Easy way to monitor burner run times?

Easy way to monitor burner run times?

wall dudes,

Is there an easy way to monitor burner run times? I have this apartment complex that may be looking at a boiler swap. I'm simply amazed at how large the existing unit is. Obviously I'll bring my 5 year old Dell lap top over and bang out a quick heat loss to compare notes, but I'm wondering if we can get a feel for how long (or short) the cycles are on a zero* morning.

Thanks!

Gary

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a small 120 volt timer (hour meter) from graingers wired in parallel with the burner motor X nozzle size (@ 100psi) will give you the oil consumption. I used to use these when a customer had a suspected leaking underground tank and I would compare this to the stick readings.

Ed

couldn't find it

do you know the part #? The ones I found were 700-800 or so. I could have my guys go over with the morning paper and watch it for an hour or so!

Thanks

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Weezbo

Ingenious, I love it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Kevin Flynn

Burner run hour meter

Gary, I use the timers on most of our oil burners. Viessmann makes one for their burners and I've obtained standard run hour meters (110v) from Chris Rorke at Blueline Supply in Jackson Hole, WY. The hour run meter will also allow a tech to determine maintainence schedules. We like to retune the burner, clean the boiler and change the oil filter every 2000hrs.

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Paul

do you have a phone # I can't find them on search

Gary

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I use

Omron timers and cycle counters. They are available in numerous configurations and usually will work between 18 and 240 volts. I like them because they are small - 1" x 1.5" x 2" deep, lite, easy to read and reset, can be triple ganged in a standard electrical box, quad ganged in a 4 x 4 box for portability and are relatively inexpensive.

Those are EXCELLENT articles Mark

It is nice to know someone else who does real time energy analisis in the field.

the problem with hour meters...

do keep in mind that if you use a simple hour meter to track usage/gallonage and you want real accuracy, that your numbers can grow inaccurate over time if the burner uses a pre & post purge control. the hour meter in parallel with the motor arrangement doesn't know that the oil valve is not open during the first 15 seconds (pre-purge)& very possibly the last 2 minutes (post-purge) of every cycle. if you conservatively figure that the burner may cycle even only 3 times an hour - those purge times easily add up to 2.5+ gal/day or 75 gal/month with a 1 gph nozzle. you could hook-up an event counter in parallel with the elapsed time meter & that would help, but would require a little math to get it right. you could try to hook-up the hour meter to the oil valve rather than the motor but experience has shown that the parallel loading often makes the valve stutter & kick off the control. soooooooo, you could electrically 'insulate' the valve signal from the hour meter by putting a dpst relay between the control valve power-on (120v) and the valve and have the other pole run the hour meter - this would work as long as the relay current draw and back emf spike doesn't exceed what the control can handle - 'course that involves a little extra wiring.

but hey, no pain no gain.

ss

getting control...

hi ron,

you can reach me at info@boilerbrain.com

(sorry no website yet).

just a note here.

the current version of the software is designed to track oil usage on a boiler with a *separately fired* hot water heater. if the system is only a tankless, then it probably doesn't matter, but if it's an indirect tank and you want to track HW gals usage separately, then we'd have to alter a few things - which is probably fine as long as it has priority & there's access to that (120v) circ signal. at present, the oil usage monitoring & run time/cycle length 'stuff' is good. (the unit even holds the data after a power outage). the next thing i've been exploring is the possible addition of some circulation control features (in the little memory space remaining). but if the main interest is really more so for the gallonage/cycle length function, then i may just use the remaining space to enhance or add to the current stats or try to store some additional information past the last 24 hours & make that a finished version. you can tell me what you'd like to see & i will try to accommodate.

ss