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@rick in Alaska, there was a person in my long ago past that was convinced that operating a smoky burner with a 13.5% carbon dioxide was more efficient than operating at 11.5% carbon dioxide with a zero smoke. …and in fact that may be true for the first 6 minutes of operation. Once all that carbon settles on the boiler walls as you have so nicely illustrated, there is a problem with transferring the flame's heat to the water on the other side of that soot. I still believe that smoke is an indication of unburned fuel, and the heat content that unburned fuel never was actually generated… So you didn't get all 138,000 BTUs from that gallon of energy. (but there was no changing his mind, he just brushed the soot off the boiler walls every week as part of his "efficiency program")

When I started in the business I worked for an oil co. Being new they started me on cleanings. They were scheduling me for 4 a day. I quickly found out that wasn't enough time. Most were really old boilers and burners installed in the 20s-50s and they made a lot of soot. The company had been installing Petro burners since the 20s and they wern't the best as far a combustion. As I gained more experience I down fired some and did some nozzle substitution tests and raised the pump pressures to 120 and got them to run ok. Most had hollow nozzles and they worked much better with Delevan Ws. Even if the boilers were not too bad no one ever took down any smoke pipes so I found chimneys full of soot from the clean out door to the height of the flue pipe sometimes higher. Oil was about $.25 /gallon then so you couldn't sell a new boiler or a new burner. This changed a little after the oil embargo in the 70s.

I had them only give me 3 a day which was doable unless I ran into a really bad one. We had the larger soot vac and sometimes that wouldn't hold enough to get through the day. Every day i looked like a chimney sweep.

I guess soot must be healthy to breathe because I am still alive.

When the Beckett AF and the Carlin 100CRD came out around 1970 we thought we died and went to heaven. there were a few low speed burners that could burn like a Beckett SR? and a Carlin 400N2R and Texaco (Ducane) had the low speed TWJ burner that was half decent. Used to buy those burners for $60 with no cad cell control and used them on jobs when the customer was short on $$. Reuse the stack control. The good old days.

Older Weil-McLain WGO-3 with Beckett AFG that we serviced for the first time yesterday. Took most of a day to get it clean:

You can see the rug had come loose and the sulfur deposits got behind it and made it curl inward. You can also see where the flame was hitting it, causing sooting in the flue passages. The oil company must have been laughing all the way to the bank.

We also replaced the old 3-wire primary and added an oil-delay valve. I know there won't be much cleaning to do next year!

That boiler had a partially blocked nozzle. I don't know how it kept running without tripping the cad cell, but it obviously ran quite a while. This was in its own room, and there was soot on everything from about 3 feet up. The floor was also pretty wet with oil, so had to remove the boiler and rebuild the room. That place was a mess

Rick