I guess what I am asking is there anything I should try before I rip this POS out and go back to burning wood?
Oil has a learning curve. It requires heat to work. Most people get the burners started then freak out the flames are too big and shut it down when they sould keep it going, let it heat up and settle and go from there.
Getting oil to burn is not the trick, controlling it is. If you are not getting enough heat, it comes down to two things and 2 things only:
1. You have too much air for the amount of oil you are burning.
2. You don't have enough oil flow.
The 3rd is a combination of both.
If you have control of the air and the oil flow then you can do anything basically. You can have a small gentle fire or you can have a clean burning raging inferno. It's just a matter of balancing the two. You have to learn how to read the fire. Having too much oil will also make a fire burn cold. You want the oil to change from a liquid to a gas. It's gas that burns not wet stuff. For that to happen you want the burn chamber to be at very least 350oC for engine oil.
Hard to say without seeing any pics of your setup but Rather than force the air down onto the opil pool which largely cools it, I like to have the air spin around the bowl it's burning in unless one has a very tall vessel that the fire will heat as it escapes and transfers the heat back to the oil pool. Having a tall vessel also allowed the pipe with the incoming air to be preheated which helps a lot. I also feed the oil into the air pipe so it also has a chance to preheat to a gas at least boiling off the more volatile components in it which means it is burning as soon as it exits the pipe and imparts more heat to the burn vessel. Spinning the fire also sends it outwards to the heater in this case to warm it up
One thing i see a LOT of people do which puzzles me is they duct the flue out of the building as soon as possible. In a shed the best thing to do is run that flue from one end to the other inside the space you want to heat. There is a lot of energy and a lot of surface area to transfer the heat to the air in there and it increases efficiency dramatically. Throwing all the heat straight out to atmosphere is stupid really. The longer you can keep it in the building to radiate the warmth you are doing the whole exercise for, the better.
If you are not getting enough heat, simply turn up the burn. You may have to increase your air and oil rate but that should be no big deal.
If you can see in your burn chamber and there is very little oil or the fire goes out or drops within 10 seconds of shutting the oil off, you are probably running lean or too much air. If you shut the oil off and the thing continues to burn pretty much the same for the best part of a minute or more, you are too rich. Smoke can indicate this but I can also have a litre of oil sitting in a burner and the fire will burn perfectly clean because all the vapors are being mixed with enough air at the top.
Don't ever doubt oil doesen't have enough power. I'm building a waste oil powered spa heater to heat the home with and my biggest trouble is keeping the output down to 20KW ore less. If I wanted to do 200KW which is what most Olympic size pool heaters are here, I could do that with great ease and ramp it up to 500KW VERY easily. 5-10 Kw is going to keep most homes hot let alone cosy once the place is up to speed so it just comes down to burning enough oil to provide the heat you need.
