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Oil Burner for furnace

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awemawson:
I've been poking around an oil fired central heating boiler today (one of three in our 'establishment' ) and was thinking, if I scrap it what would be useful.

Now these boilers are all pretty standard and use a burner system that atomises oil and blows it through an ignition system into the guts of the heat exchanger. Now that burner is a bolt on easily removable unit that could be reused ....


.... in a FURNACE to melt metal.  :ddb:

My furnace is sitting under tarpaulins  waiting to be re-comissioned - perhaps this would be a suitable source of lots of heat.

This particular one has an output of 25kW according to the blurb. How does this compare to the various home made burners people use?

Random web sourced picture of burner follows:


Andrew

Meldonmech:
Hi Andrew

                  When I built my propane furnace, I needed to research the subject in detail before embarking on the project. There is a wealth of information on  " BackyardMetalcasting.com " that includes oil firing. Another useful site is " Alloy Avenue ".
I have taken apart several of the combi type oil central heating boilers, just for the diecast parts, to remelt. I am sure the fan will be useful, the rest I think would depend on what type of oil you use. Many of the furnaces I have read about use reclaimed oil, such as that from fish and chip shops, I think this would require different jets etc. than you have in a central heating oil burner. Having said that your unit could possibly be modified. After reading and digesting vast amounts of material, I found I had to carry out experiments using differing burner designs before a satisfactory result was achieved.
                                                                                                                                        Good Luck      Cheers David

awemawson:
This one uses 28 second ch oil which is very similar to red diesel .... I keep a 5000 litres bowser of red for use with the tractor etc  :ddb:

Some time back I had a 'Morgan No 5' oil fired crucible furnace that I mounted in a pit for safety. Now that WAS a beast - would melt up to 1 cwt of cast iron at a time - I seem to remember calculating from its diesel consumption that it had an input power of nearly 1/2 a megawatt  :bugeye:

Sadly that had to go when my neighbour sold the bottom of his garden for building and I ended up with someones kitchen 10 foot from my foundry  :bang:

Andrew

chipenter:
Hi Andrew I am shure that it could be made to work , but your question should have been is it economicley viable , if you can slide it in under the radar under farm heating and can claim back VAT on it may be .

vtsteam:
Sorry Andrew that I hadn't seen this when you posted it -- just found it reading up on foundry posts, as I hope to start casting again soon. Your original question was never answered, so here goes just my own experience with my waste oil burner.

The setup:

4" thick firebrick lining
chamber, about 7" diameter
homemade atomizing burner
time to melt an A6 crucible of cast iron scrap, about  1-1/2 hrs (from cold)
fuel, diesel with or without about 10% used motor oil
fuel consumed per melt, about 1-3/4 gallons (US measure) (from cold)

So say about 1.4 gallons/hr
Say 130,000 Btu/gal (US)

Fuel heat input = 182,000 Btu/hr
or 54 kW (fuel input)

You can make adjustments for efficiency of burner(s), burner actual power vs fuel potential , and efficiency of your planned furnace construction - and its size compared to mine, but at least you have a data point here.

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