Filtering Your Waste Oil

Filtering your waste oil is one of the biggest steps you can take to make sure your oil burner stays running properly. This aspect to owning one of these machines cannot be emphasized enough.

There are several quick lubes in my town alone that has bought a waste oil boiler and after several months had to get it removed and switch back to natural gas because it broke down so much. The reason why is simple. The managers and employees did not care at all about maintaining the equipment. And it all started with not filtering the oil.

You have to make certain that there is no water, antifreeze, chlorine, or much sludge in the oil. You cannot just dump oil that you got out of someone's car or truck into your tank. You have to have a process in place. Its not hard at all.

First, whenever you get a batch of oil you want to make sure you let it sit for several days. Two days is sufficient. The goal is to let all the contaminants settle to the bottom. After this "settling period" you can to take some sort of suction wand and suck the oil into a holding tank of some sort.

Now I have two holding tanks. I have several 250 gallon holding tanks in my garage that I house the oil in and I have the 200 gallon holding tank that is connected to the actual waste oil burner that came with it. When the holding tank connected to the actual boiler starts to get low than I suck more oil into it from my holding tanks in my garage.

The reason why I stated this is because when I transfer the waste oil from my two holding tanks I filter the oil through a 30 micron Dahl or Baldwin filter. This further cleans out my oil.

The quality of oil going into my boiler is as clean as it can possibly be for what it is. I go way beyond the call of duty when it comes to filtering. But it has paid off. It has never broken down once since I have owned it.

When you only put filtered clean waste oil into your boiler, regularly maintain it, do an annual cleaning on it you will have a smooth running machine that will not give you any problems at all.