[AT] Fuel Oil vs. Diesel Fuel

Chad Stansbury oldvw2 at yahoo.com
Mon May 9 04:55:50 PDT 2011


Interesting reading everyone's experiences with fuel oil. The plant I work at here in central NC used to burn #6 oil - our data sheets also referenced it as "bunker c". We had two boilers on it at one time and would fire with propane from dead cold to get enough atomizing steam to light off on #6. Compressed air could be used in a pinch but firing with propane first to get the boiler hot was safer (at least for our design).

We have around 80k gallons worth of storage and while burning #6 had a separate jacketed day tank equipped with recirculation pumps and a steam heater to keep the #6 hot. Burner nozzle cleanliness was very important as a coked up burner could cause oil to pool on the firebox floor. Operators also had to be extremely careful to follow restart instructions if the burner tripped as restarting without checking the firebox for burning coke/tar could cause a flash fire or explosion.

We converted from #6 about 10 years ago and have since removed the last of the small fire tube boilers – we fire our big water tube units with natural gas or #2 oil now. Our #2 oil is dyed ULSD and in fact we are planning a fuel dispenser at the tank farm to refuel the jockey trucks, welders, Lull and other non-road equipment.

FWIW,
Chad





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