Propane Burner

[mjgraham]

While this project started years ago when I thought I was going melt cans, I thought I had a good propane burner built, it was noisy and required about 40psi to work, fast forward to today when I am getting 16 Lb. Bags of charcoal to incinerate stuff I decided to revive it. After a quick trip on the Internet I saw that the pipe I was using was to big and the fire was burning inside the pipe instead of the flare until the pressure was so high it pushed it out. Now this new creation works around 3-5 psi on up. I put most of the pictures on a separate page with details just to keep from having a monster long post but most of the details are there, as for the furnace container I basically used my charcoal container so there needs to be some work there.

main details are a 8" piece of 1" and 3/4" pipe, a 1-1/4" to 3/4" bell reducer and a 3" flare from sheet metal (dimensions are on the other page).
gas supply is from a 1/4" piece of pipe with a 1/4"-28 threaded hole with a 0.035" MIG welder tip as the nozzle brazed to the back of the reducer.

 

[grance]

Nice man. When I built my furnace I considerd propane but when with charcoal. It also works supprisingly well on biomass pellets

 

[mjgraham]

I almost think the charcoal works better, one thing I did notice is it does not ignite the gases from the new chips, although it is instant heat, and seems to be fairly reasonable on gas, ran an hour or two and still have some gas in the 20 Lb. tank. Another thing is there seems to be far less oxygen in the chamber for the chips to turn white, I saw that they were glowing and when I took the lid off they flashed over but since I am not pumping air in there to get the coal going. A few improvements to be made.

 

[grance]

Charcoal is more efficient when you set what ever your crucable directly on to it. I like it because if I would have messed it up there is no risk of an explosion and a wood working shop up the road makes biomass pellets. I run a mix of 3lbs of pellets to 1 lbs of charcoal

 

[mjgraham]

I'll have to look into pellets, I was OK with charcoal was getting 16.6 pound bag for $5.99 but when they found out it went to $8.99. I guess the price was quite old, still not to bad I don't guess.