Heating Oil to Waste Motor Oil Conversion

NYSpeed Automotive NYSpeed Off Topic
1

Has anyone converted a heating oil burner to burn waste motor oil?

I replaced my oil boiler with a natural gas boiler this summer. so I now have a 15 year old boiler and 2 ceiling mount unit heaters that will be useless once I finish off what is left in my 1000 gallon tank.

looking around my local Craigslist it seems there is a bit of waste oil around and it seems like it shouldn’t be that hard of a conversion. I don’t heat my garage very often so I figured it might be worth the conversion to heat for free.

2

I’ve seen articles on building your own but not converting a heating oil one.

3

You’d probably need to change an office in the nozzle. I’m assuming it has a nozzle, haven’t worked on them much or recently.

You’d need to heat up the oil before its sprayed into the chamber so the viscosity thins out.

Post a picture of your setup?

4

From what I’ve found online it seems like most people swap out the pressurized nozzles for a siphon nozzle connected to an air compressor and the siphon draws from a small tank with a heating element in it.

There were a few where people kept the typical pressurized setup but it seemed like they were pre-heating the oil to a pretty high temperature. They seemed less reliable.

Ill post some pictures later

5

Either way the oil needs to atomize in order to ignite, so you’d need to have some type of nozzle that matches the type of oil your burning. I think you should be able to convert but you’d need to adjust the spray nozzle to make sure it atomizes properly and ignites properly.

6

So this is what I have to work with… 2 56k BTU powrmatics and a 121k BTU burnham boiler.

Both have Beckett burners AFG on the boiler AF on the unit heaters.

https://scontent-a-iad.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn2/1477388_10105627105567224_2017139292_n.jpg

https://fbcdn-sphotos-b-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-frc3/1452122_10105627106026304_389283800_n.jpg

https://scontent-b-iad.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/1497796_10105627106794764_778687627_n.jpg

I figure ill modify the boiler and probably just sell the unit heaters since the boiler output is higher than the 2 unit heaters combined

7

Make sure you have a good source of clean waste oil…
They can’t burn heavy weight gear oil, transmission fluid, coolant, water, etc… It’ll fark up your shizz yo.
Some might be able to, I don’t know. I just know you’ll get a lot of dirty oil if you get it all off craigs or from auto stores etc…

8

in for results.

9

Based on the Beckett conversions Ive been looking at it seems like it will burn through just about any oil type with the right preheat and air pressure settings.

The water issues seem to most commonly be dealt with with a water trap filter which seems easy enough.

The boiler is rated at 121k btu at about 1gph on heating oil and I think waste oil is a little denser energy wise. With the mileage my wife and I put on our cars I’m doing a couple oil changes each month so I will be producing about 2.5 gallons of oil a month giving me at least 60 hours of heat…I’m not planning to continuously heat the garage but if I get a good source I just might