How to / DIY > Everything else

Diesel Heaters

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ajaffa1:
Hi Glort, it`s nice to have an internet connection again, ours failed about ten days ago. When we reported the problem to our telco, by landline telephone, they diagnosed that we needed to buy a new telephone despite the fact that I was talking to them on our existing phone! F*cking morons finally realized that it wasn`t just our property that had no internet, the whole district was disconnected. Eventually they sent out an engineer to reboot the ADSL router at the local exchange. Guess what, all the locals now have internet again, next time it goes out I`ll just go to the local exchange and kick the door in, turn the router off and restart it, problem solved! It`s not quite that simple, this problem occurs every six months, I suspect the router has a memory cache and error file that builds up until it is full at which point it falls on it`s face. A little routine maintenance and remote supervision would cure the problem but I`d bet my house it will fail again in December or  January. The real killer with these outages is that the local Canoe Center is unable to take bookings or deal with necessary bank transactions, I would estimate the financial loss at between $5,000 and $10,000, none of which the telco is responsible for unless we can prove negligence!

Enough of my problems, back to your project. I have never seen a glow plug that would heat diesel/kero/veg to the point of ignition. Much more likely it heats it to increase volatility before passing it through an atomizer nozzle with a spark igniter. Once alight the fuel burn should be self sustaining. I think I suggested before that a gas pilot light could easily replace the spark igniter and would be better suited to igniting veg oil.

Your concerns about the dangers of mixing diesel/RUG are unfounded. I recently wanted to quench some red hot steel parts in oil, the only oil I had available was a 5% RUG/diesel mix left over from fighting the forest fires earlier this year. I filled a container with the mixture, dropped the red hot steel into it and ran like f*ck. I was expecting it to ignite or worse but nothing happened, it did boil rather harder than neat diesel but left a very nice blued finish on the steel. I continued with this process for over an hour with no ill effects until I managed to boil the Diesel/RUG mix at which point it spilled out of it`s container and all over the shed floor! So much for health and safety.

I like your idea of feeding the hot/return air through a window, I have no idea about which way your windows open but a sliding window could easily be modified with a small strip of plywood to allow for the inlet and outlet pipes, without effecting the window.

With respect to your idea of water injection, I doubt that this will do anything. In an ICE the water droplets work under high pressure on each compression stroke, this has a hydraulic/steam cleaning effect that you will not find in an low pressure burner system but I might be wrong and look forward to hearing what you discover.

Generally you need to adjust the fuel air mixture in any burner until you have no signs of yellow flames; blue is good, yellow/orange produces soot and blocked chimneys and all the associated dangers, carbon monoxide and etc.

Let us all know what you find out.

Bob

EdDee:
I jump in to add my not even 1c worth....

<Quote:>
With respect to your idea of water injection, I doubt that this will do anything. In an ICE the water droplets work under high pressure on each compression stroke, this has a hydraulic/steam cleaning effect that you will not find in an low pressure burner system but I might be wrong and look forward to hearing what you discover.
<Unquote>

I have been playing around a little with this lately and found one interesting thing, haven't verified or documented it properly yet, but when I took the water from the over pressure bleed off/expansion valve of my boiler to the path of the flame, the stack cooled slightly overall, but I found the heat transfer to the heatex coil a little better... Could have been atmospherics, dumb luck, or error... As I say, I need to look into this a bit more, it could prove interesting....

Cheers
Ed

veggie:

Very interesting little heaters.
So many uses.
Small shop, Greenhouse, Camping vehicle, Generator shed.

veggie:
Apparently they can run on vegetable oil if diluted with diesel...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bmELZaH6zQ

Perhaps the ideal situation would be a pure diesel tank for starting and stopping.
A second tank of 50/50% to run on once the heater is hot.
Just like and automobile WVO system.

Desiel:
Hey Glort, I own 2 of these heaters from China, one is in my 1974 vw bus Westphalia, the other heats my backyard mancave (12 by12 1.5 story building), the one in the bus runs about 30 hours a year (winter camping), the one in my man cave runs about 3 hours a night, every night in the winter.I have had 2 failures, the first was the cheapo thermostats that come with them, once I switched over to the simple one knob thermostats, that problem disappeared, the other problem was with carbon. You must turn them to full blast 15 minutes before turning them off, otherwise carbon will build up over time causing smokey exhaust and eventual no start situation there is no spark plugs in these heaters  only a single glow plug that operates at start up, once the combustion chamber comes up to temp, the combustion becomes self sustaining.No fears of exhaust gas leaking into the room air. The way they are constructed and the extremely small amount of fuel precludes that assumption.Feel free to PM me if you have any questions or need advice on installation or operation.

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