OT---Blending waste and heating oil for use in a boiler

Harold and Susan Vordos wrote in article ...

Have you tried mixing a little nitro-glycerin in your car's fuel tank!

I understand it REALLY increases the horsepower........if you can only hold the engine together.

How about mixing a little waste oil with your salad oil?

For what little you might gain I believe there is a much bigger downside - more filter changes, plugged nozzles, etc.

If you WANT to burn waste oil, why not buy a........

........TA-DA!.....WASTE OIL HEATER ?

Even filtered, there's going to be nasty crud leftover (in your firebox, and prob. in your oil tank).

To get to 50/50 you'd probably need separate oil/waste-oil feeds, and a pre-heat loop for the waste oil.

Probably save a lot of grief if you used 2 different pumps/burners.

I think I'd want to filter and thin the used oil products before adding them to the supply tank. I'd be tempted to build a filtering machine that circulates the thinned oil products through some filters, but I wouldn't know how to determine when it's cleaned (just a timer, maybe). A pressure gauge between the pump and filters would provide a way to see when the filters are becoming saturated with solids/dirt, as long as the filters aren't the bypassing type.

If you find a way to use your used oil, maybe then you'll have a purpose for your used Stoddard.

WB metalwork> Has anyone here tried blending filtered waste engine and transmission oil

Cute response, but hardly in keeping with my question. Remind me to never ask you to fill my oil tank-----I'm afraid you wouldn't know one if it jumped up and hit you in the ass.

How about because I'm not eating the stuff? Even *you* should know that salad oil (without conversion to bio-diesel) will gum up the system.

Apparently you didn't read the part about being filtered?

I've decided to do just that, and I'm sending the invoice to you, sunshine.

Truth is, I already have the boiler-------and I'm looking for ways to decrease my heating costs, considering when the boiler was installed oil cost less than 70 cents/gallon, and is now well over $2. But thanks for the great remarks. Maybe we can stay warm by laughing this winter.

Harold

Harold and Susan Vordos wrote in article ...

I know you already consider me to be a wet blanket for your brilliant - near-genius - idea to end the world's dependence on "foreign" oil (I KNOW what I just said), BUT......

.....with ALL the oil shortages we have been through, coupled with what has been learned in the use of waste oil for heat......

......don't you think SOMEBODY - even a entreprenurial purveyor of snake oil - would have invented a machine or process to tap that "reserve" of waste oil?

The ad headline in the back of Popular Mechanics would read.....

"ALLOWS YOU TO HEAT YOUR HOUSE FOR NOTHING USING THE OIL YOUR NEIGHBORS THROW AWAY!!!!!!"

Think about it.

Rig up a small pump and motor.....

Set it up with one of those Frantz toilet paper filters.....for that "microfine" cleaning.....

Sell an eight-ounce bottle of odorless kerosene packaged as.....

"Special Waste Oil Viscosity Adjuster" .....that......

"..........through a closely-guarded, Iranian, crude oil chemical distillation formula - that the heating oil companies are now trying to buy up in order to shelve it - thins your waste oil supply down to that of Number Two fuel oil so it will burn cleanely in your current home oil burner."

YOU TOO CAN BE AN INTERNET MILLIONAIRE......

With all due respect, I don't believe you are the first with the idea, and I would bet hard-earned money that people with more engineering background than you, I, and six other "regulars" here put together, have already looked at this possibility, but rejected it for one practical reason or several.

While I offered a tongue-in-cheek response, read what some of the others have to say about the potential problems.

You're not the first to try this..........

.......and, you won't be the last to spend hard-earned dollars on reversing the consequences of such a foolish plan.

What you "save" on fuel could easily be doubled in what you "pay" for repairs and maintenance of a system that is not designed to burn this "free fuel.".

Take a close look at a standard fuel oil burner, and a waste oil heater.

The differences in design between the two exist for a reason.

Hey Harold...

I've got about 150 gallons of edm fluid with a little hydraulic oil mixed in it if you need a thinning agent. Just come and get it.

Please go away and don't come back.

GWE

Jeeze, Grant ! Don't be unkind to " * ". He thinks he is cool with that coded name, don't you know. At any rate, I like it a lot better than "Ignoramus".

In general, people that hide behind pseudonyms make my ass tired.

Bob (coward by any other name is still a coward) Sw>

Harold, not quite what you're asking about but one of my "ongoing" projects is converting a standard oil burner to run on waste oil. I looked at mixing, dual fuel feeds & such but concluded a complete conversion was actually the easiest (at least from a users viewpoint) way to go. The big problem is that standard lubricating oil has a much higher viscosity & won't spray out the nozzle properly. Actually it won't spray at all. You need to get the oil heated up to around the 200 F before it thins enough to spray properly. My mk. 1 conversion heated the oil just fine but by the time it got through the pump & out to the nozzle it was too cold to atomize. In fact the only thing it DID do resulted in the mk. 1 being christened "Calvin"

I'm just about ready to try the mk. 2, it has the ability to circulate hot oil through to the nozzle & back to the tank preheating the whole the system before it tries to light off. Hopefully after the test I'll be able to call this one "Hobbs" :).

