Welcome to OUPower.com
"Over Unity Power" Research

WVO Turk Burner Project Page 1

This Website is Created and Maintained by chris--at--OUPower--dot--com (Fix the address for it to work!)
This Project was last updated on: May 26, 2008 10:01pm
v7.01

WARNING! Many, if not all of the projects described within these pages, contain dangerous and potentially fatal consequences if you do not exercise proper precautions and follow standard safety procedures. The owner of this site takes no responsibility for injury sustained by anyone attempting to duplicate or utilize any of the information on this site. The information here is strictly for Educational Purposes! -USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Click Here to go to my YouTube Channel!!

Click Here to go to our NEW Facebook Discussion Group! This is replacing the old Discussion Board!

Click Here to go to our ARCHIVED Discussion Boards.

Please consider donating to help support this website!

Click Here to Re-Display the Main Project Page

Project Description:
Turk Burners are an interesting way to burn difficult fuels such as WVO (Waste Vegetable Oil) or WMO (Waste Motor Oil) in a rather low-tech application. The one I built here is not very efficient, but it did work. I imagine if you put more time and effort into your burner, you would be able to achieve much higher efficiencies than I did here. I was more or less just testing the concept to see if it worked at all. -It does!

Proceed to another page of the WVO Turk Burner Project: [<<<   <      >   >>>]


Yes yes I know... I should be shot. These pictures are 9 months old and I am only NOW getting around to posting them. What can I say, I have been so damned busy I can't see straight. But life might be settling down now for me so I would love to get back into posting my projects and sharing my research with you guys. If you can forgive my horrible delay, I'll start at the beginning of this story. It's a pretty cool one!

Ever since I built my nice new workshop during the winter of 2006-2007, I have been struggling with the challenge of trying to come up with a cheap, efficient and EASY way to heat the place. Additionally I wanted to find something that would allow me to do my foundry work with those same requirements as the shop heat. Obviously I knew doing foundry work in my shop in the winter would provide a great symbiosis between melting metal and heating my shop with all of that wonderful waste heat, but I had to make the puzzle fit properly or not at all.

I had played with Charcoal and Propane foundry methods a few years back (see my previous projects), but they were both NOISY and Expensive; not to mention messy in the case of charcoal. -No I needed the perfect solution here. So I started digging and reading, then digging and reading some more. Finally I came to what appeared to be the perfect solution: Waste Vegetable Oil (WVO). Burning WVO is considered by many to be carbon neutral. When you grow the plants that Veggie Oil is made out of, you sequester the carbon from the atmosphere. When you burn WVO you simply liberate that carbon back into the atmosphere. You are not ADDING any extra carbon that was not already in the atmosphere.

Waste Motor Oil can give similar results to WVO, in fact it is easier to work with because it has a lower ignition temperature. But it's dark side is that it adds carbon to the atmosphere; carbon that was sequestered far below the earth for thousands of years and not impacting our atmosphere. By us burning it, we release that carbon back into our atmosphere. It also releases a bunch of heavy metals into the atmosphere such as mercury and Zink. -Not a good choice for someone trying to be GREEN. -Right? ...So Veggie Oil it is. I picked WVO instead of SVO (Straight Vegetable Oil) because WVO is free if you can find some restaurants willing to let you take it. SVO is great because it is so clean. It has no nasty food particles that tend to want to decay like in the WVO. But SVO is very expensive. I don't know how it compares to standard Diesel fuel when you do a MPG test vs cost, but I bet they are close. So for me the choice of WVO was the clear winner.

Other than being dirty, messy and smelly, WVO is great ...let me tell you! In fact it's amazing. But you have to overcome some hefty obstacles to make it work great. I'll go into more detail on those obstacles in a bit. Bottom line here was if I could find a way of easily, cleanly and neatly burning the stuff, I'd have a nearly unlimited FREE supply of fuel for my shop and foundry. That's where the fun and imagination come into play.


Just a 12v gel cell leading to the leads on the fan motor.

I started my WVO testing by first obtaining some genuine WVO from a local restaurant. I went balls-to-the-wall low tech for my first run: An old 5 gallon bucket, a cup and a few towels.

