Waste Oil Heater Forum - Your definitive source for burning waste oil for heat.

About 3 years ago I bought a used Clean Burn burner and triad boiler and set myself up for waste oil. After 2 seasons of messing with the old Clean Burn setup I decided to give the CK Burner kit a try with a new Beckett burner. I put it together and set it up this past summer, it's been running since October and the few times I've had issues it has been air compressor related, the burner itself has been flawless. The Clean Burn burner was an almost daily "tuning" of the oil and air pressures to get it to burn right and there was always something wrong with it (which was most likely age related). The CK burner has been a "set it and forget it" machine.

I tried a few tips and ended up with the 1gpm nozzle to get more heat for a large boiler. 12 psi seems to be the happy spot for easy lighting and decent flame size. I have an air regulator (set at 40psi) inline before the reg on the burner itself, this prevents any fluctuation in air pressure (from the air comp. cycling) at the primary burner reg. So once I set got done the initial tuning in the fall I haven't touched the air pressure since.

About once a month I clean out the lower chamber of the boiler and get about a coffee cup of very light ash, much better than the old burner.

I also want to say that the few times I have had a question about the system during setup or afterwards Craig from CK was very quick to respond and very helpful.

Took it all apart and soaked the whole block in gas for about a week, then cleaned it with some gun cleaning tools... turned out pretty good. Going to be firing it up in about a month so I guess I'll have to wait to find out if my wires are all back together correctly :-)

Hello,

I have a Clean Burn CB4000, from the early 1990's. I was wondering if anyone knows the procedure to clean the preheater block? I just got the unit last year and had a pretty successful first season, but every now and then my nozzle would get clogged, so I'm blaming it on carbon build up in the preheater block. Considering the unit is over 20 years old and I don't know it's history I'm thinking it would be a good idea to clean the preheater, I can't seem to find any info on this site or anywhere else, I know it needs to be soaked in something, but not sure what.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Austin

Well, I thought I would give an update. It's been over 2 months now since I've had a real problem with the unit. Ever since I put the larger nozzle in it's been working pretty well. It seems that a good cleaning is required of the firebox about once a month. That takes me about 15-20 minutes from start to finish, so I can handle that. It burns very clean, no smell outside and nothing but heat waves coming out of the stack.

Every once and a while it will trip itself off, for whatever reason, but this is less than once a week and a press of the reset button and quick adjustment of the oil pressure and we're back in service for a while. During the cold snap in January I was burning around 8-10 gallons/ day with boiler temp set at 180. Now that the highs are in the 40's and lows just below freezing I've turned the boiler temp down to 140 and we're burning 3-5 gallons/ day. The furnace blower in the house runs a little longer (because the water temp is lower) but it still heats the house up fairly quick. I'm pretty happy that the gauge on my heating oil tank in the house hasn't moved for months!

I just ordered the diaphragm pump from northern tool. I'll post back once I see how it works...

Austin

That Cleanburn 4000 is a big unit, with the factory nozzle it's rated at 280,000 btu and 2.0 gallons per hour fuel consumption. Did you get the pump with it? The manual I saw calls for around 7 psi oil pressure, and 26 psi air, which is way above and beyond what most of us are running in our kit furnaces. I'm not a furnace or boiler expert and I don't even play one on TV, but do you need that much BTU for your setup? Depending on the size of the burn chamber and how much water you're heating, you might be able to drop down in nozzle size, oil psi and air psi and still do what you need to do. One clue might be cycle time, if the unit cycles on and just runs a short time and cycles off, then does it again shortly after, that may indicate that it's oversized for what you're heating. It's more efficient, or at least that's what I understand, for the unit to run longer cycles less often.

Thanks for the info.

It did come with the "Clean Burn" pump...

It came with an assortment of nozzles, and I have no idea which one is factory. Right now I'm running around 5psi oil and 22psi air and that seems to be working pretty well. In the last 24 hours I've burned just shy of 10 gallons and it's about 15 degrees at night and 30 during the day, I was also heating the garage for a few hours. That's a major improvement from before I cleaned the blast chamber, but that's still a lot of oil, I would love to get the down to maybe 5 gallons/ day when I'm not heating the garage at all.

I'm going to go look what nozzle is currently being used and post back...

I currently have it set to kick on at 170 degrees and off at 180, I would say it takes it 10-15 minutes to get back up to temp if nothing is on, and longer if the blower in the house is running or the shop heater is on. The off time depends on how much the heaters are running but at most it's off for about 45 min.

Austin, nice looking set up. twenty gallons per day seems like a lot of fuel. are you running an expansion tank and is your boiler system a closed loop?

Yes, I agree. That's why I think it still needs a lot of cleaning. There is probably at least an inch of buildup in the blast cabinet of the boiler that's probably acting as an insulator. I got the fire tubes clean, but was in too much of a hurry to get it hooked up and didn't get the rest cleaned... I was also heating the uninsulated garage for most of the day when I was monitoring the fuel burn, but it's at least going through 10 gallons a day with just the house.

I'm running a "gravity fed" or "open" system. Just  like an outdoor wood boiler. I was able to avoid having to plumb a fresh water line out into the detached garage and deal with that freezing. There is a 5 gallon bucket in the rafters of the garage that's my open expansion tank :-). The only disadvantage to this setup is that there will be oxygen in the water, so rust in the boiler will be more of a problem than a closed system.

Austin

Here are some pics of my setup I just got finished installing. I have a few bugs to work out, but it's working well so far.

I have this setup in my detached garage with 1" pex lines run underground to my house to a "water to air" heat exchanger in my ductwork of my existing forced air furnace. I added a second thermostat in the house, wired directly to the furnace blower only and a strap on aquastat wired in series. So when the thermostat calls for heat, if the boiler isn't up to temp it won't turn the fan on and blow cold air around. I just keep my old thermostat (for the forced air furnace) at a lower temp as a backup.

As you can see I also have a small hydronic shop heater that I put in the garage, I have it hooked up to a thermostat, but only run it when I'm out there because the garage is uninsulated. I just let the hot water run through the loop 24/7 to keep it from freezing (the fan is controlled by the thermostat).

I found the Triad Boiler, and Clean Burn "CB4000" on craigslist. I was going to convert a normal boiler with the CK Burner kit, but luckily found this and saved a bunch of time. I have some bugs to work out on the burner itself, but it's working pretty well considering I haven't put any money into it yet.

I also have to figure out how to clean the boiler better, the previous owner hadn't cleaned it in a while and the fire tubes were almost clogged with soot buildup. I've got them all clear, but the bottom blast chamber still needs a lot of cleaning and the burner is running a lot more that it should be, when the blower is on in the house it can't quite keep up and looses ground on temperature. The burner is probably running 75% of the time, and at that rate I think I'm burning through about 20 gallons/ day to heat a 1200sf house.

As you can see, I have two tote tanks setup. One is for settling, and the other is the tank that it draws from. I have a cleanable screen filter, and a hydraulic filter that it runs through before going into the draw tank, plus the actual filter on the burner pump.

Austin