The end of last nights burn:
Worked great, I’ll be checking the results this evening.
The fire itself was too smoky, the smothering was not too bad.
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I want to talk about some thoughts I’ve had recently about burning used motor oil. I remember long ago when I was a little guy, visiting a shop that had a used oil drip stove, and I noticed they had two lines running into the stove so I asked about it. One line was used motor oil, and the other line was water. The man would set a pool of oil burning in a pan, then when it was hot he would start the water drip. When the water hit the hot pan it exploded into steam and added a lot of turbulence to the flame. I left it at that then when I saw it. Since then I have always thought that the purpose of the water drip was to add turbulence and get the oil to burn completely. But now I’m not so sure.
I use the old 30s vintage fuel oil pot stoves. They use a vaporizing pot to turn fuel oil into something that’ll burn. They don’t have a wick, they don’t have any fuel pumps or use any electricity. They just use a pool of fuel oil in a combustion chamber that operates in a reducing mode. They are always sort of starved for air. Well the reason those stoves are still around even though they are made out of sheet metal, is they never have an oxidizing Flame. Going back to the waste oil burner, I would say that adding Steam would cool off a reaction that’s getting too hot because it’s running rich and provide oxygen for all that extra carbon that’s available with the used motor oil.
So I can imagine if you had a bed of charcoal and were dripping oil on to it, you would be creating the perfect environment for the water gas shift reaction and be producing lots of hydrogen lots of oxygen and still have a reducing Flame.
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