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.
