Progress report-I picked up a suntec model A2 pump on ebay and did all the pump mods. per Tim and I did a test run on the bench.The pump is turned by a c-band satelite dish mover motor with an attached gear reduction unit (LOTS of torc)36/24 volt 1/15 hp. On 12 volts it turns about one rev per two sec. At the end of my drip tube I threaded a flare nut 1/4" with 5/16 24 threads per inch which I attached one of those needle things for filling footballs and basketballs with air. I powered the motor with a batery charger on 12 volts then 6 volts. on 12 I got 4oz. in ten min. that’s 3 cups per hour I hope that’s enough, and on 6 I got 2oz. in ten min. The needle was near the pump (no head pressure) for this test.The needle is capable of more output if I need more rpms. I already have my dc motor controller to adjust flo. I found a 30 gallon gas hot water tank on my scrap pile it has a 3" air inlet. The door is cut in and the air tube is cut at the bottom and near the top of the door, but that’s about as far as I am now. I hope two have all the bugs worked out for next years heating needs. Again a very special thanks to Tim for all this useful information.

Tigman,
How did the pump work out for you I havent heard from anybody in a while.

Tim,
I tried a baffle in the tank to help deflect heat to the shell as we discussed before didnt have much luck seems it slows the exhaust just a little too much it really smoke and sooted fast.I was actually get large flakes of soot out of the flue so I removed . It really works well without it.
I am now looking at putting in a fan limit switch thru the outer skin of the heater so it will allow the heater to heat up and turn the fan on automatically and shut it off once I shut the fuel off.
Slowly moving towards automizing everything including using an ignition module for a gas furnace and a stack primary for flame proof like on the old oil furnaces.

Scott all I have done is a test run outside not installed...Too busy at the shop and that pays the bills ya know. I also intend on limit switch for my fan setup...My stove is setup like yours except a little more industrial (there are picts on one of the linked discussions noted at the begining of this thread) I have a inside burner chamber surrounded by another chamber exactly like yours except all 10 gauge steel I have some 300 little tabs welded to burner chamber with the thought of more surface area and air contact when fan is on hopr it works as good as yours.. I also have just 2 6 inch holes for air in and air out of heat exchange area I assume I will be adding another for air exit like you...Anyways thats it for now...Tigman

Tigman,
Are you lighting yours the conventional way with diesel first . I am trying to figure out some sort of automated ignition,this is going to be a challenge. If you have any ideas maybe this should be everyones next project it seems we have mastered everything else together. I think we are all in the quest for the perfect setup.

yep diesel fuel lamp oil whatever...It would be nice to have auto ignition Jeff

Progress report- GOT-R-DONE- It’s been burning over 24 hours straight. I used a one quart pet dish inside a 3# coffee can, the can was the new style top that you pull foil lid off the top to open it and it mad a vary tight seal around the pet dish. To tight– After lighting it with lamp oil the pet dish shot like a rocket out of the coffee can I use the air inlet on top to view my flame thank god I was not viewing the flame at the time it could of shot hot oil in my eye! So I drilled a 3/16 hole in the can and that will not happen again. Just wanted to post my experience to ensure the safety of future experiment.

I’ve been toying with the idea of using my heater, as seen in this post as a heat exchanger. I have some copper tubing lying around that I would wrap around the outside of the heater to a tank and circulate it with a pump. I know it would work great but am concerned about polly building up in the copper when not in use. To keep the air out of it when not in use I thought I could use quick disconnects and keep the oil in the copper when not in use. If I was able to slip the wrapped copper over the top of heater(remove it from heater). I would also be able to still heat my shop with it when not cleaning oil. Any thoughts on this one. Thanks.

you want to pre-heat VO using this exchanger? but not for combustion in the heater? use steel coil then instead of copper (NAPA), OR circulate WATER through the exchanger, or coolant, use the heat from that fluid to heat VO, or your house, or whatever - best to keep VO coolish until it's ready to be burned - 2¢ from veggie vet (house and car)

It is getting cold enough now to need heat in the house full time so I have been checking everything out getting ready to light the drip heater, up until now I have been burning wood occasionally as needed.

I cleaned out the bottom of my brick chimney and got about 2/3ds of a paper grocery bag of black dry powdery soot. I had cleaned out the chimney last year before firing up the burner so this has to be the amount of soot created from burning the drip heater over all of last winter.

