We have used a couple of types of waste-oil heaters. They are
basically of two types.
The first uses a series of filters to get the oil clean enough that
it will flow through a conventional furnace atomizing burner. The
downside is that they use filters up fast, depending on the amount of
contamination in the oil.
The second is similar to a Coleman stove. There is a pre-heating
chamber that is fired with clean kerosene to get the waste oil to
vaporize. Once the process is taking place, the kerosene is no longer
needed, since the heat of combustion keeps the vaporization taking
place. This type of heater needs only a rough screen to keep the 'big
chunks' out of the flame. The rest of the waste simply accumulates as
heavy ash in the bottom of the burner. This needs to be scraped out
every day or two.
Even though we produce a lot of waste oil in our equipment rental
business, both types of heater are a bit too 'high maintenance' for a
production shop. I think they would be OK for a home shop, since the
hours they would be used would limit the maintenance considerably.
Our first heaters were Kroll, of the vaporizing type, and the later
ones were Lanair, I believe. Also, this was 20 years ago or so, so I
don't know the current environmental opinion of these heaters. At the
time, however, the Fire Marshall approved our use of these. I just
did a Google search of "waste oil heaters" and got a lot of hits.
- Bill Rabel
Seattle, WA
> All of this talk about heating, electric, gas and geothermal garage
> heat
> reminds me to ask about a topic I have long been curious about:
> Waste Oil
> Heaters. Does anyone have any experience with them? I don't need
> to heat the
> garage around the clock, just for a few hours at a time. I
> frequently have
> several gallons of used oil sitting around between trips to the
> recycling
> center and it would be nice to put it to good use. Do they work?
> Are they
> environmentally ok?
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