Got my waste oil stove finished (jcassity will love this)

September 03, 2009, 10:49:20 AM

I finally got around to building my waste oil stove for the garage. I was tired of using up firewood that would be better used heating the house (the woodstove was a homemade job that had a ferocious appetite for wood), and didn't want to burn furnace oil (at almost $3/gallon), so I built a waste oil stove. More accurately, I converted the existing wood stove in the garage to burn waste engine oil. My plan was loosely based on the "Mother's Waste oil stove" (google it), but with some simplifications/modifications.

For a burner I used two brake rotors and a brake drum from my sister's old Dodge neon, bolted together so that there is a rotor acting as a base, the drum acts as a burner, and the top rotor acts as a heat spreader. The Mothers plans called for cast iron frying pans, but I had these brake parts lying around. A plate of 1/8" steel is sandwiched between the bottom rotor and the drum to seal up the big hub hole in it. The drum is filled with crushed ceramic tile (the Mothers plans called for asbestos, which is no longer available). Here's a pic of the burner:

The air injection pipe is old exhaust pipes with a blower fan mounted to the end. The Mothers plans called for a larger diameter pipe and natural aspiration, but I had to blow it

I actually did this to lean out the fire, which makes it much hotter and much less smokey. Fuel injection is courtesy of a length of copper line, gravity fed, regulated by a ball valve.

The oil tank was my biggest worry, I didn't know what I was going to use (I had visions a bucket sitting on a shelf, with a fitting cobbled into it, constantly leaking). While visiting a friend who lives off the grid I asked his advice, and he gave me the perfect solution: an old 25 gallon water tank out of a camper trailer he sped. It's galvanixed, already had the bungs on the bottom, and already had a filler tube. You couldn't ask for a better tank:

So after bolting it all together I had to take it for a "test toast" (Simspson fans will know what I mean). I didn't even bother cleaning up around it, I was that anxious to try it. I poured a little mineral oil into the brake drum, lit it, turned on the blower, and away it went. Once the mineral oil heated up the ceramic tile I opened the oil valve slightly to let the oil drip in, and everything worked perfectly!

These pics were taken with the fire turned way down. When going full bore it's almost blinding, and the stove actually glows! It will run fine with the fan turned off but will smoke more. The fan actually blows a bit too hard, so I put a choke in the air pipe to slow the air down some. This frickin' thing is awesome. According to the Mothers plans it should burn about a quart of used engine oil an hour. I ran it for two hours at full bore and the oil level on the dipstick I installed in the tank did not go down at all.

Best of all, it is all 100% free! I got all the parts for nothing, I get the oil for nothing, and since the fan isn't 100% necessary I don't even have to pay for electricity to use it!

It works so good, if I could get a reliable source of enough oil I'd convert the wood furnace in the basp00get to run on used oil...