Lend Me A Hand

The oil burner is the heart of any furnace or boiler and yet very few people know how exactly it works.

Educating yourself a little bit about oil burners is a wise thing to do so that you can troubleshoot a problem should it come up.

Here is a general idea of how the whole process works to provide your household nice and toasty heat during the winter.

1. Heating oil is supplied to a holding tank located somewhere in your house.
2. A switch, called the aqua stat, turns on the power to the burner when the temperature drops bellow a certain degree.
3. The oil pump is turned on drawing heating oil from the tank.
4. The oil is run through a filter and pressurized at over 80 PSI and turns into a vapor or mist.
5. It travels through the lines to the actual burner where it is squirted through a small nozzle.
6. Before the oil is squirted out the transformer is turned on and it powers to electrodes in front of the oil burner nozzle.
7. As the oil comes out of the end of the nozzle in a fine mist it is ignited by the electricity coming from the electrodes.
8. This ignition produces a flame.
9. The flame creates a large amount of heat and energy.

If you have a furnace then the heat is blown by a fan through ducts that run through a home or building.  This hot air is then blown out into areas of a room causing it to be heating.

If you have a boiler then the flame heats up a combustion chamber in which water is passing through.  These water is heating up to really high temperatures and ran through a home or building.  As it is traveling through the walls of a structure its heat it radiated out to all of the rooms.  When the water gets cold again it goes back to the combustion chamber to be re-heated.

This is how most homes and commercial buildings are heating.  Furnaces are twice as popular than boilers but radiant heat from boilers do not dry up the air like furnace heat does.  Either way an oil burner is the mechanism that powers them.

There also exist ones that run off of used motor.  These ones allow a person to heat a structure for practically nothing.  You can read this blog if you need more information about waste oil burners.  The technology involved in making waste oil a viable fuel source is not new whatsoever but over the last two years it has become very popular.

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