Author Topic: Wanting to make an efficient burner  (Read 6852 times)

B-Man

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Wanting to make an efficient burner
« on: September 18, 2020, 04:59:30 am »
Hi guys,

I have a brake drum pot belly heater out in the shed and looking to run it on waste oil. Be it motor oil, cooking oil and everything inbetween.

I was hoping to have a drip system without any forced air but after running it I dont think im getting it hot enough as its quite smokey.

Am I able to run a drip system without forced air?

Im not 100% sure how to run it but if i run it slow theres a lack of flames and if I run it fast its a bit smokier.

Attached is my fireplace and burning pot




Russ

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Re: Wanting to make an efficient burner
« Reply #1 on: October 23, 2020, 10:47:56 pm »
I do believe you can get an efficient burn with a drip style and no forced air, although I have never done it before myself.  Check around the forum and see if you can gather some ideas on what might be causing your incomplete burn.  Good luck!

doug

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Re: Wanting to make an efficient burner
« Reply #2 on: November 04, 2020, 08:11:30 pm »
 I too have not run this style burner. What I have seen in this style burner is less and smaller diameter holes in the primary burner. Also I have never seen this large of diameter holes in the secondary burner.

 I found this video that may help. https://www.brilliantdiy.com/how-to-diy-make-a-stove-heater-that-basically-burns-all-kinds-of-waste-oil/2/
« Last Edit: November 04, 2020, 08:36:10 pm by doug »
You can't put it on the internet if it isn't true!

http://wasteoilheaterforum.com/index.php?topic=102.0

B-Man

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Re: Wanting to make an efficient burner
« Reply #3 on: November 04, 2020, 11:55:52 pm »
Yeah I just copied off an image I could find on the internet. So sizing is just a guess. I guess i got it wrong.

I have cut a piece of 4" pipe about 500mm tall and that will sit inside the second burner. That has no holes and have cut some grooves out of the bottom. Hoping I can tune the airflow by changing that around and create some better suction.

Will check out that video cheers.

B-Man

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Re: Wanting to make an efficient burner
« Reply #4 on: December 07, 2020, 06:50:49 am »
Im thinking too much air so its not creating suction when its burning. Its like if your fireplace is roaring and you open the door it actually dies down a bit.
Might look at just trying to make one like that video...
Its summer now so havent done anything. And im flat out at the moment so wont see anything happening in the short term.

Oilburner

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Re: Wanting to make an efficient burner
« Reply #5 on: January 09, 2021, 11:11:21 pm »

I have Never been able to build a truly clean running draft burner.  I have seen some YT vids that claim they have but also seen they do cause loads of buildup in the flue.

The forced air burners I have built, plenty of them, all run perfectly clean with zero buildup.  I built a new design draft burner last winter for the back patio which worked awesome and threw a ton of heat and although after some tweaking it exhausted perfectly clean, it still got a lot of buildup inside and would require pretty much dailing cleaning in a home heating application.

I could run a forced air style burner that would only need a 12V bilge blower pump running maybe 30 Watts to heat a home that would never require cleaning.  Also Drip burners far as I'm concerned are impractical for long time heating unless you want to be fiddling with the things all the time. As the level in the tank goes down the flow decreases, as the oil warms up it increases and it's just not in anyway consistant over a few hours.

I now prefer to use a cheap car  pulse type fuel pump and a cheap Chinese Timing board.  I can set the on and off time to give the heat out-put I want and it will run unattened for days as I have tested as long as there is fuel and the output won't change and the unit does not need to be touched.

There seems to be this preoccupation in the waste heating world of keeping things simple but that's a bit like saying you want to keep driving a Model T because it's simple and you don't want the complication of an electric starter, air con, a heater, power steering, disk brakes, a radio or all the other things we take for granted now that make driving so much better and don't give reliability problems at all.

For the low cost and simplicity of a forced air burner, for me the benifits far outweigh the Drip/ draft style which are no nearly as easy to run in operation and are in fact LESS reliable than having a blower and fuel pump.  I'll build the " Complicated" one and someone can build the simple and reliable one and we'll set them going and come back every 12 or 24 Hours and see which one is still going without a runaway or going out and proves the more reliable then.   :0)


B-Man

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Re: Wanting to make an efficient burner
« Reply #6 on: January 13, 2021, 04:21:15 am »
Fair point.
Was hoping to not have to use additional power and extra stuff to research learn and buy but might be worth it in the long run.

