A Waste Oil Heater Review

Waste oil heaters and burners come in many shapes and sizes and use a variety of
techniques to ignite and combust the fuel which is fed to them. Some heating systems are
as fundamentally simple as a kitchen variety grease fire in a frying pan while others
require computerized controls and elaborate fuel pretreatment routines. This document
will cover the most popular types and attempt to explain the pro’s and con’s behind each.

Gun Burners
The most common type of waste oil heaters on the market
today are commercially manufactured units which use a
horizontally fired “gun” that is not much different than what a
home heating oil furnace uses.

Gun type burners work by using a gear pump to deliver the

fuel under high pressure to a fuel nozzle which then atomizes
the fuel by spraying it. A motor driven fan mixes extra air into
the cloud of fuel and it is then ignited.

Most of these gun type burners are very limited and inflexible on the type of fuel they can
use due to fuel viscosity and ignition flash point. In addition to the fuel limitation, these
types of burners require the fuel to be filtered to a fine degree to prevent particulate
matter from entering both the pump gears and the fine orifice of the fuel nozzle.

Gun type burners generally use a spark ignition module and high voltage ignition
transformer as well as an electric motor that drives both the fuel pump and combustion
fan using a common shaft.

The typical cost of a commercially manufactured waste oil heater starts at around $4000
for a small bare-bones 100K BTU unit and can run up to $7000 for a more complex unit
of the same size.
There is also the cost of maintenance and repair. Replacement parts can usually be
obtained only through the manufacturer and can get costly quick.

Maintenance involves frequent changing of the fuel filters and removal of the burner to
swap the spray nozzles when they get plugged and gummed up. Another common trait
among waste oil heaters is that the combustion chambers need to be cleaned out due to
the inherent particulate matter that comes from waste oil.
Pot Burners
To my knowledge, there are no more commercially manufactured pot burners
manufactured in the USA. Pot burners, new or old, are very dirty devices and emit lots of
smoke and soot. They are difficult to ignite and slow to extinguish.

Pot burners work on the same principle as your kitchen variety grease fire. A pan or pot
that sits at the bottom of the unit is filled with hot oil and then ignited. As the oil burns it
creates more heat to help more oil ignite and burn. Fuel is fed to the burner using a small
pump or even by gravity flow.

Pot burners do not have a way to turn them instantly on or off but they can be throttled by
regulating how much oil is fed to the pot. Much like a wood stove, pot burners require a
warm up time and a cool down time that can last from 20 minutes to an hour.

While pot burners almost never burn cleanly, they do have the advantage of being much
more reliable due to the simplicity of the design and lack of mechanical parts required for
operation.

Pot burner maintenance is a nightmare and can take up a significant amount of time and
energy. An air-chisel or hammer is required to knock loose the hardened cement like
carbon substance that builds up in the pot. This carbon substance is what is left behind as
the oil burns and it builds up inside the pot and can take a lot of effort to remove.

Home Made Pot Burners

The most common type of home made heater is a pot burner due to the simplicity of the
design. Most folks tend to use an old water heater tank and feed the unit by gravity and
natural air convection. As with the older commercially manufactured units, these devices
are as dirty as they are simple to build.

The one advantage to the home made pot burners is that some setups require no
electricity for operation. The fuel can be gravity fed and natural air flow can be used like
a wood stove for oxygen. Despite the dirty exhaust, a heating unit that doesn’t need
electrical power to operate could be a real benefit in a power outage.
Babington Burners
The Babington burner was invented by a retired
NASA engineer Robert Babington. The burner
works on the same effect as a whale’s blow-hole in
that a high speed jet of air is mixed with a liquid
that is being poured over a spherical ball with a tiny
hole in the side. As the liquid flows over the
outside surface of the ball, the air pressure inside
the ball is forced through a tiny hole in the side.
The high speed jet of air then atomizes the liquid
fuel and it is then ignited.
Babington burners are very efficient, clean burning,
and long lasting with low maintenance.
Their biggest problem for the do-it-yourself crowd
is that they are difficult to build due to the precision
machining required to make the tiny hole.

Murphy’s Machines Burner

An alternative burner design is the MurphysMachines.com hybrid system. The Murphy
burner is a combination of a Babington and a gun style system that is reliable and easy to
build for the do- it- yourself crowd.
Using common parts and components, the system is easy to build with basic tools and a
welder.
In addition, the plans at http://www.murphysmachines.com/waste_oil_heater.html
contain the required information to build a complete heating system that operates much
like a regular furnace with manual controls.
The Murphy’s Machines heating system can burn almost any type of oil including Waste
Motor Oil, Hydraulic fluid, Vegetable oil, Fuel Oil, Biodiesel and more. It is easy to
maintain, burns clean, and is easy to build.

Copyright 2008 MurphysMachines.com