The heater ran just fine all last winter without incident, 2nd year in a row, hope it goes as well this winter.

The "military heater" discussion (HERE) indicates that that drip heater configuration seems to burn cleaner than my simple insulated dog bowl so I intend to try a few different configurations along the lines of the mil heater burner to see if anything improves it. One of the ideas is to use a thin screen around the top of the bowl that hopefully will glow red hot and ignite the smoke from the bowl. not sure what the screen is made of but it is very sheer, mostly very tiny holes, and it does not deteriorate even when heated to a bright red heat repeatedly. This screen is from the inside of a television color picture tube, it is an internal mask used to collect excess electrons so that the electron streem that iluminates the color dots is as small as practical. Any color picture tube has this, TV tubes or computer moniters, the screen is directly behind the front glass of the tube and is as big as the front dimensions of the display.

My drip heater I built for my shop worked so well I now have one in the house as well, It is teed in to my wood stove. It gets cold here 20 below. Tim keep us posted on any improvements. I will do the same.

had a little insurance setback with mine in shop..BUT i said screw you and took my shop off insurance..and intend on using it No UL certificate or not..lets keep info coming...Jeff

Hello, I have read this whole thread. You guys have done alot of good work on the drip burner idea. I have been burning WVO for two winters now and while it is cheap the way I am doing it is a real pain in the butt. I plan on getting the 2qt stainless bowl inside the 3 qt. That should help on the combustion side. As for fuel delivery. Is the suntec pump with wiper motor the best way to go? I tried a chem metering pump but it didnt seem to work very well. I would like to come up with something relatively inexpensive obviously.

I turn my suntec with a dc motor off a c-band satelite dish positioner it has like a gear reduction tranny, sort a speek built right in.

I have been tinkering with the burner in the heater. After reading through the "military heaters on Ebay" discussion several times (HERE), and downloading the mil burner manual (follow the "KENEFICKMOUNTAIN" link in the last post on the first page of the link above), and printing out the burner pot pictures, I wondered if I could incorperate some of it's design into this much smaller 1 QT dog bowl burner. Looks like I can.

I have been reluctant to tinker with the burner but bought a couple more dog bowls to play with. The concept of the dog bowl burner is that the thin SS bowl stays hot enough to almost instantaniously vaporize the fuel drops that splatter into it, I was concerned that if I let more air in around the underside of the burner bowl the air would cool the bowl below it's vaporizing temp but it looks like air can be allowed around the underside of the bowl without being too much of a problem, within reason.

New burner design - Still use the dog bowl inside another container, this time I am using a tin can for the lower container, the can was a 3 pound tin of Planters peanuts, I think the same can is also used for 3 pounds of coffee. The can had one of the new peal-off tinfoil tops but I used a can opener and removed the 1/2 inch ring that the foil was stuck to, this allows the dog bowl to set nicely in the top of the can.

This first test was simply to see if the concept would work at all, I needed to start someplace so I arbitrarily added a ring of 44 (just came out to that number) 1/8 inch diameter holes through the side of the burner bowl just below the top rim. The holes are roughly 1/2 to 3/8 inch apart and about 1/2 inch down below the rim of the bowl. I did not measure the placement of these holes, just started in by eye on the drill press. At the location of the holes there is about 3/16 to 1/4 inch of space between the side of the burner bowl and the inside of the bottom can, this space allows more than enough clearance for air to reach the burner bowl holes from inside the bottom can. I then drilled five 1/2 inch holes around the can about 1 1/4 inch up from its bottom (allows soot to build up without clogging holes). The five 1/2 inch diameter holes are about 2 1/2 times the area of the 44 1/8 inch holes so there is no restriction for the air getting to the smaller holes.

