Thanks mark! The “sand blaster” and I have been together for 29 years now, and she comes in handy sometimes!
Heat…funny you should ask. Here is yet another one of my projects.
I heat with drain oil, I had made my own gun and stuck it in a furnace many years ago but the fire pot was so small and I was pushing so many Btu’s through it that I burn out the fire pot twice. I then got a good deal on a used Black Gold forced air unit (made to burn waste oil) that I used for several years until the heat exchanger rotted through I then got an old oil burner furnace with a good sized fire pot lined with fire brick, much better to take the Btu’s I needed to fire through it. I installed the Black Gold gun and used it for a year or two until I got sick and tired of it and the tank taking up valuable floor space in my shop.
I had a cement slab out back by the hog barn that was from a smaller barn that had fallen down before I bought the place. I also had a bunch of 10” channel iron frame rails from some old Oshkosh cement trucks, and a pile of used corrugated steel siding from a pole shed….what was I to do but build a boiler house! You may notice in the shop pics the heater hanging from the ceiling with the two orange lines to it, this nothing more than a heat exchange/radiator from a big screw air compressor and a squirrel cage blower behind it.
If you look close at the boiler building you can see the frame rails standing in the corners and supporting the center, as well as my dad’s major on the back side of the building. We split the roof line to make it look somewhat like an old chicken coop but I also needed the height to get an I beam, trolley and hoist up in the peak so that I can back a truck in the back door and unload 55 gal barrels of oil with the hoist.
I picked up a old boiler for $250.00. It was nothing but the bare boiler, front door, and the smoke box that the stack attaches to. I made the enclosure and installed the fittings, pumps, expansion tank, controls, etc. I then made another gun using the boiler water as the oil preheater rather than electric as used on the Black Gold unit.
I then got out the back hoe and dug trenches to the shop and the house, and the worst part…. I had to spend $1,800.00 on the insulated Pex tubing lines that got buried in the trenches. I then got a visit from a nice gentleman from the county that thought I was putting in an illegal septic system. Unfortunately for the county the nice gentleman gut suckered into doing a perk test in my back yard as I already had trenches dug all over the place.
We got the system up and running last year December and heated the house and shop all winter. I just fired it back up last week and as long as I can scrounge up enough waste oil I’ll go another year without spending a dime on heating oil.
Pat
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