need some help with my waste oil furnace

Well my luck has been good and I aquired a waste oil furnace for free for my shop. It's a Lanair Turbo Z CA-120 circa the 1990's. I hired a guy to install it and it doesn't work, long story short he said I need to buy a new oil primary and a new block assembly because the heater is bad. The primary is easy to get at my supplier but the oil heater block not so easy, does anyone know where to get one or how to repair it?

You've probably already tried www.lanair.com Past that,start scanning with any part #'s available for aftermarket. Free may not be too cost sensible if these are proprietary parts deemed obsolete. Good Luck,Ed

I'm thinking you could rig something up ... like part of an old kiln, or oven, or lead-pot, toaster oven .... any kind of heating element. You definitely want that oil as hot as possible before it hits the burner.

My grandfather built his own out of a 55 gallon drum & some firebrick way back in the day. He used a metal clothes hamper to hold about 10 gallons of used oil, then another smaller container for straight #2. He rigged up an oil burner unit & installed a very large nozzle to handle the thick oil. Then, he wrapped the copper line carrying the used oil around the barrel, in order to heat it up as hot as possible. Had a tiny 2" metal pipe coming out of one of the bungs on the top for an exhaust. He'd fire the unit for about 5 minutes with #2, then turn some valves, which cut off the #2 & ran straight used motor oil. You couldn't stand within 10' of that barrel! It was borderline glowing orange. If you shut the lights off at night, you'd see a faint glow. Not one bit of smoke ever came out of the exhaust of that thing. Would be 75° in that concrete block garage in the dead of winter. Wish I had that thing now ...

SMITTY wrote:I'm thinking you could rig something up ...

There was an article on converting oil burners to alcohol somewhere on the web. It described a few methods and components used to preheat the fuel IIRC.

There are a fair amount of waste oil burner parts on eBay, you might get lucky and find what you need. If you want to talk to someone who really knows waste oil equipment, call Dave O'Neil. His number is under "Advanced Energy Systems" in the list if EFM dealers.

-Rob

thanks I'll give him a call. LANAIR was no help when I called them, I asked for a rebuild kit for my preheater block and was told my item is obsolete and no longer available. No longer profitable maybe I'll figure something out it's not complicated.