I made an awesome turk burner. It is based on a BBQ size propane tank, with a freon tank inside. I am using a cheap bathroom exhaust fan for the air source, via 3 inch pipe. It is awesome outdoors, but what I really want is to heat my shop. My shop is a cinder block structure, pretty flame resistant. I am looking for the most efficient way to get usable heat from this beast. Do I enclose it somehow? I don't really know a lot about HVAC type stuff, but I can sure weld! Also, since it is forced exhaust, I would rather vent it out a window, instead of cutting a new hole in my already leaky roof!

Set it just outside the shop, put a 55gallon drum over it with a fan blowing through the drum and duct the drum output into the shop, ala the Murphy Waste Oil Heater.

That's what I'm gonna do once the shop is built and the heater is built . Keeps the fire, exhaust, and hot surfaces outside, and replaces the shop air with fresh air at a constant rate.

I haven't done this, but you should be able to just encase it in a wood stove for safety. This guy Mac from the Wastewatts forum encased his in an outdoor wood-fired boiler, and it seemed to work well.

Mark

Mac McQuaid's website: http://www.cybernet1.com/mcquaid/Waste%20Oil%20Burners.htm

While I have yhou on the line...

what size holes did you drill, how far apart are they, and how many rows of them did you put in? I've been struggling with not being able to get good performance out of mine without a really powerful blower, which I obviously dont' want because of power consumption issues. I think I need more holes or bigger ones.

I'm starting a Turk Burner web page soon, hope you can post some pictures when that's up, or somethin'.



Mark

A friend here is heating his insulated 40 X 50 ft high-bay workshop with a 8 inch OD, 6 inch ID turk inside a modern welded steel wood/coal furnace located inside the building, the furnace is a front loading type. He passed the air tube through the front of the furnace, next to the door.

This burner is not quite big enough when the temps drop down below zero f. He is burning used motor oil, gets a bit of smoke out the chimney but the flame looks clean and white hot ?

Hey, is he doing any kind of continuous feed of the oil? That's a challenge for a space heater Turk- if you only use it for brief periods for process heat it's fine to use it as a batch process, but how do you guys set them up for continuous feed and how do you control the levels?

Mark

GM, et al: I'm building yet another singlepumper pump for feeding a shop-heating turk burner. Having played around a bit with different float valves, drippers, droolers, etc, and the like, I'm reverting back to a float switch and small piston pump to maintain a near constant level. If it works, I'll post part numbers.

The local guy ( GM - he took your course here when I did, got the Turk idea from your demonstrator) is heating his shop using a continuous drip feed (more of a thin stream really) from a second story loft, it runs continuously 8-12 hours a day in really cold weather. The fuel flows from the loft feed barrel, down a 1/2 inch pipe til it is close to the stove, then a 3/8 steel brake line is wrapped a couple times around the flue just above the stove, then a short length of 1/2 inch pipe drips the fuel into the top of the turk. Flow is regulated through a needle valve where the 3/8 steel tube mates to the last 1/2 inch pipe section. The 10 foot of head pressure allows the needle valve setup to work pretty consistantly but this burner is run hot most of the time so the valve is pretty well opened up anyway.

The only way I have been able to get highly controlable fuel flow to my drip burners is by using Suntec fueloil pumps, turned slowly with windshield wiper motors, as metering pumps. I don't have any way of getting the fuel significantly higher than the stove so the pumps have been the best way so far. The wiper motor speed is controlled by a cheap 12 volt DC pulse-width modulated motor speed control, these are available from many places for about $25.00. the wiper motors only draw from 1 to 4 amps, depending on there speed setting, so a normal 100 amp-hr car battery will last for anywhere from 25-100 hours of continuous operation. I have cheap 6 amp auto battery chargers hooked to small 12 amp-hr lead acid gell cell batteries powering both my heaters pumps. The batteries will run the stove during any power outage periods we have here during the winter, usually only last a few hours, but also usually in the middle of the night. The speed controls allow absolutely precise flow control from "0" flow up to over 1/2 G/H.

The Suntec pumps are gearotor pumps so the flow rate is not effected by the thickness of the oil (within reason, oil must at least be liquid). I run my house heater at about 6 SECONDS/rev this time of year, this gives two drops of oil about every second, no problem (slowest reliable speed is 16 sec/rev). The flow rate from these pumps never varies once the motor speed is set.

I ran one feed pump 24/7 for weeks on end last winter, the other one ran 12-15 hours/day all winter in my shop, only problem with it was the veg sometimes turned vasoline-like over the cold shutdown period. I have just added a 60 watt cartridge heater (rated 225 watts at 220 volts, powered by 110 volts) to my feed tank for this pump, this is plenty of heat to keep the veg liquid, may even need to add a water heater thermostat to the tank to keep from overheating since this tank and pump sets indoors close to the stove.

Using these pumps at this slow speed requires that they be located BELOW the oil source to keep them flooded with oil by gravity, they just don't make any suction when turning this slow.

For this super slow-speed application the Suntec pumps need some internal mods, you have to eliminate an internal diaphragm valve so they will pump oil at any speed, and open up the input to the gears to bypass the internal input passage that is easily clogged by tiny bits of solidified fat, not difficult, thread and plug two small holes using 1/8 inch long set screws, drill a 1/4 inch hole, Either remove the internal strainer entirely or replace the normal HHO strainer with one designed to flow used engine oil (these are available from patriot supply for about $5.00). These mods are described in more detail (with pictures) in many posts in THIS discussion. The other mods described there, such as drilling out the internal passageways, are not needed for this application, they are only used to increase flow rates when turning the pump at high speeds for use as a vehicle fuel lift pump.

