You know the little triangle? It says recycle/reuse/reduce. Burning waste oil is not recycling it, it is reusing it. It is keeping new oil from being burned to reduce the amount of oil being used as fuel. It takes much less refining energy than recycling it and saves the same amount of crude.
The EPA quote above is disingenuous. It doesn't tell us what the rest of the barrel of oil or what's left over from the recycled gallon of oil can be used for. Of course, the rest barrel of crude is going to have many, many more uses. I doubt the recycled oil does.
The main thing is that oil is very hard to burn outside the boiling burning plate inside, so it is safer than burning wood. Since the stove in this rental was already there, and my insurance was ok with it, I'm not concerned. The copper tube is cool to the touch inches from the stove pipe. I guess I could make it appear better, but all it would do is decrease the chance of me spilling oil. I have fire suppression at hand and do not leave it unattended.
Spook- your intake duct sounds like a good idea. My setup is stupidly simple and appears to work so I'm going to go with it for a while and make changes only if I see a need for it. I think the valve I got was about $10 from a local fluid connector place and uses more standard threads. I got a nicer one from Home Depot, but it is all for crimped connections in a gas setup and hard to find anything else that would thread to it.
Spook- your intake duct sounds like a good idea. My setup is stupidly simple and appears to work so I'm going to go with it for a while and make changes only if I see a need for it. I think the valve I got was about $10 from a local fluid connector place and uses more standard threads. I got a nicer one from Home Depot, but it is all for crimped connections in a gas setup and hard to find anything else that would thread to it.
It looks like the intake will be somewhat simple to set up since I can just use single wall dryer duct. It'll keep the cost down too I'm hoping. This is a budget project so I'm trying to do it as cheaply as I can while still being as safe as possible. The exhaust ducting from what little research I've done so far looks like it'll be costly (unless I can get a good discount somewhere) given the need for a section of double wall duct to pass through the roof, a roof flashing, and a rain/weather cap. All I've found so far are stainless steel, which I really don't want to spend the money on unless there's absolutely no other option. I thought about having it exit through the wall, but that wouldn't really save me more than a couple bucks, plus the bends could negatively impact the draft with 6" ducting.
For my burner, I've seen some people mention using stainless steel salad bowls. I've got a small one that looks like about 16-14ga, but that seems way too thin to me for a burner. I'll give it a try though (with fire bottle nearby), and if it works, great. If it can't stand up to the combustion heat I'll figure out something else.
Do you have a non-contact thermometer? If you do, care to measure your burn pan next time you get it all warmed up?
Hi guys, this is a new idea from the ones i posted in the brew room about workshop heating and space heaters costing a fortune to run. So i hear these waste oil heaters burn really clean and heat up a building better than a wood stove. My question is has anyone made there own and got good results or has anyone made one of these ?
I'm not sure about heating better than a wood stove, but the impression I have from the research I've done is that they'll heat just as well as a wood stove once everything's dialed in. I'm stripping down a water tank right now from a 55gal water heat that I'll be using as the body for my stove. Not sure if I'll have it done in time to use this season, but I'm hoping to. As far as clean burning, again that's dependent on how well it's set up and how well it burns the oil being fed to it. If it's burning right, they're fairly clean burning. Obviously there are gasses from general combustion that still get released into the air, but since less fuel is being consumed than with wood or pellet stoves, there are less pollutants being put into the atmosphere.
My goal is to build mine as cheaply as possible (save for the exhaust stack and ducting since that will all have to be bought new) because when all is said and done, it's still just an experiment. If I can't get it to work well, off to the recycling heap it goes and I'll put a pellet stove in its place. If it does work well, it'll be my primary source of heat for my shop for (hopefully) years to come.
I don't know if anyone is interested or not, but I took the plunge and bought a Centrifuge for processing waste motor oil WMO. I thought I'd put everything on video for those that wanted to follow. Here is a link Free Range American
