How has the system been working for you? Are you using it a lot?

The system still has a few bugs, so is constantly getting tweeked, we use it about 5 days out of seven, it runs for about 6 hours to heat the 400 +/- gallons of cold water to about 104 deg F. straight out of the faucet. Then next day it takes about 1.5 or 2 hrs to re-warm the water using a recirculating pump, temp gain of about 10 deg F per hour. We use almost no chemicals in the water, so we dump and use fresh after about 4 to 6 days. We find an evening soak to be good for my arthritis/sciatica, and a nice peaceful time to relax and sort out the day, and plan tomorrows work.
Thanks for your interest.
Tony.

A quick update, the 3" burner tube is much better, The stick on oil pan heater, I would not bother with again. The burner is a bit difficult to get hot enough, we were getting a little pooling of oil in the burner tube then the oil would catch and we had flames shooting upward. I now have a tiger torch so use it to get enough heat into the burner at startup. Next addition will be a heat exchanger to warm the oil using the output hot water, the thinking there is that by having good warm oil, we will not get oil pooling, therefore a faster startup. Basically we are very pleased with the burner, SWMBO was complaining about the amount of time and money spent, but now we have it down to about 10 minutes per day.
We use the tub almost every evening, to sooth these old bones after a day of hard work, There we thought retirement would be a life of ease - haha.
Tony

Hi. New subscriber.. I clicked on all the picture links in this post, but couldn't see any of them. Would have liked to. Any chance they can be fixed + visible?? NIBS, that's a pretty cool thing you built there, hope it's working well for you still. I can't always remember what some of the acronyms like WMO are; you might want to define them the first time you use them, so newbies can get their meaning without going elsewhere for a look-up..

We use the wvo burner almost every day to heat the hot tub. The pictures seem to be there ok.
The changes I make now are incremental as the basic system is pretty well done. The most recent change I have made is to pass the out coming hot water through a tube with a fuel line inside, this warms the fuel oil and helps ignition. Since the pictures, I have also put a tape drive motor driving a gear pump to deliver fuel to the top of the christmas tree. Also put a washer in front of the babington ball which catches some of the oil from the jet, this stops oil pooling in the burner tube. I now use a tiger torch to light the burner, this gets the burner tube up to red hot in just a few minutes which really makes a difference.
All in all this is the best gizmo I have built (though I do make a buck or two from my patent, easyearwire.com). With a bit of fussing to light, the burner will handle waste motor oil, and any light oil stock.

So we have shut down the hot tub for the year, and miss it. The reason for the shut down is fear that the heat exchanger coils, and water circulating pump will burst when they freeze. One cure I have thought of is to put a timer on the pump that will pump warm water from the tub through the coils for lets say 5 minutes per hour every hour. That should be sufficient until Nov when we head for Mexico. Does anyone know of such a 120Volt timer?

As we are coming into hot tub season again I'm curious if you are still working on this project?

Will probably not work on it anymore other than maintenance, since it seems to do the job for us quite well. Though we will have to move it next year, so will likely do changes to a few things, like make some fire clay and insulate the firebox a little better.
Tony

Where are you getting all your SVO?

There is a hotel down the way good for about 7 gals per week, I can also get it from a restaurant across the road, and from another hotel in town. No problem getting the oil, there is not much competition for it hereabouts.
Tony.