B U R NE R S E T UP
"Faulty draft conditions cause more flame and combustion problems than any other single factor." Draft is air, air is draft, and if it's not
right and set correctly to begin with you can spend a day working on the freaking thing and it still won't work right, FACT! I think much of the language we use is confusing to a lot of us. I keep making it simple for myself and
I've even stopped using the term "draft regulator." In reality, it really isn't a regu- lator, it's a draft reducer. The "reducer" will only reduce the airflow; it just can't make draft and most are too small or in the wrong place to begin with. I keep hearing these stories about
OEMs testing burners to perfect condi- tions, that's just pure fantasy! The burner and appliance companies demand that you set the draft correctly. Making it, low- ering it, whatever it takes to get to those so called "perfect conditions," parameters or boundaries is your problem, not theirs. It's not a "perfect condition." It's where it will work correctly, got it? If your flow of air from start to finish
isn't right, pump pressures, nozzle selec- tions and burner adjustments just don't count. Manufacturers test their equip- ment under conditions you will probably never see the both extremes of, but you must make it run right and if you set it where they want it, it will! Anyway, let's say that you've adjusted
the burner for the ideal draft condition and now want to set the burner to do the same using a cad-cell. Well, it's become easier than ever thanks to two new con- trols, the Beckett GeniSys, Figure 2 and the Honeywell R7284, Figure 3. In this article I'm going to use the
GeniSys and its companion Contractor Tool, Figure 4, simply because I'm more familiar with them and have spent lots of time experimenting with them. By using the Contractor Tool and
GeniSys, setting up a burner can be very easy and can go a lot faster with confir- mation using combustion test equipment as great tools to verify everything. If you have an electronic analyzer and really
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know how to use it, that's the way to go, but there are still a lot of people carrying wet-kits and this is for them. By the way if you don't know everything that analyzer will do and how to interpret the readings, come spend some time with me in a semi- nar and I'll show you what it all means.
As we've done with multi-meters in
the past and using the "Lanthier Scale," adjust the burner air settings for the lowest readings you can obtain by moving the air gate open and close. Using the following pictures, we can see what will happen as the air gate is adjusted.
