How easy is it to fix an oil burner?

There is always hope that a machine can be fixed by a few tricks and a guess as to the one cause that is always simple. However, an oil burner balances air pressures from inside the house by a fan that is adjusted with a moving damper on the side, the oil that is of unknown condition through parts that might or might not be clean. Parts will naturally wear and shift in time, usually a problem appears within 3 years of ignoring annual service, leading to an emergency call that temporarily restarts the burner, but usually is left in dirty and marginal adjustment by guess.

I came to my knowledge through unsupervised learning on-the-job (when there was a lot of 'forgiving' in burner styles 40 years ago, not so today with high efficiency burners) and book study in DIY fashion, then learned from factory training and from others more experienced on-the-job. Most won't accept that after ten years of vocational training, on-the-job training, and working in the field that is just the STARTING point of understanding what is going on in the HVAC trade, when an idea of safety and liability becomes pressing from having units shoot flames on your face. Many leave for other things at that point, or specialize.

Playing with 220V for residential equipment and 440v 3-phase in commercial is daily testing. That doesn't mean I'd tell people how to play with it unless I was on the site showing someone I knew very well, so they'd survive. The same with oil burners. I do recognize that SOME level-headed people can slowly and carefully go through the books on-line to learn how to repair their oil burners and they do have the 'right to remain silent' and the 'freedom to die as they choose.'

The Usual Horror Story that happens to many, if not most, service techs:

One night about 10 years ago, I went on a late night call to a home to check out their no heat call. All that was wrong was the ignition buss bar under the transformer. Before I even started, I asked how many times they pressed the reset button. The homeowner said "only one time." HIS WIFE said he had pressed it at least 20-25 times before they called me, and 3-4 times after they called.

The furnace was a ThermoPride with firebrick in the chamber. After I pulled the burner, I found about 3 inches of raw oil standing in the bottom of the firebox. I pulled the front off of the heat exchanger, pulled out the firebrick, took it outside to the driveway, and set it on fire. It burned HOT for over an hour. While it burned, I went to the basement and cleaned up the mess in the furnace using all the rags and oil-dry that I had in the truck.

I was on the job for nearly 3 hours.

AFTER it was all done and over, the homeowner refused to pay the bill saying that I had overcharged him. Our company eventually got paid after we took the owner to court.

Fast forward to last winter.

There was an article in the local paper about a fire at a home caused by a faulty furnace. It was THIS SAME homeowner. Same furnace! This time, the house had over $100,000 in damage. It had been over 9 years since anyone had worked on the furnace at all, other than this idiot homeowner that was too cheap to do regular maintenance.

[From HolmesUser1 post in HandymanWire.com] The most usual response is the insult and "You just want to scare us to make more money."

The folks that come on to say that they'll do the repairs because they don't have the money can be scary. The first is the idea of why they don't have the money; having sufficient money to take a taxi when drunk and enough to call a pro for explosive situations seems level-headed. Having enough money comes from hard work; though I know from experience it is hard to get started to get enough for many. The other point is that not having money, there won't be the cash to buy a $1000 combustion test set, which means getting all the parts like new, they can't be adjusted. So I remain cautious about running an unsupervised trade school by correspondence on the web.

The only way to tell is by using combustion test instruments, no one indicator will tell all of them:

When a tech uses combustion test instruments to give you a complete combustion test list including the data for:
Oil nozzle pressure ____
Pump suction pressure _____
draft over the fire _____
draft in the fire chamber ____
No smoke setting ____
CO2 percentage ____
room temperature _____
Stack temperature _____
Combustion efficiency _____

Then he will have a starting point to know, after all parts are clean and set to factory specs, if a condition like inadequate draft or other problem is a cause. If he doesn't have or use these instruments there is little chance that the burner will be adjusted to prevent soot or be so wide open that oil is wasted.

I was sitting at home in the evening and my phone rings from a Massachusetts call. A guy says he saw my web site and decided to call. He ran out of oil and wanted to know how to bleed the pump.

Most people who read my posts over the past years know that I don't recommend anyone bleed their own pump as they also have to check combustion with tools they don't have or they are just guessing as to an explosion or not in order to save some bucks.

I directed him to the manufacturer's PDF page: Oil pump manufacturers instructions.
showing a picture of how to bleed a pump (pages IV-7,8). Just before I got him to the page, he tells me he has to take another call and hangs up.

Now I know I offend DIY royalty by telling them to get a pro to do the dangerous stuff, and he might have been 'getting even' for my doing so. OR maybe he's just an inconsiderate jerk. I can't tell. How many people are ready to call someone in the evening they've never met for a free consultation to blow him off after almost getting what he was asking about?

There is no upside to advising mateurs on oil burners. If you tell them it is dangerous, just push the button once, as some say on the machine or customer manual, then call a pro, they accuse you of wanting to make money. If you tell them anything at all, and they cause soot, smoke, fire, or explosion, you are to blame for not warning them. If you point out that it could be any number of causes for the problem, they find one and then brag how they found the one while you didn't catch that one. Even if you warn them and tell them what to do they still blame you. If you point them to a manual to do it, they complain it is too technical and they want a free lesson NOW. It's all about saving money. The lesson to be drawn is to agree with a DIY for them to replace every part with a new one until the problem is solved.

Of course, in out litigious society, he could sue if I told him how instead of directing him to pages by a manufacturer that tell him to call a pro. That might have turned him off; but I really doubt that many people are that sinister.

Oil pump manufacturer's troubleshooting.