The Idea of all this is to allow more air to come up through the lower can and blow through the smaller holes and mix with the veg vapor lower in the burner bowl, hopefully to get a more efficient burn. Sorta worked, the mil burner postings indicate that the mil burner will burn with blue flame even on veg, not quite as well as it does on more volital fuel but the one fellow dripping veg in his mil burner indicates mostly blue flame with maybe yellow tips, this is what I was hoping for, didn't get that yet.
I don't see any blue flames with this yet but it did change the burner heat output pattern a good bit, it also allows more combustion air to be fed in from the top air inlet without causing flameouts, all this extra air changed the flame color from mid yellow to bright yellow indicating a couple hundred degree hotter flames. The hotter flame seems to have pretty much eliminated the soot collection in the stove, the smoke from the chimney is about the same so I suspect the hotter flame is actually just burning away the soot as fast as it is being generated but the interior of the burner tank now has very little soot accumulation and there is a lot less soot accumulating in the bottom of the stove where it lands when the top applied air blows it out of the burner bowl. It also looks like there is less coal forming in the bottom of the burner bowl but can't tell for sure yet. The burner has now burned for 3 days straight without going out, the longest the original burner would go without cleaning has been 4 days, if I go past that it should indicate an improvment, the soot reduction is already a nice improvment.

I don't know just how much oxygen is actually being added to the burn as what is going through the burner bowl holes is not actually air, it is combustion gasses from lower down in the burner tank, may just be hot CO2, this may be why I don't see any blue flames from the new holes. don't know yet.

Harbor freight had a sale on non-contact infrared thermometers a while back, should have had one of these earlier. This one has a laser pointer built in to indicate just where it is measuring the temp. Using this new meter I see that the new burner has moved the hottest band of heat up the side of the burner tank about 6 inches. With the original burner the hottest section of the burner tank was at the same level as the top of the burner bowl, the combustion air coming down from the top was pushing the flames sideways just as they came out of the bowl. This "hot band" was about 2 inches wide and the temp tapered off both above and below this. The new burner still has about a 2 inch wide hot band but it is 6-7 inches higher up on the burner tank, I think this is because the gasses coming through the ring of holes is sort of crowding the flames into a smaller vertical columb in the center of the bowl, looking through my stove peep hole I can see that the flames no longer cling to the inside wall of the burner bowl, there is about a half inch space between the holes and the center columb of flame.

Opening the stove door with the burner running allows oxygenated air to get to the lower holes in the burner, unfortunatly, it also screws up the draft through the stove, so I don't know if the burner will react the same with oxygen once the stove door is closed BUT - with the stove door open the flames in the burner pot shift around and look a lot like the swirling flames seen in a Turk burner, a vertical spiraling center columb of flame that is not touching the sides of the burner bowl. SO - the next change will be to modify the pedistal that holds the burner assembly such that oxygenated air from outside the stove will be allowed into the burner through the bottom of the lower burner can, the 5 holes will be eliminated so only outside air will be coming throught the 1/8 inch holes in the burner bowl. Hopefully the added oxygen will inprove the burn even more.

One thing I did find - with the original burner, if I added too much air down from the top the flames would become erratic and the flame was easily blown out randomly, with the new design the flames are stable and burn just fine but if too much cool air is allowed to the burner the burner bowl cools down to a point where the vaporization stops, if an actual pool of oil starts to collect on the bottom of the burner bowl the vaporization does not take place correctly and the flame will get smaller and smaller until it goes out, takes 3-4 minutes to happen once a fuel pool starts to collect.

I intend to add a 90 deg sweep-type piece of 2 inch car exhaust pipe tubing to bring the air up through the bottom of the stove and into the burner, this will allow the end of this air pipe to be just below the bottom of the stove and out from under the stove, this will allow me to add an air gate control to the end of the tube, don't know if this will be needed but it will allow more testing. I suspect the top fed combustion air will still be used, need it to blow soot out of the burner bowl if nothing else, don't know, but I will then have 3 dampers to tweek rather than the current 2. This large diameter air tube will also allow me to try adding a small computer cooling fan on the end of the air tube to push even more air to the burner, may not need it but I will try it.

Once I get the bottom air installed I can then try changing the burner bowl hole sizes and patterns, looks like I need to pick up a half dozen more dog bowls.

This is a picture of the completed burner.

complete_burner.JPG (17 KB, 68 downloads)

This shows the holes in the burner bowl.

bowl_-_showing_all_holes.JPG (12 KB, 52 downloads)

This is looking down into the empty lower can.

down_into_can.JPG (22 KB, 53 downloads)

This is a top view of the complete burner.

looking_down_into_burner_bowl.JPG (27 KB, 61 downloads)

Tim, et al: I improved my Sears oil heater by angling the air inlet holes to cause the flame to swirl in a column, a little like a Turk burner. This might work for the dog dish, too, which strongly resembles the Sears burner hole arrangement. I used a punch that fit the holes and just bent them to one side as far as they would go (about 45degrees). I used to clean out the accumulated carbon after 3-4 days of low fire, but now it will actually burn itself clean on a hot fire after an hour. I haven't cleaned it since last year, and have burned roughly 20 gallons sporadically over that time (it uses biodiesel, not svo, so your results may vary).