After obtaining permission from the restaurant to procure some of their liquid gold from the 55 gallon drums out back, I set to work.

Lifting the lid I was perhaps as excited as I would ever be at seeing something that very much looked and smelled like SHIT! I have to say it was quite an odd sensation to be so excited about gathering something so utterly gross. I was doing this in the winter time, so it was cold and goopy, like pudding. It stank to high-heaven and was horrible get on your hands or clothing.

I proceeded to dip my first cup and immediately realized that I had to find a better way of obtaining this stuff. It was NASTY and I mean NASTY! After about 6 scoops I had close to a gallon of the stuff, maybe a bit less. I had the nasty stinky goo on my hand, on my sleeve and probably elsewhere. WTF do I do with this damn cup now? So I threw it into my bucket, wiped my hand and sleeve off and put the lid back on the 55 gallon barrel.

I'll worry about better collection methods later. For now I was racing with excitement at testing this stuff out.


Here's a close-up of the blower. Pretty high-tech huh? I did this because trying to blow directly down the throat toward the air pipe caused too much backwash. Introducing the air from the side of the bottle worked much better. I had at least 3x the air pressure of straight on. I didn't get a picture of the odd straight-on configuration. Sorry guys!

So back to the story. When I got home I decided to try to filter the stuff. It was pretty nasty cold, but warm it was far worse as the odor filled the entire basement. I had managed to obtain close to a gallon of the stuff so I can only imagine what hundreds of gallons would smell like. For a filter I used an old pair of red tights that my little daughter had outgrown. She happily donated them to the odd experiment at hand. -What are you going to do with them Daddy? -Come down and see sweetie...

With my little helpers assistance, I cut a piece of the leg into 3 filters. Using a twist tie, I cinched up the bottom, so I basically had a small nylon bag. Then I took one of my son's used plastic baby food containers and cut the bottom out of it. Then put the bag inside, just like you would put a garbage bag liner into a trash can that had a lid. The lid secured the nylon "bag" into the container and gave me a way to support the nylon filter. I cut a small hole in the top of the lid so I could put a tube into the contraption. This was then suspended over a cup that was just big enough to support the baby food container but to let the nylon bag hang down through as it drained.

It worked, but horribly slow. The basement was too cold for good flow of my fuel. You need to have this stuff really warm to filter it with any speed.


You're looking at my FREE, totally scrounged "Turk Burner"! It's made up of a coffee can for the outside chamber, a V8 can for the inside chamber and a piece of 1" aluminum conduit for the blower tube. The blower motor is an old computer fan fitted into a 2-liter soda can; sealed with tape. LOL This has to be one for the prize books on cheap! Right fellas?

I could have gone high power with the hair dryer blower, but why make all that noise when I just need a little air. This nearly dead silent in operation. It worked surprisingly well for what I had done here, furthermore the temp was quite cold and windy on the night of my inaugural testing.

Here we are just after lighting the wick which was nothing more then a piece of tissue sitting int he pool of oil. In a turk burner, you add your oil in the bottom of the inner can first then use a wick to light it. Takes quite some time to get up to speed out here in the cold.


I had to re-light it several times before it finally caught. The blower is constantly trying to blow the small flame out and my wick (tissue) was certainly not the best of choices. But I was determined to make this work. You may have better luck keeping the blower off for a few minutes to try to let the heat build up.

Proceed to another page of the WVO Turk Burner Project: [<<<   <      >   >>>]

Click Here to Re-Display the Main Project Page

This Website is Created and Maintained by chris--at--OUPower--dot--com (Fix the address for it to work!)
This Project was last updated on: May 26, 2008 10:01pm
v7.01

WARNING! Many, if not all of the projects described within these pages, contain dangerous and potentially fatal consequences if you do not exercise proper precautions and follow standard safety procedures. The owner of this site takes no responsibility for injury sustained by anyone attempting to duplicate or utilize any of the information on this site. The information here is strictly for Educational Purposes! -USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!

Click Here to go to my YouTube Channel!!

Click Here to go to our NEW Facebook Discussion Group! This is replacing the old Discussion Board!

Click Here to go to our ARCHIVED Discussion Boards.

Please consider donating to help support this website!