I have been working on a heater for my shop. I plan to use WVO, and maybe some KOH glycerine if it works out. Here is my design so far. I have made a very powerfull turk burner, and fitted it with a constant fuel level float. It will burn hours on end, full blast, raging hot with no buildup of soot. No smoke at all, no odors. ONLY if ran uncovered, thus loosing most heat to the atmosphere. As soon as I attempt to add exhaust or any sort of heat exchange, I get loads of black smoke. Adding more forced air doesn't seen to help. I do have to clean the firepot daily, this is no problem. I need to be able to run it, with some sort of exhaust, and a good heat exchanger for the shop, and don't want to have black smoke rolling out of my roof. Any suggestions, or links to similar plans. Even a better plan based on a different idea is fine. I am going to the scrap yard to do some shopping, hopefully something good turns up. I can't spend much, new business and all.

How large of an outer housing have you tried so far, I think you said that the 100 pound propane tank that I suggested DID NOT work, sorry about that.

The only thing I can think of to cause the smoke and soot is that an "open" turk flame must be consuming most of this above the burner rather than inside it, limiting the flame outside the burner by adding a housing, plus the cooler metal of the housing, is not letting everything get burnt ?

The only other burner styles that I have read about that will burn heavy oil cleanly are mobius1's original "vertical babington" design (discussion here) or Murph's somewhat different "vertical babington" burner design (discussion here) Or a syphon nozzle style burner made by modifying a normal oil fired furnace burner (click the altfuel link at the top of this discussion section) or a Babington style burner, either completely home-built or built by modifying a home oil furnace burner, check out the altfuelbabington discussion group HERE for more info on those.

Soot means incomplete combustion, either up the air or reduce fuel. Or the burner might not be atomizing the fuel correctly. Have you tried a high chimney.

Working on the chimney today. I got some 10 inch pipe at the junkyard!

I've been working on my own babington burner design with the intent to heat my hot tub. The first stage combustion tube is 2in pipe by 6in length that empties into an old brinkmann smoker lined with a homemade refractory mix using perlite as the primary insulator and fireclay. I'm using no forced air and only get some soot when the unit is coming up to temperature. Once it's hot and the refractory lining is glowing red, there's no soot nor black smoke coming out of the flue. Adding a 3 foot vertical flue did increase the convection and seemed to aid combustion nicely. I'm only at the prototype stage, so I'm not saying my design or adjustments are perfect by any means, but it did make good use of recycled materials to keep the cost low. I do have an expensive marine heat exchanger I could use at the flue to heat the water, but I'm thinking of just ebaying that to fund more experiments and instead make a heat exchanger out of cheaper more commonly available scrap materials. I have an excellent idea in mind, but am going to keep that private until I have it implemented.

Anyway, below are some online video links of by burner and the burner connected to the furnace which I dubbed, the "Brinkmann Afterburner" since it uses a Brinkmann smoker and burns used oil. Note I left the stock temp gauge on the brinkmann to monitor how effective the refractory is at insulating the shell. I found I was able to melt glass in the furnace and at that point the temp gauge still read between "ideal" and "hot".

Brian

Video of burner firing up alone:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5084016719392671037

Brinkmann Afterburner video demo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtall1szoY4