Thanks, Guys
There is a fascinating selection of issues and answers and viewpoints here as always – especially yours re neighbours and health and personal responsibility, Bruce – and thanks for that
Observations that several folks such as Glort or Ed Dee have made around the technical things that can go wrong or, worse the potential for “runaways” aren’t really concerns for me. If I build something it will just be “drip feed”
I have had first-hand experience of diesel runaways – and never want to experience any others
What got me thinking is the presence in my workshop every year of twenty-odd 200-litre drums of “dirty” oil changed out of low-speed agricultural gearboxes which we service annually or biennially
Visually, 90% looks as clean as the oil with which we replace it
There are no combustion by-products as there is no combustion. There is no heat in these units as they run at around one half a rev per minute. Sometimes there is a small amount of water from condensation, but the air-gap in the top of the gearboxes is only maybe 2% of the volume (low-speed and no foaming) and there are condensation traps fitted & serviced
What the oil does, is it deals with torque & friction – big, slow, agricultural loads – so the by-product we do get in the oil is small amounts of very fine particles of steel – or larger chunks if the big gear loses “teeth”. While these particles/teeth will suspend for a while, my observation is that they just sediment out; as I see drums with a “sludge” at the bottom
It seemed to me that it might not need much more than some “sitting” and a draining process that left the bottom 10% of the oil in the drum, to give a clean-ish and consistent-ish product
(Of course it may be that high-load gearbox oils will have a bunch of environmentally-unfriendly additives that will need considering)
It also seemed to my amateurish and un-informed self that if I had a “consistent” product then, once the burner was properly “tuned” (the right number of air-holes in right places) then it might perform consistently?
I watched two videos from blokes who had successful-looking burners, that had been through several fine-tuning iterations, and which didn’t seem to give out any visible smoke at all. So maybe “clean-ish” is do-able too?
I wouldn’t consider leaving something like that burning unattended in my workshop for any length of time
As a country-dwelling person in a building I have built myself, with plumbing, heating and energy systems also all self-built, I’m OK about taking personal responsibility for the safe-operation of things. ie – not burning the goddamn workshop down
Please excuse a Glort-length response here. I appreciate the various inputs and thought I’d deal with a few of them at once
Check out this guy if you like. He struck me as someone who had put serious time and effort into solving some of the annoying aspects of living with a simple drip-type waste-oil burner
https://www.slideshare.net/QZ2/e2g30Also - if you see the image attached: This is the sort of unit I had in mind - made out of welded heavy-wall steel with holes drilled in it etc etc
Cheers, Mike
