Just want to say this forum is superb it is a great pool of info.
I had been looking into waste oil burners for some time but it took someone to rell me that i could not make my own burner push me to do it !!
Thanks to research on the net and a lot of time spent in the shed i finally came up with a unit that burnt waste oil i ran it for the entire winter last year and was delighted that it performed really well considering it was prtestty much thrown together, anyway this spring i pulled it apart and put the finishing touches to it and tidied it all up, to anyone else it looks like something that should be in the NASA space program....
A quick overview of what i did is as follows:
I got my hands on an old Bentone gun style burner (about 150,000 btu's) to use as the basis of the burner
I bought a siphon nozzle and holder off Ebay and machined piece of aluminium to take the nozzle holder, directly below it and either side i drilled 2 x 8mm holes to take 2 x 300w heater probes.
These were to be controlled by a digital PID via a solid state relay. The PID maintains the temperature at 135 degrees and will not allow the burner to fire until 130 degrees has been reached
I used the existing oil pump to circulate the oil from the main storage tank to the 1 gallon preheater tank mounted next to the burner, this was also allowed to return to the main tank in event the preheater tank was full
The preheater tank used a kettle element again controlled by a PID and an SSR to maintain the temperture of the oil at 45 degrees, there is also an immersion thermostat fitted as a cut out should the oil over heat and a limit switch on the ball valve to prevent the oil heating should the level in the preheater tank drop.
Ebay provided a solenoid valve to control the flow of air from the compressor.
Had a few problems to deal with but nothing i have not been able to overcome !!
Mark