Despite the industry-leading simplicity and reliability of EnergyLogic units, there are some crucial steps in your annual maintenance which can be easily overlooked, resulting in premature wear, shortening the lifespan of your Heater or Boiler and costing you money.
The Flame Retention Head on your Waste Oil Burner increases the burn time of your fuel, allowing for better energy extraction, while controlling the direction of the flame inside your burn chamber. As noted in your maintenance guide, owner’s manual, and here, it is critical that your flame retention head is aimed straight into the burn chamber.
The Burn chamber in your Waste Oil Appliance is made of a high-grade stainless steel, designed to withstand the heat generated by the burner and transfer the heat effectively to your usable air flow.
With a lot of resources at your fingertips to prevent this kind of error, I thought it would be fun for you to see the results of a misaligned flame retention head.
Heavily damaged burn Chamber, caused by a misaligned flame retention head.
You can see in the above pic that while the Stainless Steel Burn chamber is extremely resistant to the heat generated, it is no match for a poorly aligned flame. When the flame gets pushed sideways out of the burner, it will burn a hole straight through the burn chamber. The picture above shows a hole at the top of the burn chamber.
Symptoms accompanying this misalignment include hard starting, heavy exhaust smell from the machine, and if it goes unchecked long enough to burn through the chamber, the cabinet itself will show obvious signs of overheating.
Cabinet damage, caused by the misaligned Flame retention head.
In this second picture, we can see the obvious area on the cabinet wall where the flame has removed paint and caused clear oxidation. At this point, the burn chamber/heat exchanger were already damaged beyond repair and the only reasonable option was to trade-in this machine on a new one.
The extreme failure seen here is rare, and costly to repair, but with a little extra attention to the details of your burner assembly, easily avoidable.
