1979 Carrier oil furnace,

[micky]

A few miscellaneious questions, if you can help me. The first are more important. At the end, it's just curiosity. If you answer any of them, it will help. If it matters, I live in Baltimore.

How do I know if the burner in my 1979 Carrier furnace is Beckett or not? I don't see a name other than Carrier anywhere.

My control unit is giving me trouble, but now is not a good time to buy a whole new furnace . If it fails, do I need to buy the exact model control unti from Carrier, or can I use a fancy new thing like this which costs** only $72.

Are these things fairly universal? Or even something like this

**Way back in 1983, the supply house wanted $260 dollars for a control unit, but eventually suggested a separate power-supply transformer for $10, which is still working fine. . About the first control above it says "Replaces Honeywell R7184A, R8184G, and Carlin 48245, 40200, 42230, and 50200", but maybe that's EXACT replacement, and I can still mount it for my furnace??

A friend in a nearby townhouse with the same furnace thinks his furnace ### would fire better with new electrodes. Ours are curved but online we can only find straight. Does it matter, as long as the tips end up where the curved tips do? And can the electrodes be bad, anyhow? They don't seem any shorter now than they were 10 years ago, and even if they're shorter, can't they be bent closer? I have the diagram that gives distances. Seems to me it's broken insulators that wouldl be the problem. But to buy new insulators, no one gives the diameter, only that they're Beckett, and two reviews of Amazon-sold electrodes said they didn't fit. (Didn't they mean the insulators didn't fit??)

Everything I've seen shows that there should be a filter, the size of a V-8 engine oil filter, in the line between the tank and the furnace. Yet I don't have one, and in 31 years, I've never had a problem with a nozzle clogging in less than 2 years. (Most were routinely replaced at one year, but two years I couldn't get an apointment and I let an extra year go by.) I've used several different oil companies over the last

31 years. How am I so lucky that I don't need a filter? Or what?

On the left side of the burner, where the oil comes in, as part of the pump, I think they have something they call an oil filter. It's only 2 pieces of metal. How much filtering can that do? Does it just chop up clumps of oil??? Hard to believe there are clumps, and hard to believe chopping them up would make them small enough not to clog the nozzle, but that's the only thing I can think of. I looked into this "filter"

20 years ago, and saw no sign of clumps, only a light coating of oil.

I see now that new ones have digital displays and electronic controls. What do they do better than my 1979 control board does, that has iirc two transistors, two resistors, a relay, and a red button? What and where is the air tube? They refer to this a lot. Maybe I don't have one on a '79 furnace?

There's been a lot of talk about increased furnace efficiency, but that's really for gas, isn't it? dividing the output BTUs given in the manual by the input BTUs, I get 80% and iiuc the new oil furnaces are only 82 or 83% efficient. That's a 2.5 or 3.8% increase, only.

Obviously I have no use for this but what does it mean? "4 Used Commercial Units Available

4.0-13.6 gph Max nozzle-size 8.0 gph" If the max nozzle-size is 8gph, what is the bit about 13 that's right before that?

Thanks a lot for any help you can give.

[Stormin Mormon]

CY: Look on the web for pictures, that might give you indication. Riellow is one other brand to compare.

CY: Don't know.

CY: I don't know, but I doubt there is much difference.

And can the

CY: I'd also expect the porcelean to crack or break.

CY: Not sure. You might have a good oil supplier, or the pickup tube might be way over the bottom of the tank.

CY: Ed Pawlowski wrote that his new oil furnace saved him a pile of fuel the first year.

[Randy333]

NEW nice pointy electrodes in my burner made a big differance in how it lights and fires. Very difficult to bend in my experience you loosen the clamp and turn them to adjust the distance.

Got mine from Keith supply online.

Remove 333 to reply. Randy

[everettcotton]

I have always used a gap gauge that fits over the nozzle and bend the electrodes so that the fit into proper gap setting on the gauge. The nozzle has a angle pattern on the nozzle that is expressed in degrees. The most common degree angle is 80 degrees. You can purchase the gap gauge at just about any HVAC parts house. There is also a tool that makes it easy to bend the electrodes. Good luck

[micky]

No kidding! Makes sense now that you've said it. Thanks.

I know about lightning rods and that they need points. I've read other stuff about points. How could I not notice that I need points.

....I just looked at the ones I took out a couple years ago. No points at all!! They're like a round pencil that has never been sharpened. The closest thing to a point is where the end meets the side!

...Now that I think about it, I might not have needed the spare ignition transformer. Maybe the old one would have worked if I'd had points!! (I'm glad i saved it.)

I did notice that, But for some reason, I thought either I had bent them enough (when perhaps I hadn't bent them at all) or that they didn't need bendnig after all. I figured the next time I'd put them in the vice to bend them. And I could file points on them too.

Didn't know about them. This is very good, the first set of electrodes with the other end looking like mine (flat metal tabs). Now it's easy enough to transfer that part off the old electrodes, but it's still feels good to find someone who sells just what I use. More important, unlike the other (very few) electrode listings I've seen, this site gives the dimensions for the porcelain insulators. So I don't have to just hope they'll be like mine. And the insulator diameters are not all the same, 9/16, 7/16, and 1/2. .... Mine are 1/2".

Something like

Keith's lists

3 curved ones, like mine**, though all different lengths, none of which are the same as either of mine. I guess it matters most where the tips end up. **Although now I notice that in the owners manual that came with the furnace, the diagram about measurements, the electrodes are not curved, they're bent. This is how I got the idea that all that matters is where the tips end up! ???

Flat bus bars are sold separately.

And though this supplier is near nothing, 20 miles from the closest towns, which are Indiana and Punxatawny, and 50 miles from Johnstown and Altoona, they're only 200 miles from me, so shipping will probably be pretty quick, not that I'm in a hurry this time.

Thanks again.

[micky]

Posted and mailed because I'm correcting my mistake of yesterday.

Today I called Keith Supply and he was very nice, answered 2 or 3 questions, and he told me that not all electrodes are pointy. at all.

So all my excitement over pointiness yesterday was, it seems, for nothing. (In the meantime, I sharpened one of 4 spare electrodes to a point, so now it's a tiny bit shorter than it was, I think.)

But thanks a lot for the referral. I'm going to order about 20 dollars worth of stuff from him, and maybe more later. My new furnace will be oil too.

While I"m here, I put my stick on the control-until relay pointed end down this time, and it seems to have found the sweet spot. That is, the furnace is running normally for the past 26 hours.

I'd forgotten since last march but the problem is that the relay energizes but the winding or the current through it isn't strong enough to pull the armature down. So I would push it down with the stick (a stake pounded into the ground used for an advertising sign illegally on public property.) and when the house was hot enough, I'd remove the stake.

I seem to have put the stake so it just makes up for the weakness in the electro-magnet.

[micky]

My memory was bad. They call it an oil strainer, not an oil filter.

They sell replacement strainers for some furnaces, depending on the oil pump attached to the burner, that look like little rat-wheels, cylinders less than an inch high, with a diameter about 2 nches, made of some strainer material,

or

but they don't look like anything in my furnace. I suspect some so-called technician removed the strainer and didn't replace it either before I bought the house, or maybe even almost right in front of me without telling me. Those guys tick me off.