ACK! Hippies and cooking oil fired boiler...

Andy Baker

Short intro: Hippie friend of a friend has a relatively large boat they just inherited..kinda. Used to be a house boat and a ferry, but has since been gutted. Over all in good shape. They want to turn it in to a "community space" - Whatever. It already has an oil / diesel / K1 boiler in it. Looks to be less than 20 years old and has some relatively new components (exp. tank, circulator pump) The heating loop has been pulled apart, and the chimney is gone - both of which probably needed to be replaced anyway. They were going to try to heat it with wood (HAHA!!) which I quickly convinced them was a HORRIBLE idea, and I suggested instead another fuel that's acceptable to hippies - used cooking oil. Now they're all familiar with filtering the stuff and they all run their volvos on it, so they know the filtering requirements. My thoughts are this...

Two tanks on the boat, a little one full of #2, and a big insulated one full of waste fryer oil with a copper loop in it hooked to a circulator through the boiler to keep it nice and toasty and thin. In the fall, get the whole thing up to temp on the #2, then switch over to the grease tank.

A heated, jacketed fuel line from the grease tank to the burner might not be out of the question either.

My question is:

are there any modifications to the burner required? (aside from a switching valve for the fuel?)

Has anybody tried something this silly before? what happened?

Thanks in advance!

Andy Baker

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Contact

Thom at Clean Burn boiler. they have several waste cooking oil boilers in operation. Their waste oil burners seem fairly well matched for this application. They use compressed air and several preheat blocks to drive their burner systems.
www.cleanburn.com.

Also, I have a friend that has several trucks running on waste cooking oil. He uses a system from www.greasel.com,
if you need to power and engine for that boat. Good luck, let us know how it works out.

hot rod

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Contact ,sorry double post nm



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Steamhead

Sounds like a Waste Oil Burner is needed here

Waste oil burners are highly modified from what we're used to working on. Best bet is to contact one of the companies that live and breathe waste oil- CleanBurn and Shenandoah come to mind- to see what they recommend. I suspect you have to be really careful when converting an existing boiler.

This sounds like a good pilot project for you. You appear to have thought things out well. With this one under your belt, others will follow. Let us know how you make out!

Maine doug

Do they

want fries with that?