Proper adjustment of air and retention ring on Oil furnace

Richard S. wrote:

whistlenut wrote:"The dreaded PIN Boiler"! It is great for heat transfer when squeaky clean, but oil does not burn very cleanly unless 'tuned' to the max.

One good thing is there is very easy access to clean it. It looks like all this crap will fall into the firing chamber though and I'll have to take off the burner plate to access it. I don't see any easy access to that.

I have an HB smith oil boiler with carlin buner on it also. The thing is a soot generator. You cannot guess at the settings and get a clean burn. You need the right tools to measure combustion and they are expensive, so I never bought them. They make brushes to clean the boiler but I found the first pass requires a simple steel rod to knock the big clumps of soot out. The brush has to be just the right size or it won't make it through between the pins.

Yes, you have to take off the burner plate to access the fire box. Disconnect the electric. Disconnect the oil piping if it is not flexible enough to allow the burner to be set to the side. Also take off the flue to access the flue connector on the boiler. Pain in the a**.

I brush down the boiler from the side first, then take off the buner plate and vacuum out the soot and then brush the inside surface of the fire box. The flue is done last.

My boiler is now strictly a backup boiler and sits there unused.

steamup wrote:Yes, you have to take off the burner plate to access the fire box.

Be very careful in the firebox, some of that refractory can be like cotton candy. If you bump it with a vacuum hose it can disappear!

Yeah that stuff is very fragile!

My boiler is a Burnham. Has a door that swings open so you can clean the chamber out without removing the burner unit. There has to be access to the chamber somewhere ... otherwise it would fill up after several years of cleaning.

steamup, I know what you mean about "rodding out the soot". I fought soot in my 66 series Weil McLain for the first year I lived in the house. Regardless of the burner "tune" it would soot up the heat exchanger. I finally just added more air until the burn cleaned up, but by then the stack temperatures were off the chart and the boiler sounded like a jet engine. I decided to get serious and installed a brand new Riello burner...their recommended settings in the manual produced a perfect burn; 0 smoke and 12% CO2. The boiler has had 1000 gallons run through it since then and the heat exchanger looks like new. Now that I have the EFM running, the Riello just sits there and "looks good".

Smitty, I haven't looked at an older Smith boiler in a while, but my Weil McLain requires that you unbolt a plate off the front in order to access the chamber. It is not a fun job.

-Rob

I had a Weil Mclain 68 series in my house when I bought it. I had to clean it twice a year. It would plug solid and I had to use a rod only. A brush would just jamb as the sections were too close together. I replaced the refactory once. What a nighmare. Finally replaced it with my current wood burner when oil hit $1.00 per gallon. ( a little while ago). Needless to say, the 68 series was discontinued and replaced with a newer series. One day when I was in the Wholesaler, they had a display on the new series. Everything they stated as new and improved fixed the issues I had with my 68 series. Obviously, I wasn't the only one with a problem.

My old Smith oil boiler is in my workshop building and is 7 sections. It doesn't need refactory as the fire box is deep enough to allow a complete burn without the burner targeting the back of the boiler.