Burnham v8 no start.

Yes. Call a pro. That control locked out for a reason, to keep you safe.

Where are you located? We might know someone who can help……………

It falls into a service lockout after three resets …. Telling the homeowner you need service … After the repair the tech knows to hold the button in until light flashes (45sec?) to reset …

OK, I'm no expert on NY State geography, but here is a listing of some contractors in that state- hopefully one is near you:

https://heatinghelp.com/find-a-contractor/state/NY/

@joea99 , it shouldn't be locking out at all. If it does, something is wrong.

@joea99 I agree that you may be able to reset it once, and if it runs for a month before needing another reset, then the next time you have no heat a month later, it would probably be acceptable to reset it once again. Your post did not indicate that, so I assumed the worst.

Back when I started working on oil burners, the primary safety control was a “stack switch.” The most common one was the Honeywell RA-117 with a 90-second safety timing. Think about that for a minute—actually, a minute and a half (LOL). If your oil burner was running for 90 seconds with no flame because of weak ignition, and you had to reset it three or four times before the burner finally lit off, all that extra unburned oil would accumulate in the chamber. There could be a substantial BOOM when it finally ignited.

That is why I still have a stack of “RESET ONLY ONCE” stickers on the shelf—although the glue may be dried up by now. Situations like that happened more than once with both customers and mechanics from the 1940s through the 1970s.

Later controls improved safety by reducing the timing to 45 seconds. That was a big improvement. Your control only allows 15 seconds to prove ignition, which is considered the gold standard today. In fact, if someone still has a 45-second safety control on their oil burner, we strongly recommend replacing it with a safer 15-second control like yours.

So if I sounded a little extreme, that is because my younger brother ended up in the burn unit after repairing an oil burner where professional boiler operators had ignored an ignition problem for an entire week. Three shifts of boiler operators had recorded the same note in the logbook every day:

“Boiler #3 not operating / Reset once / Still not operating.”

Day shift, night shift, and graveyard shift all did the same thing for a week. That is 21 resets with no flame (but only once a day by each boiler operator. At the end of the week, the supervisor reviewed the logbook and asked, “Why has this not been addressed? Call the oil company and get this repaired.”

My brother found a bad ignition transformer and replaced it. While looking through the fire door to verify ignition, he started the burner. With all that extra oil built up in the chamber, the delayed ignition blew out his eyebrows and mustache and gave him a glowing sunburn in the middle of winter.

Thankfully, he recovered completely. His eyebrows eventually grew back, although he is permanently bald now—but I believe that has more to do with age than the burns he suffered that day.

And if you look at my previous post, the control itself does include a warning label.

So I am an alarmist when it comes to reset buttons.

If the burner won't try to start it is unlikely to be the cad cell unless you have a light shining on it.

Cue the "Twilight Zone" theme……………..

This actually happened to a customer of the FP Young Company in the 1980s. They had an old pancake-style coal conversion boiler. The existing oil burner was one of those inefficient Quiet May or Silent Heat burners with very poor efficiency.

FP Young sold the customer a “complete modernization” package for about half the price of a new gas boiler. The work included:

• a thorough cleaning of the boiler flue passages
• removal of the old brick combustion chamber
• a new Carlin CRD-100 oil burner
• new limit control
• new thermostat
• new cad cell relay
• new smoke pipe
• new draft control
• and a new Lynn Time-Saver combustion chamber

The job also included a coat of white paint over the asbestos insulation and silver paint on the fire doors. It made the old antique boiler look and run like new. We even guaranteed 75% combustion efficiency using a Bacharach combustion test kit. This was to lower the fuel bill and save the customer from switching to gas heat.

To measure the draft over the fire, the installer drilled a 5/16-inch hole in the fire door—the same door where coal would have been shoveled in years earlier—in order to obtain the over-fire draft reading.

Now this is where the story gets interesting.

After about a week of perfect operation, the customer called and reported no heat, so they shut off the emergency switch at the top of the basement stairs. The technician arrived, checked everything thoroughly, and determined that nothing was wrong. He restarted the boiler and left. No-charge warranty call.

The next day, the customer called again with the same problem. A week later, it happened again. At that point, the service manager became involved because they needed to get to the bottom of it.

You are not going to believe this.

He discovered that when the basement light was turned on, a beam of light from the bare light bulb passed directly through the 5/16-inch hole in the fire door and cast a bright spot onto the brand-new combustion chamber in exactly the right location for the cad cell to detect visible light. The primary control interpreted that light as a flame signal and locked out the burner until either the basement light was turned off or someone physically stood between the light bulb and the boiler to block the beam of light.

You can’t make this stuff up!

Um wouldn't the burner remain off if it's "seeing" light? It wouldn't even start so it wouldn't lock out.