why make biodiesel. im pretty sure the listers will run on waste cooking oil alone. the cheapest way to start up lowering your bills is to replace light bulbs with cfl bulbs. also, for power, you can buy an old diesel mercedes for under 1,000. pull the engine,sell off the other parts on ebay,hook an old onan generator head to the engine, and run the mercedes on waste cooking oil. use the engines  radiators cooling system to heat the house with. as well as using some thermal transfer to obtain the heat from the exhaust. as for heating without all that, go to tru value/ ace hardware or tractor supply co, get a 55gal drum woodstove conversion kit($35 last winter) and set that up for heat. many of the tree services, especially smaller ones will give you all the wood you want free, especially if you come to their jobsite and load it yourself. if your loading, they will cut to your length for no charge. splitting will be up to you too. if you drive a long
way every day, you could also hook up an extra alternator in your vehicle, buy a few deep cycle batteries and charge them up as you drive. then hook them to a power inverter in the evening and run what you can off them in the evening. you can also build a turk or babbington type waste oil burner to heat home and water with. but research these options very throughly, any of them can have catastrophic failures if your not careful. the absoloute safest way is to heat a small shed away from your house by whatever means.then run airtight ductwork through the shed to heat up the air before it enters your house. or use radiant heat with water for the thermal transfer fluid. i have had some close calls with oil and steam systems. one of my little coil jets overheated,melted the copper tubing and released a huge cloud of superhot vaporised oil into the air. as soon as the fuel/air mix got  right the vapor cloud exploded into a huge fireball. btw, even the
55gal barell stoves are not legal inside a home, but there are lots of them out there, but they can burn through if they get too hot. from the tree services you can also get woodchips free usually. 3-4 dumptrucks of those decomposing with water lines inside them will give you a constant supply of 140f water. there are plans online for building composting bins that use arobic bacteria to decompose the woodchips so you do not create methane gas. using anarobic decomposition will put off methane gas, a flamable greenhouse gas. some systems trap the gas and run heaters off that, or engines. like the city dumps have gone to. a small greenhouse made from black plastic will get amazingly hot inside in the winter,too, car in the sunlight effect. you can put a blower on dual thermostats, and have it blow the air into your house as soon as its warmer in there than inside your house.very little risk factor there. but its useless as an ashtray on a motorcycle for
nightime heating.