Dear SunWizard.

I sort of get it from your description how the ramp works, but would it be possible to see a shot of this in action?

I tried taking pics and you can't see it well enough. With flames you can't see the bowl/ramp because they are so bright, without flame and the bowl and ramp are so black you can't see it. I need to take the ramp out of the bowl for a pic but I have been using it non stop, and then you still can't see the main trick: how the air blows up the ramp. Here is the best pic, air comes in at the right. You can't see the ramp or bowl, the flame you see is about 12" long and is the part outside the bowl.


Here is the bowl with ramp in it, air comes in at the upper right:

Hey Sunwizard- looking good. Are you starting a cold stove with oil or are you warming it up with a wood fire first? Can you describe your cold start procedure? How long does it take to warm up and burn clean? How much smoke is there at startup and for how long?

BUMMER -- I have tried half a dozen configurations of a burner using only bottom fed outside air and a burner bowl with 3 rows of holes, they all burn fine when the bowl is clean, no visable soot or smoke, but none have burned for more than a day without the bowl crudding up due to the burner bowl becoming too cool to vaporize fuel adequately. Once the bowl cools down the splashed fuel droplets run down the side and into the bottom of the bowl where they boil off the lighter oils and leave a black bubblegum thick tar liquid, crap to clean.

The last burner configuration used the 3 row bowl, a vaporizing platform made by inverting the shallow vaporizing tray I tried earlier, a heat shield under the bottom of the bowl made by cutting down another SS bowl and mounting it 1/2 inch below the burner bowl using one 1/4 inch spacer in the center, I even added another filler spacer under this heat shield made from a cut-down 1 pound coffee can that had 1/2 inch tall legs to allow the outside air to flow up between this inner spacer can and the outer burner bowl support can, I had hoped this would force the cool incoming air out agianst the hot outer can and preheat the incoming air, didn't seem to help.

I got the longest burn by closing down the amount of incoming air enough that the burner bowl stayed hot enough to vaporize the splashed fuel droplets as they hit the side of the bowl, unfortunatly, this restricted the amount of combustion air getting to the flames to such a point that I no longer got any blue finger flames, just yellow ones.

I am now using the lower support can with both inside and outside air to allow the hot interior gasses to circulate throuh the holes in the bowl. I am using mostly top air along with just enough bottom outside air to create bright yellow finger flames (no blue showing). This burner puts a small amount of smoke out the chimney but it has proven to burn reliably for several days before needing cleaning.

The next testing will be about adding a small lid-like ring around the outer top of the burner bowl, Most of the ready-made commercial pot burners have this ring and I have always wondered just what it's purpose was, I begin to think it has something to do with retaining heat inside the burner bowl, don't know. I have never read anything about the function of this ring but the successfull commercial pot burners seem to have it, it has to have a function. I will be shopping for SS pot lids to cut the center out of to use for this ring, may be a while before I get back to testing this?

quote:

Originally posted by canolafunola:
Hey Sunwizard- looking good. Are you starting a cold stove with oil or are you warming it up with a wood fire first? Can you describe your cold start procedure? How long does it take to warm up and burn clean? How much smoke is there at startup and for how long?

When I start on PHO:
1. I burn wood for 15 minutes to melt the gallon thats in the pot on the stove top.

2. I open the needle valve, let the VO drip for about 30 secs, squirt a small amount of kerosene into the bowl, close the door and the bowl with VO/kero blend lights up within a few seconds. It takes about a minute for the burning VO in the bowl to get the ramp hot enough that the blowtorch effect starts. Thats it, clean burn at that point.

When I start with liquid VO, step 2 only, and I drop a small piece of burning paper into the bowl to light it. Smoke is about the same as a wood fire at startup, lasts a minute or 2, then clean.

I get a small carbon buildup on the ramp, that needs cleaning about every 2 days of run time. I scrape a putty knife down the ramp and thats all it needs. Sometimes its hard brown carbon balls like gravel that just needs pushed off.

Hello all.

I've been lurking here for a while and this is my first post. I have slowly been gathering up the parts and pieces to fab my own waste oil stove and I want to thank you all for your information, testing, and above all, your sharing of your endeavours and expierences. The good karma vibe returns to you all.

Now, I have read and re-read the entire post as well as other posts in an effort to gain as much knowledge on different types and designs of WO stoves mostly to get away from padding someone else's pockets and satisfy my own creativity and need to fabricate. I have a relatively limitless supply of waste oil and an industrial fabrication shop at my disposal so I will post my stuff as it comes along but it may be a slow process as time constraints pose the biggest problem at this point.

