Saturday, July 22, 2023

Diesel Heater.

The Fuel tank used to feed the old petrol generator which was heavy and loud and way too high VA. 

It is 200 x  450 x 600 = 54 litres  2 x 20 litre jerry wont quite fill.

The Heater burn / litres per Hour 1.2 - 2.4 

The fuel sender is 3 Ohms to Negative / Earth when nearly full and also when nearly empty;  so the sender is toast. To get at it I would have to remove the fuel tank which would involve getting under the chasis and removing 4  bolts with nylocks nuts...  easy .. 

Bolts removed and tank is ready to slide.

Will wait till the tank is empty again before recommencing. 

UPDATE : Inspected the sender and it looks fine  - 170 Full  - 3 Empty Ohms


I quite like the look of those old round dials. So if I go say 50 mA and thought of it as litres? 


The diesel heater has been largely trouble free for a few years now. 

It would be nice to engineer it into a IOT system. 

November 2019 Fault

Symptoms:  blows smokey unignited fuel vapour out of the exhaust. Last time this happened I disconnected the fuel and ran it thorough a cuppla start cycles to lean it right out. That was about 4 tanks of 24 liters of fuel ago. It worked.


My initial (wrong) diagnosis was that I had been running it on a low setting. I thought maybe it was running too cool and not de coking the combustion chamber.  I have never run it one any setting but 100 percent since the last failure.

Problem solved. The connector that takes the start up current is not up to the job. Inadequate current gets to the glow plug to start combustion but a credible voltage drop still exists.

Fix:  involved breaking out the conductors to a more robust connector lug / bus style system.

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