I just use a small propane torch to light it. It usually fires right away.

WMO centrifuge
http://youtu.be/RzOsn9CYu14

Well work has been slow on this thing lately. I'm hoping to work on it some more over this holiday weekend. I have a different idea for the water heat exchanger. The original idea was just to put the propane tank that the burner shoots into into a tank of water. I have not been very pleased with the rate of heating the water. So the new plan is to coil some .75" copper tube around the propane tank itself.

Thoughts?

So I'm also wondering how well a heat pump would work with this. Obviously it won't work well in ac mode.

Say I hear the water and pump it to the heat exchangers that heat the house and those heat exchangers will bring down the temp of the water to a certain point but if I also run the cooled water to a water/refrigerant heat exchange to extract that last bit of heat out of the water before it returns to the WMO burner. I have two 12k btu ac units that are on the chopping block I it t haven't found what I want to do with them.

so i havent given up on this yet lol just been a slow go lately. but i am making progress. i will try to get a few photos up and what not this week.

So progress has been slow lately. It's just been to cold out side (no heat in garage) but I haven't been pleased with the heat output of this thing yet. Few problems I've had are the nozzle will still clog up once in a while and that might be my fault as I'm not super careful with the filtered oil. Problem two I've greatly under estamated 30k btu lol it takes much longer to heat things up than I thought even tho my chimney temps are in the low 100*f range. So I have been re thinking the heat exchanger and also pondering doubling the nozzle size to a 60k version. The larger size doesn't require any more air pressure and only slightly more cfm. So my hope is that the larger nozzle will have larger openings so it won't clog up.

Sounds good. Keep us in the loop and let us know how it goes.

Well like all of my other projects this one has been pushed back a little. Been getting my house in shape to sell to build/ buy something else. I never updated this after I got the 60k nozzle. It burns much hotter! But I have since found a few different oil heater designs that I have liked so I might be changing up the heat exchanger all together. This will probably have to wait till after I'm in the new place.

On a side note I was pondering today about thermal batteries. Isn't motor oil supposed to be a good thermal battery? More btu storage per gallon than water? And since it doesn't freeze that would be great! Although I wouldn't pump it around I was thinking more for the energy storage? Anyone have any insight on that theory?

Nope, water has more heat capacity than oil. About twice as much per unit volume, depending on the type of oil. The hydrocarbons that store and release more heat than water do so because of phase change (melting/freezing). Think of things like beeswax, candle wax, and the like. The latent heat of melting is 100 times as large as the specific heat capacity. This means the heat required to melt a certain mass of wax is the same as it would take to raise the the temperature 100 degrees! Not a trivial amount of storage capacity by any measure.

Maybe, it's because I'm not American.
But I thought WMO means Waste Motor Oil.
If this is correct, it may be cheap to use, but what has it got to do with biofuels or ECOrenovator?

It is a great DIY project. If you are burning old oil you are not burning other fules. Could be a good way to heat a grange. I find it interesting. It is strong on the DIY part.