WMO burner/heater
 

So i have started building a WMO heater. i have my old water heater tank that i plan to make the heat exchanger out of.

i did something different from all of the other videos and things i have found on the interweb. Most everyone goes with a minimum of a 1 GPH nozzle i have got with a .2GPH nozzle. my thought behind this is who needs 150k BTU? i know i dont. I have a brand new 95% t stage furnace that is rated at 72K and its more than enough to heat my 1600SF house. so if we base the WMO btu output at 150K (ive seen many numbers online) i should be at about 30k btu and thats probably under what i need but i might end up jumping to the .3 nozzle size.

Anyway this is what i have so far its a ,2GPH nozzle with 3PSI.

http://ecorenovator.org/forum/member...d-wmo-4psi.jpg

this is the retention head i made for it. you cant see it in the pictures because its in the tube. it serves two purposes one of them being to put a slight swirl to the air and the other is it gets red hot and helps to keep the fuel vaporizing.
http://ecorenovator.org/forum/member...ead-i-made.jpg
'
and this is just a short video
https://youtu.be/yxw0056m3X8

more tinkering today

http://ecorenovator.org/forum/member.../260-image.jpg

Nice, so your heating a shop with it? Are you using the air pressure to siphon up the oil? Pre-heat on the oil? My work has an ample supply of wmo and a huge gas bill as the doors are constantly being opened. We had looked into commercial systems before but never went for them. They sounded high maintenence as well.

Currently I'm not sure if I'll just be heating my garage or try to get some of the heat into my house. Yes the air pressure is used to atomize the fuel and siphon the oil up to the nozzle. As far as pre heating the oil I've had it running with and without pre heat. It runs ok with no pre heat but seems to clog up easier? Not sure if it really does but it seems to run less smoothly with out pre heat. I've been pre heating it to 140-160f.

Up till this point I've been running in filtered oil straight out of my car/truck. I have a centrifuge that I've filtered some of the oil with and I'm going to start using that the next time in messing with the burner.

The only real problem I've been having with it so far is that after it's been running for a while the flame will begin to cut out for a split second but restart instantly. This only happens a few times a minute but then it will continue to get worse and eventually the flame will go out. So that is the next big to work on. Once that is solved I'll be making the heat exchanger

so i spent a few more hours tinkering with the burner. and i have another thing im going to try tomorrow and see if it makes any more improvement but if not, i think im at the best its going to get

http://ecorenovator.org/forum/member...-heat-3psi.jpg

thats filtered oil at 3psi. very hot!

http://youtu.be/XgPjwpMrD-w

The latest run. Pretty sure I have fixed all of my little issues I was having with the burner. So now I will start working on the heat exchanger. I'm planning on using my old 40 gallon water hear. I want to hear air and water with this set up so I'm still in the thinking stage on it. Any one have any thoughts?

Awesome work, I am very interested in your project. We have 3 Mack trucks that get the oil changed every 4 months. That is 33 gallons of oil every 4 months.
I'm thinking a copper water coil inside the pipe with the fire or just blasting onto a large tank of water, then two heat exchangers, one air 20x20 Water to Air Heat Exchanger New Front Mounting | eBay and one water to water, either homemade or bought. Like coil in coil, or like a solar water heater tank.

Wow, I missed this thread. Love to see more of the build though, and how you go about prepping the oil.

Where have you gotten most of your information on designing it?

ill have some more of the build in a few days hopefully. i actually have a centrifuge that i use to clean the oil. it really is pretty amazing how different the oil looks after its been cleaned.

as far as getting info on the build ive just been looking on the web and youtube. lots of people are making oil burners but most are the drip type which is great and all but even after you turn the fuel off it continues to burn for a long time so its not the safest way to do it.

as of now i have th burner set up to heat about 20 gallons of water and im really not happy with the results at this point. but i have a few other ideas and one of them is jumping up to the .4 nozzle which will double my heat output.

https://youtu.be/Z1MZpr64620

latest run of the burner tonight. i made a few adjustments and now im able to get water temp over 160f and thats about 40 degrees better than before. also these little adjustments cleaned up the exhaust smoke that i was having

Don't be shy. What you are doing is very useful and interesting.

Well I added a new photo to my album on here. My phone crashes when I try to add the photo to the post but it shows the basic idea of the heat exchanger.

http://ecorenovator.org/forum/member...er-drawing.jpg

http://ecorenovator.org/forum/member...nning-good.jpg

http://ecorenovator.org/forum/member.../261-image.jpg

http://ecorenovator.org/forum/member.../258-image.jpg

I added a few of the pics in your album to your post for you. This is a very interesting project.

Can you tell us a bit more about the burner itself?

The centrifuge would also be very interesting to see and hear about.

thanks for adding them.

here is another video of just the burner running

https://youtu.be/q1div6g1yho

this is the part number for the nozzle im using 30609-2 and the nozzle body is 17147
those are the only parts i have bought so far. everything else has been stuff i have had on hand.

i will work on the details of the centrifuge soon.

Is it really as loud as the video makes it seem?

its not that loud but it does make some noise. thats actually something ive noticed about the videos too not sure what it is about my phone that makes it seem so loud

so today i was messing around with some different burner designs.. i came up with this, basically it goes from 2.125" tube to 1.125" tube. the video doesn't really do it justice but it really focuses the flame into a longer skinner flame and i think i like that better

https://youtu.be/o16Y4BINhgs

Perhaps if you can talk a little it'll put the sound into perspective.

Ford Guy,
I like the idea but how do you regulate the temperature? Once the water gets to about 120 to 125F I'd want to shut off the burner. Is there an easy way to automatically turn it back on when the temp drops below a specific level? It seems to me these are a little tough to get going.

Rob

Daox i made a video but you cant really hear me haha but im pretty soft spoken so ill try again this weekend hopefully and ill got over my "silent" air compressor and the centrifuge at the same time.

Rob my plan is to heat water and then pump it into the house into a heat exchanger. This is also part of the reason i went with the smaller nozzle so i could just load up the fuel reservoir start the burner and pump and walk away.

the water tank will probably remain an open system at least at this point just so i dont have to worry about a tank exploding if something happens

also i think i have finally decided on a burner design. over the last few weeks i have been tweaking the burner a little and im finally happy. it lights up easy gets hot fast and burns clean!

Interesting, do you still have to prime the burner with kerosene to get it started?

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.

May all be true, but my question was: what has it got to do with biofuels or ECOrenovator?

This is not just a DIY-forum as far as I know...

So, does it belong in this forum?

It is just like making biodiesel but with less things added to use it. So yes it belongs here.