving the school money. If the district can be convinced to run buses on biodiesel the reaction can be run on a large scale using donated restaurant grease--everybody loves donating shit to schools, and currently most restaurants pay to have their grease hauled away.)

I am SO. GEEKED. right now.