Brake Fluid - Alternative Use?

Well you don't just burn used motor oil in a furnace without treating/filtering it anyway. At least you don't if you know what's good for you. Used motor oil is contaminated with all sorts of things, cadmium for example (from bearings) which is bad for you when you get it into your system. (This is why garages/service stations stopped burning motor oil for supplemental heating. There used to be quite a market for stoves to burn used motor oil.)

You burn the untreated oil, the contaminating products get into the air, you breath the air, or touch a contaminated surface, eat something that has been grown in contaminated soil in your garden, and wonder why you die or your children are born with two heads etc..

I'll give you all of that, but my concern was more of the nature of a storage tank that has an atmosphere ready to explode. Maybe not much of a concern, though, when you consider gasoline is stored in tanks without problems. Just thinking out loud.

Harold

Maybe someone should tell my local body shop. Well they have stopped using used motor oil for supplemental heating. They use it for all their heating. Their tip for me was turn off the heat in the storage tank during the summer. They forgot and it turned some oil into coke.

Dan

Diam>

LOL. The gas station across the street was using a waste oil heater for a while. I went over there one night because the haze inside the building was *intense*. The two young guys working inside were just about keeled over from the fumes.

The new owner said that it never did work right, so they took the waste oil heater out.

Jim

If thy can't get the flue to draw on a waste oil heater, I would be rather leery about having them fix my car. Heat rises, and cool air follows it in the draft diverter. If the heat isn't rising, either the flue or the fresh makeup air is restricted.

Though the 'drip' style waste oil burners seem rather hit-and-miss to me - gas stations have compressed air, so a Babbington style oil burner should be trivial to kit-bash.

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LOL. These were the kids who worked there during the day, but they were allowed to stay on at night and work on their own cars. I made sure the owner worked on my car. That was a long time ago, and the proprietor is long gone. He was the last local guy I would trust to work on a car or truck of mine, so for the time being I'm doing all my own work now.

Apparently not, at least for them. This was the type fed with compressed air.

Jim

This sounds like alarmist thinking to me. The EPA allows burning a waste motor oil for heat as an accepted way to dispose of it.

Ron Thompson On the Beautiful Florida Space Coast, right beside the Kennedy Space Center, USA

hobby pages are here: Severe stupidity is self correcting, but mild stupidity is rampant in the land.

-Ron Thompson

Mother Earth News thinks it's a good idea also:

Jon