Posted on 09/25/2022 12:45:55 PM PDT by leopud
Sell it to someone with an old diesel tractor (pre-electronic injectors) or an M35A2 military “deuce and a half” truck. Those diesel engines are designed to run on most anything.
he’s too far away, or I’d buy it for mine. I run #2 fuel oil mostly during the winter, but I’d run a kerosene blend if the price was right.
LOL.
1 gallon oil can with drain oil hung from ceiling with copper tube and a drain valve to pot belly stove kept my garage nice and warm in the winter months when I lived back east.
No long warm ups and the tires ware didn’t feel square in 20 below weather.
#2 heating oil is pretty much kerosene. Dont worry about it.
^^ This It’s done all the time around here. Different levels of #1 to #2 depending on the cold. #2 fuel oil will jell below 20f, cutting with Kerosene reduces jelling. Most likely the reason your tank is normally filled with #1 is the tank is outside.
The kerosene is a hotter burning fuel, if like the heating oil burners I was used to back east, an injector pushes the fuel into the furnace combustion chamber.
In my opinion the only reason the addition of #2 fuel oil (which is diesel) is a problem is if it burns dirtier than the kerosene to the extent it soots up the burner or pipes. I don’t think a mixture is going to be that significant over the course of one tank.
Fire it up under observation and make sure there’s no major chuffing or re-start attempts and the stack doesn’t look like a coal burning locomotive. If you don’t run into that enjoy the temporary savings (I’m assuming the #2 is cheaper)
Definitely make sure that in the least they charged you less for the #2, and if you’re uncomfortable or they’re bitchy about it make them drain it and replace it...
That report also says Kerosene is more viscous than #2... (it’s not)
yes, the tank is outside.
Thank you
It’s not the viscosity that is concerning — it is the increased heat release that the burners are not designed for.
We’ve used kerosene as a 50/50 blend in several oil burners over the years. It just burns cleaner and creates less soot.
To clarify, the system is designed for kerosene, but you accidentally added No 2 heating oil? And has your burner fired since then, and how did it fire? Is this forced air, or a boiler feeding radiators?
I am not an expert but, if you added gasoline for example, you might have a problem as obviously it has a very low vaporization pressure, and when the burner blew a mist before the spark lit the flame, it would be setting you up for a boom from the gas vapors in the combustion chamber. How much of a boom would probably depend on the ratio of gasoline to kerosene.
But No2 is less volatile than Kerosene, so in this case the problem might be a system designed to ignite kerosene might fail to ignite the No2, though I would think they are similar enough it would catch
The only concern I think, which might pertain, would be a failure to ignite the mix at the spark, but then your burner would simply shut down when the light sensor failed to detect a flame.
If you restarted it a lot and it failed to ignite each time, and you filled the combustion chamber with fuel that had not ignited, and then it ignited, that might be a problem, as the fuel could run out of your heater on the floor. But you would know the problem was there, as you would have to restart the burner five or ten times, or a lot more with no flame before you had a problem.
Have you fired up the burner yet, and how has it fired? Did it light right up, did it take a while to catch, and then rumble in the combustion chamber? Did you open the little door and check how the flame looked?
Your best bet for a professional answer might be to call a home heating contractor who services burners each year with the cleaning and nozzle/filter changes, and explain it to him. He might want to change out the nozzle to something with a different pattern, or even lower GPH, since there is a BTU difference. I imagine your burner would also need the air-flow control altered too, since the No2 would have more carbon than the kerosene, and might need more air to burn cleaner. And he might want to move the spark electrodes as well. He would know all of that on diesel vs kerosene.
Simply call your fuel supplier. They will pump it out and dump it back into a huge storage tank diluting it and they should fill you back up to whatever you had. They want you to be safe also. The liability is tremendous if something goes wrong.
A viscosity too low can cause cavitation and pump impeller damage.
Viscosity to high can cause high running current and motor damage.
>>A viscosity too low can cause cavitation and pump impeller damage.<<
I hate to show off, but pump cavitation is strictly a function of liquid vapor pressure at pumping temperature. Cavitation is NOT a function of viscosity. Sorry. Cavitation is associated with bubble formation and rapid collapse which is stricly a function of vapor pressure. Viscosity is generally associated with Reynolds number which, in turn determines pressure drop due to fluid flow. I say all this because I busted my ass as a young man studying this crap so much so that I neglected the love of my life and got painfully kicked to the curb which resulted in me carrying a huge hole in my heart. It was really not worth the effort.
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