Oilburner

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Re: Wanting to make an efficient burner
« Reply #7 on: January 26, 2021, 05:48:45 pm »

I would say that it is a HELL of a lot easier to "learn" to run a forced air burner with air and fuel controls as what it would be to work out how to get a Draft / drip burner right.

When you can control the combustion parameters easily, you can get a much faster response. I have put in the odd hour or 2 with burners over 10+ years and there is still a lot of drawing on experience to even get draft burners close. I built a draft burner last year and still had to stuff around to get the thing to run decent but I still was not happy with it and it certainly didn't burn as well as I can cobble a forced air burner together and have it running in 10 Min.

 Last one I built I put an electronic timer on and a pump because I just couldn't be bothered stuffing round with ever varying fuelling rates that you can never actually set.  Temps vary and fuel flow is different. Top up the tank and the fuel flow is different and if it's not from the exact same batch that you got the last lot from, it's different there too.  Forget it!  $5 timer board, $15 Pump, old car battery lying around...... I literally could light the thing and run it for days as I did in testing.  Carboning up was another issue but stability was not a problem and I was happy to leave it run all night unattended the day I built the thing. If it's going to run 6 Hours with perfect stability, it will run a lot more.

If I want something that will run really clean and has a good turndown ratio, I add a cheap blower and I'm done.  Good as it gets.

 You can have a draft burner running too rich and back off the fuel and it can run another 30 Min still too rich and then go out because it's lean. The same thing -can- happen with a forced air type but in my experience I'd say it's much less likely and easier to spot. Light the thing, decrease the fuel ( if you even have it on to start) till the thing starts to die out and add the fuel just enough to get stability.  When you set that, turn it off and if the thing starts dying within about 30 sec or less, you are there. More heat, turn up the air and again ramp up the fuel so the thing starts to die soon as you turn it off and good again. One can mark the setting on the controllers but  you soon get to know where you want it. You can also run forced air burners a lot leaner and with less adjustment that draft burners which tend to have a narrow sweet spot band.  it's easy to set the air on a forced air burner and have it produce 5X the heat at the top and than you can the low end and it will all burn cleanly. I build my burners so they always run lean which means they always burn clean.

With controlled air and fuel the combustion tends to be much faster and you can set the air and add fuel and see where it goes much more easily.  There can be some tricks to it, too lean will smoke as well but the smoke tends to be a bit different and recognisable.

I think it is a mistake to think one would just build a drip burner and not have a learning curve with it and as I said, the control is FAR less stable over a decent time period.
The power consumption of a forced air blower is negligible and irrelevant.  You are getting many Kw of heat for a few watts.  You need a $20  Blower and a $15 Fuel Pump and maybe a battery charger or a transformer. It's not very much.
In return you'll get a pretty much set and forget heater that you can Dial up to any output you would need. You'll get something infinitely safer than a drip/ draft system as well.  You will get something that requires virtually no maintence in comparison to the drip style, will run cleaner and take up a hell of a lot less time adjusting, cleaning and probably lighting too.


Fireman Jim

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Re: Wanting to make an efficient burner
« Reply #8 on: February 10, 2021, 07:47:39 pm »
I have to agree the draft fed fires are very tricky to get going cleanly. They flare up and can't be regulated to run steady for hours on end.  And when you selling them I think the only way is forced air, they are clean burning and have to be.  With your draft heater put the air gun in it and see the difference. Hotter. brighter flame and clean burning. I was the same not wanting to introduce power to it, but its only 12 volts and by doing so, we can introduce controls, which run the heater making it mush safer, it stays at a set temp now, we have the waste oil control unit at drip fed waste oil heating.com and that turns it off if the fire ever goes out. Where as the draft heater keep on pouring oil into the heater until the storage tank is empty. That gets messy.
My 10c cents worth.
All the best.
Jim.