If the rest of your oil heating system appears to be in good shape but the oil burner is out of date, your heating oil company may be able to retrofit it with a modern, efficient burner.
Usually, the rule of thumb for the industry is if the efficiency of the heating system is less than 75%—even after a system tune-up has been done—a new burner is advisable. A new high-efficiency burner often pays for itself in just a few years through lower heating costs.
How Does an Oil Burner Work?
Liquid oil must be mixed with air and turned into a vapor before it can burn. When the oil reaches the burner’s nozzle, it’s broken into small droplets. This process is called atomizing. The oil burner takes the droplets, vaporizes them and then mixes them with air.
How efficiently this is done depends on the design of the burner. The newest burners contain electronic pre-purge and post-purge controls to ensure ultra-clean starts and stops. New two-stage burners also have an efficiency level that’s 5–15% higher than older ones because they have been designed to conserve fuel.
And when you combine a new oil heating system with the new clean-burning Bioheat®, you’ll have a double win.
Bioheat® is not only kind to the environment, it’s kind to your heating system, too. It’s extremely clean-burning and boasts the highest BTU content of any alternative fuel. If everyone using heating oil used just a B5 blend (5 percent biodiesel/95 percent heating oil), 400 million gallons of regular heating oil could be conserved. This would be a big step toward conserving oil and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Please contact your local heating oil company for more information.