Tim - I woke up in the middle of the night last night and something immediately popped into my head so I had to get up and write this down. You posted that you are having problems with your SS bowl cooling. On your design, you have the auto exhaust pipe coming in at the bottom of the coffee can and the SS bowl bottom exposed directly to the incoming air. What if you fashoned a diffuser or some sort of a diverter so the cool outside air was swirled into the can rather than brought directly in line to the bottom of the bowl. The thought that flashed in my head was like that automotive product "The Tornado" that is supposed to boost the fuel economy of your car. As I was writing it down, I also thought of a conical shape on the bottom of the bowl to protect it from the incoming air and diverting the air to the sides of the SS bowl...
As far as the bottom air inlet, I think I will fashon mine to run down the side of the stove and then come in from the bottom so the stove heats the incoming air... but I still haven't thought this one through completely.
Anyway, We're pretty close in location and we usually see the same weather but I get it 30-90 minutes after you here in Indy! Many thanks to you for your work and inspiration.

Hello all, I also have been reading all your post regarding a WO heater and think the work you guys have done and shared with others is great. I purchased WO heater plans on ebay from RJ Dimaggio. He uses forced air in through the side of his stove through a double can (one to contain the air and an inner can with holes for the burner) the oil can be injected or gravity fed. I have not completed my heater yet so I have no heating experience. Have any of you see his plans or experimented with this type?
Thanks and keep up the excellent work.

rick621 -- Yep, I had sort of a similar thought about using a heat shield and tried it with what I had on hand, I added a heat shield under the burner bowl with a 3/4 inch space between them. This helped some but the burner bowl still cooled off sometime over night and finally flamed out with the bottom of the bowl full of thick tar, I even had tar drip through the lower set of holes and into the heat shield.

Preheating the air -- Yes, this needs to be done but I have not yet figured out how to best do it. I have considered running the 2 inch tube down the inside full length of the burner tank, do a 90 deg bend over to the center of the tank and then another 90 to get the tube facing upright to set the burner assembly on, this will take fabrication time and still may not work? I have also considered passing the tube horizontally through the side of the tank well above the burner flame, then running down the inside of the burner tank, then a 90, and another 90?, it will be a next summer project as the stove is needed for heating now.

This is a picture of the burner bowl with the heat shield attached.

full_burner_bowl-side_view-shows_shield_crack.JPG (27 KB, 49 downloads)

unless it's forced air.... I dont think you can get air to travel "down" thru heated tube. The heated air will want to go back up again and end up in a stale mate somewhere inside the tube.

I put a 6" stove pipe trim piece (used where a stove pipe goes thu a wall to trim it up) it is basically a 9" round with a 6" hole in the center, and sandwiched it between the pet dish and the coffee can. It made for an almost smokeless burn out of the stack and the pet dish was full of good flames and it seemed to put out more heat. However I took it out cause lots of soot in pet dish around trim and bottom of stove.
This Summer I may toy with mounting a L.P. pilot under the pet dish(blue flame)for a smoke test

I spent hours trying to post PICS. like Tims but the PICS are only about 1" square.

Jeepin - wouldn't the draft pull the air down the tube rather than have it heat up that quick to reverse direction?

Why do you think so? Is this from personal experience? The Sanders stove diagram here has air coming in from the top and it seems to work.

quote:

Originally posted by jeepin, moggin Jessup (coachgeo):
unless it's forced air.... I dont think you can get air to travel "down" thru heated tube. The heated air will want to go back up again and end up in a stale mate somewhere inside the tube.

Hi Sunwizard, any updates? Question on the needle valve you use: Is it the one commonly available from Lowes & Home Depot? How much fiddling (in adjustments to keep the drip rate constant) do you have to do in the course of a burn from startup to shutdown for cleaning? Does the needle valve require periodic maintenance?

quote:

When I start on PHO:
1. I burn wood for 15 minutes to melt the gallon thats in the pot on the stove top.

2. I open the needle valve, let the VO drip for about 30 secs, squirt a small amount of kerosene into the bowl, close the door and the bowl with VO/kero blend lights up within a few seconds. It takes about a minute for the burning VO in the bowl to get the ramp hot enough that the blowtorch effect starts. Thats it, clean burn at that point.

When I start with liquid VO, step 2 only, and I drop a small piece of burning paper into the bowl to light it. Smoke is about the same as a wood fire at startup, lasts a minute or 2, then clean.

I get a small carbon buildup on the ramp, that needs cleaning about every 2 days of run time. I scrape a putty knife down the ramp and thats all it needs. Sometimes its hard brown carbon balls like gravel that just needs pushed off.

Flexible exhaust pipes are available in steel and stainless in different sizes. Ryder's seems to have more reasonable prices.

quote:

Preheating the air -- Yes, this needs to be done but I have not yet figured out how to best do it. I have considered running the 2 inch tube down the inside full length of the burner tank, do a 90 deg bend over to the center of the tank and then another 90 to get the tube facing upright to set the burner assembly on, this will take fabrication time and still may not work?

harry3 - pictures - Sounds like you resized your pictures way too small, this links to a recently posted primer on posting pictures to this forum.