Re: Scott mentioned Automatic ignition: I had surprising success with an old-style diesel glow plug (the kind with exposed wire heating coil), slightly submerged in svo. The coil was about 1-inch high, so it stuck a bit more than 1/2 inch above the oil. Applying power (5 volts in this case) made it glow red hot. The oil around it got hot, smoked, then ignited after a few seconds!! My plan was to tap a suitable hole in the bottom of my turk burner to thread this glow plug into. I haven't had time, but still think it will work.

I'm also building a new wood stove for my shop that incorporates a turk burner into the base. Not very far along, sad to say, but this thread is inspiring me.

Cheers,
JohnO

johno -- I will give angle holes a try once I get the bottom outside air added, probably try several types, sizes, and locations for the holes since it only takes changing out the burner bowl. I will eventually try a glowplug for auto-ignition but not a priority for this heater as it burns continuously once the outside temps stay below the mid 40's F or lower.

Good luck with the wood stove turk, a friend here did the same thing, he is using it but it makes soot something terrible inside the stove. The burner runs like a normal turk outside the enclosure but smokes a LOT once placed inside the 3 ft X 3 ft X 2 ft tall steel firebox. Others report the same problem when putting an enclosure around a turk, don't know why they don't burn clean inside an enclosure?
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I also intend to develop a Pic microprocessor based adjustable room thermostat for this type burner, it will automatically adjust the speed of the fuel pump to increase/decrease the amount of heat from the burner, it will also have min and max fuel flow settings so the burner won't get starved for fuel or create way too much heat, probably also have an alarm to alert that it has hit one of these upper or lower limit conditions.


After 3 days of continuous burn I had a flameout last night, cleaned the burner of minimal crud and had another flameout this afternoon. I don't think this has to do with the burner mods directly but with the distance between the burner bowl and the upper combustion air inlet pipe. I had this same problem during the early development of this heater and corrected it entirely by reworking the burner pedistal to move the top of the burner bowl down an additional inch further away from the air inlet pipe. The peanut can is actually 1 1/8 inch taller than the SS canister used for the original burner so this new configuration is actually a bit closer to the air inlet than the original burner was, I had forgotten all about this problem. I will make up a couple lower cans to test, one will be 1 inch shorter, another will be 2 inches shorter, this should eliminate the flameouts as it did before.

After the 3 day burn there was very little crud in the burner bowl, and there was also very little soot flakes laying on the burner assembly support plate. Looks promising. It would sure be nice if the bowl would eventually self-clean as johno indicated his will do when burning biodiesel, probably a bit doughtfull with veg, but maybe?

This picture is of the crud in the new ventilated bowl after burning 3 days at a low fuel rate of about 1/3 pint per hour. The burner bowl DID NOT contain ANY loose soot flakes so the upper air is still blowing the soot out of the burner bowl as it did prior to adding the holes. The crud shown was absolutely dry and crumbly and came loose from the bowl with just a couple light taps with a screwdriver. The height of the crud ring was about 3/16 inch and it was about 1 1/2 inches in diameter.

new_burner-3_day_flameout_crud.JPG (30 KB, 57 downloads)

For comparison - This picture shows a representitive amount of crud that the original burner bowl produced after a 3 day burn at the same low drip rate. There is a volcano peak near the center that is about 1 inch tall and you can see a bit of a crater in it's center where the fuel drops fell (there is another 1 inch tall peak near the left edge for some reason, un-level bowl I suspect). The volcano wall eventually builds up enough to prevent normal vaporization of the fuel. This is the type of crud I have found during every cleaning of the original burner bowl over the last two winters, the new bowl with holes is MUCH better.

Normally the bowl would not be this oily but I screwed up and forgot to enable the fuel metering pump flameout shutdown detector and the bowl was almost full of oil when I realized the burner had gone out.

normal_bowl-3_day_flameout_crud-1_inch_deep.JPG (38 KB, 46 downloads)