Why Is It Better To Use An Oil Away Attachment To Burn Oil In A Trash Incinerator?

by Granite Environmental Tech Guys
(Florida, USA)

A customer purchased a portable small scale trash incinerator and wanted to find out why it would be better to use an oil away attachment to burn oil in the trash incinerator.

Is the trash incinerator burning 20 gallons of free oils at a time?

He read in the trash incinerator handbook that one can burns up to 20 gallons of free oils at a time. The customer wanted to find out if he would understand properly that he has only to load the oil, load the trash on top and the trash incinerator would burn normally.

Our tech guys confirmed that this was correct. However, they would recommend to burn the 20 gallons of oil poured over a full barrel of other material. Burning the 20 gallons of oil by itself or only with a small amount of material it would take a very long time to burn it.

Why is an oil away attachment necessary considering it burns a maximum of six gallons per hour only?

The oil away attachment will consistently burn 3 to 6 gallons of oil per hour. The attachment can be placed in a barrel of oil. The next step is to start a small fire in the portable incinerator (just to get the oil burning). By starting the pump the fire will continue to burn until the pump has emptied the oil drum. It will burn a full oil drum in 11 hours (depending on the setting of the pump). Trying this with the portable small scale trash incinerator ONLY it would take days before the process is done.

Isn't burning the 20 gallons of oil in the portable incinerator alone the best way to go ahead?

Not really. The small scale trash incinerator can burn oil as described but it needs something to act as a wick to keep the fire going. Meaning you need some wood or something that burns and produces a flame inside the drum, burning along with the pool or oil the entire time it is burning.

The flame, not the heat, is what actually eliminates the smoke. If that flame goes out, the burning oil will smoke a lot.

It is also a very slow way to burn the oil because the incinerator is trying to heat and burn a large pool of oil all at once.

By using the oil away attachment, small amounts of oil are been introduced at a time, making the heat vaporizing instantly and creating a flame, much like an injection engine.

This is a more efficient method for burning the oil and in the long run much faster.