One problem replaced by another. OIl furnace burns, stops after 9 seconds

That odd. My searches came up with about 7 out of 10 going for white or blue.

If I get the ambition I'll find some more.

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flame of some oil burners may be a light yellow in color. More often it should have a blue - white or chrome colored flame. A dark yellow flame is an indication of a lack of air in the mixture.

To the OP please wipe the photo cell clean and see what happens. If it runs ok for a couple days then starts acting up again, you know it's not burning clean and you can go from there.

Reply to
Tony Miklos
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For now forget the flame color argument and clean the photo cell and see what happens. If it runs ok for a couple days then starts acting up again, you know it's not burning clean and you can go from there.

Reply to
Tony Miklos

That's the first I've seen any mention of blue, and it also says light yellow and not in a derogatory sense. Your post indicated that if it burned yellow, something was wrong.

Reply to
RBM

Well you could have me on the very bright yellow looking white. What color are or should the tips be? That's the only place I see yellow and never orange.

Reply to
Tony Miklos

Just for the record Tony, further searching turned up your blue flame oil burners. It is not a standard oil burner, but a specially designed burner which produces this blue flame. Typical garden variety burners make yellow flames, Blue Ray type burners make blue flames.

Reply to
RBM

Interesting. In the class (some years ago) we worked on Carlin, Beckett and Riello burners.

Reply to
Pete C.

I woke up in the middle of the night remembering that I hadn't posted that I had wipe4d off the photo cell and it had no dirt on it.

Then by Thursday evening, I started it and it's been running fine ever since. It must have been the water from the humidifier, even though I watched carefully and I don't think it got into any openings in the control box. And if it did, how did it dry out in only a day? It's much easier for a nearly-closed box to get wet inside than it is to dry out.

Thanks for your help.

Reply to
mm

On Thu, 20 Jan 2011 22:02:23 -0500, Tony Miklos wrote: ....

I also should say that the acrid smell I Posted about a few days ago, and the smoke I saw curling from either side of oil burner, I solved too.

I looked inside the burner housing, which opens up by lifting the big ignition transformer which has hinges on one side, and which has to be lifted to replace the nozzle. No holes to the outside there.

And back outside the burner, because the burner was partly in the way, I never could see a hole in the "wall" of the furnace below the burner. If the burner is a clock, I can see to from about 8 o'clock over the top to 3 or 4 o'clock.

So I decided to patch it without seeing it. I found furnace cement at Home Depot but only in a half-gallon bucket. I had seen it mentioned on the web in caulking tubes. Way at the other end of the store in the paint department were 2 products by 3M, fire block and fire barrier. In caulking tubes.

The "wall", I mentioned, the outside of the furnace, not counting the decorative cover that hides the burner, actually doesnt' get hot, I finally learned, afraid to touch it all these years, so I used fire barrier, put a big glob on a paint-mixing stick/paddle, the ones they give free with paint, and smeared it on almost as widely and as thick as I could get it. It only took a little bit to do that, 5 or 6 tablespoons. It still smoked right after that, but I had only waited an hour to start the furnace and that might have been some part of the still not fully dry fire barrier. Doesn't smoke anymore, and that smell is gone.

I know if I called a repairman he would do pretty much the same thing, after charging me for a cleaning, nozzle, alignment of electrodes, all of which had recently been done, and after trying to get me to buy a new furnace now from him, instead of waiting for the summer. Plus I woudldn't have learned anything except how to pay someone to do things for me.

Reply to
mm

Maybe these other oil burners are made by the same folks who make Blue Ray DVD burners.

Reply to
mm

How old is this furnace?

Reply to
JoeSpareBedroom

31 years. I thought I was the last one using the original furnace, but asking around I have found at least 3 others of the 109 of us.

I also found the original instructions on-line and dividing output btus by input btus, it was 80% efficient. Not sure what it would be cleaned or uncleaned now. The Bryant they sold my meighbor last summer has an EPA label that it's 81.5% efficiient.

Reply to
mm

Those are probably the biggest selling burners in the NE. Just about every oil boiler I wire has one of those three, mostly Beckett, but Riello is coming on strong. Might be that where Tony lives, blue flame burners are popular. I can't believe I've never seen one. Here is a good link to the technology:

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Reply to
RBM

It's certainly interesting, but it seems to be just in the industrial market which would explain why we haven't see it in any residential applications.

Reply to
Pete C.

Don't they (often) use a different type of oil in industry. I read about grade 6, which contains more sulfur (and maybe other ingredient differences) and grade 4 which iiuc is a mix of grade 6 and grade 2.

So maybe different components give a different color. This is where the rules of color mixing come in. Blue and yellow make white, so maybe blue with a little yellow is what makes it look almost white.

Does sulfur burn blue? Yes, according to wikip, it does. So I think the fuel makes the difference.

Reply to
mm

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Problem: ?The flame on my Beckett burner is yellow not blue?

Solution: This means that you need to adjust the air intake on the fan. You can do that by adjusting the squirrel cage baffles located on the side of the burner.

I must admit, I don't see much about blue flames in today's search but there are still quite a few of them out there if you search enough. Although today's search seems to have blue flames in the minority.

I also found a neat Popular Science article about a blue flame heater from in the 50's maybe, but I lost it again. It was a circular burner where the burning oil heated up the fuel oil until it became a gas, then it burned blue. I was also working on a homemade waste oil heater that burns white/blue, I may get around to it again by spring.

Even this thread made it into google already, into a D Y I dot B a n t e r dot com.

Reply to
Tony Miklos

The advice given on the link you post, is from some guy with a blog, not Beckett, so I question it's accuracy. Again, I'm not a burner tech, but I have worked on literally hundreds of Becketts, and I've never seen one burn anything but some variation of yellow. It is also possible that Beckett makes a blue flame burner

Reply to
RBM

No, I suppose I was just wrong. My only excuse is I hadn't worked on one for about 7 years, and when I double checked and the first link I clicked on said to go for a blue flame, well, it lead me on.

I can now remember the almost blindingly bright yellow flame that was so bright it made looking for the flame tips difficult.

When I think of it now, a blue flame that large with a fan blowing it, it would probably burn through a steel firebox in no time.

Reply to
Tony Miklos

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