Fuel pressure gauge / Vaccum gauge.

gator

So, now that I’m the only guy in 200 miles of winter roads to work on boilers and furnaces / any burner on anything I guess, I’m prob gonna be needy on here. I didn’t go to school, this isn’t really my career but I’ve repaired many burners, replaced untold numbers of zone valves, replaced entire boilers and everything in between.

My second father was the greatest man I’ve ever met, beast of a man, who built generational wealth with his two hands when you could still start from scratch and do that. He owned the oil company that hauled all the fuel in double tankers to all of alaska essentially and also delivered all the fuel oil and propane. Yet he worked till the day he died and you’d have never known the wealth. Velcro tennis shoes from Walmart Type man. The knowledge that died with him was such a damn loss.
So, every chance I got I went with him. Boy did we see some stuff. Lot of homemade head scratchers in AK.
anyway. Here’s one that isn’t that needy - I’m just curious. If the only right way to check fuel pressure is at the end of the nozzle line, I was thinking the other day,

why don’t we put fuel gauges $9.99 on the nozzle line at every job - so when we walk in we can see it asap or they can tell us in advance so we have some info? When we do install them we all tend to go on the gauge. Why is that? Also why not a vaccum gauge on the tank side???

. Gauges are so cheap now.

pecmsg

at least an easy access port with a Schrader valve.

Jamie Hall

I can't think of a really good reason not to. I think you nailed it, though. People never used to do things like that — for the simple reason that a reliable gauge was not cheap, and one more point of weakness wasn't fun. Now one can get pretty darn good gauges relatively inexpensively.

Go for it!

gator

https://forum.heatinghelp.com/discussion/comment/1828722#Comment_1828722

I’m actually finding it hard to get the Tee in the 1/8 inch or even stepped up to 1/4. Surprising not much out there. There are some.

SuperTech

I've worked on some oil burners that have a pressure gauge attached to the oil pump. They can be easily installed on the Suntec A2VA-7116 oil pumps without a solenoid valve or with an external solenoid valve on the jet tube to the nozzle line. The Beckett clean cut pumps solenoid valve gets in the way of installing the gauge. My neighbors burner has this setup.

The Garber Spin on oil filters come with a vacuum gauge I have found it useful at times.

The only drawback to having these gauges permanently installed is the potential for them leaking oil. I haven't encountered this but I have heard of it happening.

ScottSecor

I agree it would be a helpful tool on residential burners. Many of the commercial oil burners we used to service had them, often up to 300psi.