Hello group,
I've been looking into waste oil heaters. My oil kero boiler won't last much longer and the price of the fuel seems to sky rocket.
I've been told that they will run on waste engine oil, rapeseed oil, kero, waste vegetable oil etc. If it burns they use it. It needs a compresses air supply but that isn't a problem and cleaning out every few weeks.
Has anyone out there had any experience of these?
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember snipped-for-privacy@tesco.net saying something like:
Waste oil burners will run on virtually any old s**te you care to put in them, but at a price. Start thinking from two grand upwards.
Some people hae converted their standard heating boilers, but I have no details.
NT
Yes as someone else said they cost serious money But you could DIY one
flow posibly even more power can be had from supplying the oil through a diffuser using an oil pump from a car.
I imagine the oil pump from a household fuel boiler.
One more comment. The plans call for plates to close the holes in the tank if you use the heater element idea as a water heat exchange to supply central heating. Or was that already mooted in the plans? (I didn't se that there.)
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember snipped-for-privacy@care2.com saying something like:
Yahoo! group altfuelfurnace is a mine of info on this.
We used to service one make of waste oil burner (can' recall name atm) which used high pressure compressed air and a paint sprayer type action where the air blast blew across the nozzle. The waste oil contained all sorts of muck and a lot of water. Most of the water was seperated out in an oversized filter bowl with a drain c*ck to release the water. The oil was then preheated before being drawn up the sprayer tube. All the grit etc caused frequent nozzle erosion and the ash produced was very high in lead content, so much so that we were instructed to empty any vacuumed out material into a sealed bag and hand it to the client for them to arrange disposal as it was hazardous waste. I know of at least two that were converted to burn gas oil (red diesel) because of the problems they used to cause.
How would you satisfy the BCO of the SEDBUK rating of a home-built boiler?
Owain
Presumably the lead was deposition scraped off the cylinders of petrol engines by the scraper ring? Since lead is no longer used that is not a problem. I imagine a centrifuge or a baffle in the oil strorage tank might have helped with the gunge. But even the cost of nozzles is still cheaper than with paying tax on conventional fuels
It doesn't sound like there was much filtering going on whatever. And that was with a powered spray feed I take it? Some of the stuff described in the site had simple drip feeders. By the sound of it they didn't even have taps. Very crude.
Why would you feel the need to complicate your life?
I would imagine with anyone ingenious or stupid enough to build this, the need to consult Mr BCO from the land of officialdom for his advice or approval would not be high on the 2do2day list.
:-)
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KISS is the design philosophy of this ,no pumps fans or nozzles,
Not so stupid when you consider early IC engines worked quite happily without sparks.
Hot tube ignition.
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You may well be correct in that but AFAICR lead wasn't the only reason for the hazwaste situation. Its a long time ago and now I've retired I can't easily get hold of the data.
I imagine a centrifuge or a baffle in the oil strorage tank
A baffle is presumably your description of a wier trap? Fine until it builds up behind it and overflows anyway:-( The filter bowl had if memory serves a cyclonic action. A powered centrifuge is going to cost serious money and maintenance.
The oil was lifted by the action of the compressed air blowing over the nozzle. Hence my phrase "like a paint sprayer" it was not supplied to the nozzle by pressure
Some of the stuff
Crude is very likely to give you smoke problems and council jobsworths chasing you under anti pollution laws.
You may be happy to accept the problems if your time and labour have no other value
I'm not sure early interna combustion engines did work happily never mind spark igniters or what. As is the case with the multi fuel burners. They need careful starting and tend to clog up. Over heating as with full fuel flow is a vicious circle which is cured by running out of fuel.
What I am suggesting is well within the capabilities of a backyard mechanic. Anyone competent enough to get off his arris and make one of these things is capable of making it efficient.
To make it a used lubrication oil burner the oner has to supply dirt free oil. This needs a large enough supply to ensure time for sedimentation.
It wouldn't hurt to have a second tank running the oil through quick lime and a third tank agitating it with a strong acid to remove metal held in suspension. Sinc ethe amount of fuel consumed in a day is less than a gallon, the last tank need not be very large.
The final process could be a series of oil filters.Or the filters used in diesel engined vehicles.
To use an oil pump out of an old car would allow the fuel to be atomised and be burned more efficiently in the space of a 20 or 40 gallon container. Come to think of it if the builder of such a device incorporated all the fuel systme from a scrapped
Coupled to a simple hoover as an air supply, the whole thing could be controlled by elecrtical contacts. It wiould be remarkably efficient and all the more so if there were a back boiler/water jacket on it.
Perhaps a meths injector or even gas to start it; and the occupier of a building being heated by such a thing would seldom have to touch it once he had it set up to suit him.
The draw back with absolute simplicity is that burning waste is a complex problem. Burning a refined and precisely calculated petroleum fraction by comparison, is KISing.
It might not, Landrover Td5 engines have a centrifugal oil "filter". Something to do with lubricating the injection system and requiring very clean oil.
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