I am confident that the flue draft would pull air down through any tube passed through the stove, you would likely have to open the flue damper completely at startup, and the draft may take a minute or two to become established, but hot air rises and the flue and chimney will be a lot longer and hotter than the incoming air tube.

Another aproach I am considering is to weld a flat tall thin rectangular air channel around the outside of the stove, something 1/2 to 3/4 inch thick and 4-6 inches tall, this would place the slower moving incoming air against the hot outside surface of the burner tank for heating. The warmed air would then flow through an internal tube leading from a hole in the tank wall over to the center burner support area of the tank, don't know, will have to build something to test.

Another option is to not bring the rich cool air up through the burner bowl at all. Someplace on another forum I read that a fellow was having good luck (bright yellow flames) by modifying the normal Sanders type air inlet tube (tube down from top) by bringing a smaller diameter (1 1/4 diameter from memory) tube all the way down inside the burner and placing an air duffuser ball on the end (metal ball? (pipe cap, I think) drilled full of 1/16 inch holes), the air blew out in all directions directly into the fuel vapor, apparently air from many small holes did a better job of stirring the fuel/air mix than dumping the air out from one large opening.

This would be about the same idea as passing air through holes in the bowl but the air would be heated as it flowed down the tube, and the air would not be in direct contact with the bowl to cause cooling. The fuel drip would be a bit more difficult to route, one idea would be to run the drip tube out of the center bottom of the air diffuser? (that poster was feeding oil into the burner through a fitting in the bottom of the bowl rather than using a drip), this would put the drip very close to the bottom of the bowl and may cause it to carbon up due to the high heat, again, don't know. Placing the air tube and diffuser deep in the burner bowl would make it more difficult to swap out the burner bowl but it may be worth the problem.

Using this "top air deep in bowl" concept it would still allow the idea of a ventilated burner bowl assembly, using holes in the lower support can and through the side of the burner bowl to allow hot combustion gasses from inside the stove to circulate through the burner assembly, this has proven VERY effective in keeping crud from forming inside the burner. I am now on something like the 5th day of burning of this burner design (2 rows of holes in bowl) and the bowl just now is showing a small amount of carboning. The last test of this type burner assembly (one row of holes in burner bowl) burned continuously for 13 days before flaming out due to crud.

This "hot air ventilated burner with warmed diffused top air" idea may be my next approach as it can be done without having to do a complete rebuild of the stove.

Hello, I was just wondering if anyone was going to reply to my post?
Thank you

quote:

Originally posted by HeirOtto:
Hello, I was just wondering if anyone was going to reply to my post?
Thank you

Your question is just enough outside the topic of this thread I'm betting it's getting skipped as folk read thru with their minds eye on the threads topic.

You might want to start your own thread titled something like

Ebay heater plan "RJ Dimaggio" anyone used it?

also- have you searched in here for "RJ Dimaggio" or searched this domain using advanced google for that? (adv. google works better)

Search should ALLWAYS be your first step

quote:

Originally posted by canolafunola:
Hi Sunwizard, any updates? Question on the needle valve you use: Is it the one commonly available from Lowes & Home Depot? How much fiddling (in adjustments to keep the drip rate constant) do you have to do in the course of a burn from startup to shutdown for cleaning? Does the needle valve require periodic maintenance?

No updates since its working so good I quit trying to improve it. I run it every day, all day, I usually adjust the valve a few times after startup, then it reaches a steady state with no adjustments for 10 hours. Unless I decide I want a bigger or smaller flame.

The needle valve is the cheapest 1/8" NPT one from mcmaster, along with a through the bottom of the pot threaded brass fitting, that I sealed with some silicone caulk.

I have had to clean poly VO bits out of the needle valve about once a month, which I do by slipping a piece of rubber hose over the brake line inside the stove and blowing with my lungs backwards through the valve.

I think I have this picture posting thing conquered.

post-2.jpg (38 KB, 44 downloads) pic of my heaters

[QUOTE] [/Hello all, I also have been reading all your post regarding a WO heater and think the work you guys have done and shared with others is great. I purchased WO heater plans on ebay from RJ Dimaggio. He uses forced air in through the side of his stove through a double can (one to contain the air and an inner can with holes for the burner) the oil can be injected or gravity fed. I have not completed my heater yet so I have no heating experience. Have any of you see his plans or experimented with this type?
QUOTE]Heirotto— I have never herd of or saw any plans like that, butt I do not see why that would not work. Let us know how its coming along.