The following picture is of one of these metering pump setups. The pump shown is a Suntec "J" model because that is what I had at the time, the more normal, and cheaper, "A" model pump works just as well, even better actually due to a better gear tooth profile.

The fuel tank for this pump is made by removing the bottom from a 20 pound BBQ propane tank, screw a 1/4 inch pipe to 3/4 inch pipe reducer into the original valve opening, screw the tank directly into the 1/4 inch pipe opening seen on the top of this pump.

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this is a picture of the fuel tank.

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This shows the cross-tube heater well for the cartridge heater and a cheap auto engine lube filter idea that I am just now trying. The filter has several large openings cut through the outer housing to allow oil to get to the paper element, seems most auto lube filters now have some sort of rubber valve to prevent back-flow, there is not enough pressure in this application to force oil past this valve, hence the big holes.

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This is a picture of the 25 gallon fuel tank for the house heater, made from a 100 pound propane tank, same heater and filter setup as the smaller tank.

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GM, I have 2 rows of holes around my freon bottle. One row is just under the welded seam, and one row is just above. Each row has 24 holes, about 1 inch apart, around the entire bottle. I offset the holes on each row. I just used some random drill bit, a step under 1/4 inch. I think it was around .220. My fan is the cheap bathroom exhaust fan from Home Depot. It was about $12.

Here is a pic. It is burning used engine oil only. No smoke at all! The box the fan came in said 50cfm. It will burn about 1.5 gallons per hour at this airflow.

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Mysubrattles -- Interesting, I think this is the first Turk burner that I have seen that restricts a rather large diameter burner section output by this much, looks like about 30% of the diameter of the burn chamber, may be on to something. Most Turk burners seem to use a much smaller diameter burner tube with no restriction on the output.

What was your fuel charge (how deep was the fuel pool in the bottom of the burner section) and how long had the unit been burning, was the complete burner up to a hot temp yet? Is the inner tank setting down against the bottom of the outer tank or is there a bit of air space between the bottoms of the 2 tanks ?

Enclosure -- Possibly cut the top end out of a 100 pound propane tank such that the opening is just a bit smaller than the BBQ tank, set it down over the top of the BBQ tank til it rests on the lower tank. Put a standard 6 inch flue opening someplace in the top portion of the 100 pound tank, I put the flue straight out the top of the 100 pound tank I am using as my house heater, Murphy put his out the side of the tank maybe a foot or so down from the top so heat gets trapped above the output before exiting, I haven't tried that yet but it sounds reasonable ? I would want to put some type of wider legs on the outer tank to hold the complete assembly solidly upright. Running the flue out a window would probably work, I have done this with woodstoves, worked fine there. You may want to put a damper in the flue pipe, closing this down a bit will allow a LOT more heat to be transfered to the outer heater tank instead of going out the flue, adjust it for whatever works best.

The auto-lube-filter-inside-tank idea -- looks like this is not going to work, I have only run about 3 gallons of warm oil through the filter in the small tank over the last 2 days, started having fuel flow problems to the burner this evening, removed the filter and got back the normal fuel stream. I had hoped this would work, filter paper looks fine? The oil run through the filter was extremely well filtered to 5 micron, and dewatered, so it is not a particulate or water problem. I can only assume that the paper fibers have swollen a bit or something, don't know ? I have a backup plan, I bought some cheap 3/4 pipe O.D., 1/4 pipe I.D., hydraulic oil supply tank screen strainers from Surpluscenter.com, I will simply remove the 1/4 to 1/2 pipe reducer from the 3 inch tall 1/4 inch pipe standpipe in the tank and screw the strainer on in place of the filter. These strainers are a bit courser than I would like but will do til I pick up something similar with a bit finer screen

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Tim, the hole in the freon bottle is 5 inch diameter. I had a pipe I was going to weld onto it, but it burns much better without it. Maybe I accidently improved the design! I have just been playing so far, putting in one gallon of used engine oil. It is at full tilt burn in about on minute, that is what whas in my picture. Burn time on one gallon is 39 minutes. It only smokes a bit at startup, and again at shutdown. At full burn, there is no smoke at all. The floors, walls, and ceiling of my shop are still white, with no smoke buildup.
I have a tank I will try mounting above like your idea. I will let you know how it works next week. Time for me to take off for hunting season!

Tim, I cut a large tank to fit over the burner, like your suggestion, and it smokes like crazy. I assumed it was burning off everyting in the tank. I let it burn for about an hour, and the upper tank got over 500 degrees. I cut a 5 inch exhaust in the lower part of the tank to exhaust it, but it smokes like crazy. As soon as I lift the tank off of it, it burns clean again. I don't know how to keep it burning clean.

hmm, more air into the burner?

HHMMM -- Bummer - Certainly had not expected that. Back pressure being created by restricting the exhause must be limiting the air flow through the burner, less air - more smoke?

If I had given this more thought I may have not been so surprised at the smoke. The burner the local guy is using inside his wood stove also smokes more than I was expecting, the inside of the stove gets coated with at least 1/2 inch of soot and the inside top of the burner box hangs full of 3-4 inch long sootcicles. The flame is white bright but it obviously produces a lot of soot, don't have any ideas of how to overcome this yet. There is another post someplace on this site of someone burning a turk in an even smaller welded steel wood stove enclosure, the picture showed a white-hot flame but it also made soot.

It may take a BIG enclosure for a Turk to burn clean, maybe two 50 gallon barrels stacked up ? even then a 6 inch exhaust pipe may be too small ?