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I have spent a lot of time thinking about this over the past 30 years here in New England and here are my conclusions:
The GPH for your nozzle is rated at a given PSI from your oil pump (100 PSI as I recall).Some furnaces run a higher pressure but a lot of them do run at 100 PSI.The oil pump pressure is adjustable based on the furnace design requirements. If you are running at 100 PSI than .8 GPH should be your consumption for the time the burner is actually running. Some time is spent with the burner turned off but the fan running when the high limit from the thermostat is met, so it will seem like the furnace is still burning oil when it is not.
If you want to maximize furnace efficiency in your house you need to look at the stack temperature as the exhaust exits the furnace.
The nozzle size needs to be adjusted to keep the stack temperature high enough to keep condensation out of the chimney but no higher. Some where in the neighborhood of 300 degrees will do that. As long as your furnace can keep up on the coldest part of the coldest day of the year (running 100% of the time on that day).
Most heating contractors don't optimize this and as long as the customer doesn't complain about being cold, it goes without notice, but costs the customer money. Not a problem if the person setting up your furnace also sells you heating oil !
Decreasing the nozzle size needs to be done using information available from the the furnace manufacturer and the burner manufacturer, but the nozzle supplied with furnace is not normally the only option recommended.
Forced air furnaces may seem inefficient since the temperature in the house seems to drop faster than with a hot water system, but you spend less furnace run time bringing the house up to temperature to start with since you are not bringing a large mass of water up to temerature to start with. Since a forced air system will go on and off more often than a hot water system there is more loss of heat up the chimney each time the furnace swithces off between cycles. This can be addressed with an exhaust pipe damper that closes (electrically) when the furnace switches off and retains the heat in the furnace. It is linked to the burner circuit and must be open for the furnace to start.
I hope this helps you to make well thought out decisions !
FYI:
I bought my own oil burner tools on ebay and did my own furnace installation and maintenance.
posted by 69.183.245...
, Sat, 2 Nov 2013 08:24:45
, Mon, 4 Nov 2013 07:16:37
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