No writeup yet but raw pics are here if you want a look-

This unit will be used to heat a detatched garage. I've built every safety I can think of into it but I certainly would never recommend a conversion like this for use in a living space.

H.

Let me preface this by saying that I don't have any first hand experience, but I think it would work just fine. The home heating oil is just diesel oil, and since you can in a pinch run motor oil in a diesel engine it will probably burn in your boiler.

I would suggest a test with a small tank with your 50/50 premix and a valve to cut out your regular oil feed and cut in the premix. Start your boiler on the regular fuel and once it is up to temp cut in the premix.

You will probably get a little more smoke, but if you can live with that you should be fine.

SNIP

Hey Harold,

Hmmmm......to the EDM fluid...............I believe dielectric sold under that generic has a flame retardant ingredient. Check before you go get it!

Even with that, I've seen two "EDM-left-running-unattended-all-night- without-the -flame-sensor-hooked-up" shop fires. One was total, the other almost $100,000 just in smoke damage clean-up.

A buddy of mine near Windsor has a commercially built used-oil "furnace" (seems more like a giant "space-heater" to me) that he heats his hangar with. It has to be shut down for a few hours (at least) per day so that the "crud" mentioned in another posters reply can be removed.

Brian Lawson, Bothwell, Ontario.

Hmmm, insulate the tank or leave it exposed and use it as thermal mass???

Dave

I don't know if it has a flame retardant or not. I do know it burns hot once you get it lit. Don't ask me how I know this. :)

Why don't you get your friend to "liberate" another cart from UPS so you can brag about it again.......

Roger Shoaf wrote in article ...

experience,

.....OR YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD......

Howard,

One of the things I did when I tested oil (15-40, from one of my Dodge diesels) was to take a serious look at the flame as it burned. While I'm far from an oil burner expert, it appeared that, if anything, the flame was somewhat better formed with the addition of the oil. Ignition was perfect every time, and it actually burned cleaner, due likely to a somewhat higher temperature. No smoke--------none------but then it never has. It's a Green Star boiler, high efficiency. Could be that the dilution, in my case, was low enough that I got good atomization. I've yet to fire up the boiler this season, but I've already put a generous amount of blended fuel in for further exploration. If I find it won't burn well, or won't ignite, I still have hundreds of gallons of capacity (1,000 gallon tank) to further dilute the mixture so it will perform properly, as before.

Thanks for the link to your pictures. I think I'd have to agree, if you're going to depend on only waste oil, your conversion, which I don't fully understand, would likely be the best way to go. Please post something when you have it operational, telling us how it works. I gather you have a considerable amount of time dedicated to solving the riddle. In my case, I don't have a source that would permit operating without buying at least some fuel oil, but the gallons I can add save enough to warrant the little inconvenience. We're pretty humble people, and live on a modest (fixed) income.

Thanks for your time and great information.

Harold

My mk. 1

Roger,

Thanks for your kind remarks.

While I was waiting for the boss while she was shopping at the local Wal Mart, a fellow parked near me. He was driving a small import pickup, diesel powered. I asked him about his mileage, and his reply was shocking. He informed me that he had been running the truck on a blend of highway fuel and transmission oil, which he was getting from a transmission shop owned by a friend. Great mileage, and no reports of any problems.

Thus far, my experiencing in messing with this stuff indicates it's ultra important that it gets filtered. Once it's gone through the filter, which takes considerable time, it will readily go through succeeding filters quite rapidly. I can see that without pre-filtering, it would be a huge mistake to add the stuff to a tank.

If you read my comments to Howard, you will already know that smoke isn't an issue. The boiler, which I have operated for several years, does not smoke, nor has it ever. Could be that it would with a higher amount of oil, but, if so, I'll adjust the ratio until it doesn't. All I'm trying to do is stretch my heating dollars a little. At this point, the amount of used oil I have at my disposal is limited.

Harold

snip

Heh! Somehow, I get the idea that by the time I've driven to make the pickup, I could have purchased an equal amount of heating fuel for the cost. Maybe not!

Where are you located?

Harold

Thanks, Brian. I'll keep that in the back of my mind should I explore his offer. I wouldn't want to introduce anything that would discourage ignition.

My filtering experience confirms what you say. Regardless of how cleanly used oil may be handled, it doesn't filter well initially-----but once through the filter, that seems to change. My limited previous experience yielded no filter problems at the boiler, so I'm optimistic that that won't be an issue. Burning, on the other hand, seemed to be fine, with no soot buildup---if anything, it lessened somewhat. I attribute that to a slightly hotter flame, with oil having a slightly higher heat yield. Could be I'm wrong.

Harold