It’s that time of year in the Midwest, i live in an older home and am stuck with the old fuel oil furnace until i can afford something better.
My question is what exactly is fuel oil?
Could i buy diesel at a gas station and put it in my tank? Could i use the leftover fryer oil at restaurants? Kerosene?
It’s basically diesel, but I’d be very surprised if you can get it cheaper at a gas station than delivered by a truck. Even the non-taxed dyed diesel is usually more expensive at the pump than bulk delivery fuel oil.
You can use waste vegetable oil in a home furnace, but it requires some modification. The problem is that the minimum temperature at which WVO will flow is much higher than diesel and pretty much by definition you’re going to be using your furnace in cold weather. On WVO-converted cars that have to run in cold weather, they have two fuel tanks and an exchanger so they can start on diesel and switch to WVO when the engine warms the WVO tank. Not sure what the modifications for a WVO furnace are, though.
Kerosene furnaces exist (though not common in the US), but you can’t just use kerosene in your fuel oil burning furnace.
Kerosene has similar chemical characteristics to heating oil and diesel and thus can be used with no problems in a furnace.
Kerosene produces very little soot and smoke when burned and because of that it is used for unvented space heaters
Diesle can and has been used in oil burners. Home fry oil not so much, though it is possible, it take modification and work to make sure it doesn’t cause a lot more expensive trouble then it’s worth.
Kerosene is possibly a better fuel then standard home heating oil in the standard oil burner and certainly can be used interchangeable. I think it contains less energy per gallon then oil, so you would use more, but is it is gel resistant so is commonly used where fuel is stored in outside tanks.
I should have mentioned. The tank itself is actually located in the basement, so the cold weather shouldn’t be an issue.
as said, home heating oil is very similar to diesel and kerosene; however it (to the best of my knowledge doesn’t have to conform to the ultra-low sulfur standards that on-road diesel does. Further, road diesel is taxed higher than heating oil, which is why heating oil is dyed to help bust people using untaxed fuel oil in their cars/trucks.
With a inside tank diesel should not be a problem, the furnace will never know the difference 
It is not uncommon here for people to fill some containers with diesel to add to their heating oil tanks to get them by till the truck can deliver which sometimes takes time if there is ice/snow issues, or can’t afford a full filling that the truck makes so will just get by with diesel till they have enough money to pay for the full delivery.
IIRC, usually the problem is the opposite - the authorities, who benefit from road taxes, want to avoid people using heating oil as deisel fuel in their car or truck. Hence the dye… When I asked about it, someone mentioned that the deisel oil was “more purified” (I assume less contamination with long chain molecules) since they did not want to clog up the truck engines.
Also, keep in mind - I had a heckuva time when I sold an old house, had to get rid of the old fuel tank because nobody would insure it. While I lived there, I was grandfathered, but the new buyer was going to be SOL. (Draining the last bit was part of the fun - the rest was how to get it up the stairs safely.) Apparently anything more than about 25 years old (in Canada) was at risk of rusting through, and no insurance company though the risk was reasonable.
Not as bad as the guy somewhere in Ontario who was delivering fuel, and after he went past 200 gal, realized that something was wrong. He had gone to the wrong address, and the house there had not removed the filler pipe when they took out the tank. Good thing the oil company had insurance.
road fuel is limited to 15ppm of sulfur to protect the catalysts in modern diesel cars and trucks. AFAIK heating oil and jet fuel are under no such restriction.
UK is probably different but i had a friend who ran his truck exclusively on Heating oil for months. very much cheaper but that is due to lower tax and so the government over here will test and take your van away if they find it!
Interesting - As far as I know low sulfur diesel was to prevent sulfur pollution. I am not sure that it is to protect catalysts in Diesel cars/trucks since predominantly they use urea to control NOx emissions. But I could be wrong - could you please provide a cite ?
I don’t think there are seizure laws in the US, but AFAIK you can be facing substantial fines if your tank gets dipped and they find pink fuel.
Heating oil has usually has some additives meant to provide better lubrication for the burner mechanism and burning characteristics. I doubt they make a huge difference since I know someone who used diesel fuel to run a home heating furnaces without a problem. Also, heating oil is less expensive than diesel fuel because it’s heavily subsidized. This is why it’s illegal to use heating oil as diesel fuel, once a common practice.
That’s a cite on the effects of sulfur on SCR catalysts. That doesn’t provide any data why the sulfur concentration needs to be limited to 15ppm or 30ppm or anything else. Can you please provide a cite that particularly supports your claim - “road fuel is limited to 15ppm of sulfur to protect the catalysts in modern diesel cars and trucks”
Did we get an official ruling on this yet?
I don’t know how they do it in the UK, but in the US, home heating oil contains a red dye. If they find traces of dye in your truck you’ll get a heavy fine. This isn’t my area of expertise but I’m under the impression that the dye gets into all kinds of stuff and is very difficult to remove, so it’s easy for them to find traces of it if you try to cheat.
I’ve known people who have put kerosene into a home furnace because they’ve run out of oil. It’s pretty common when people have run out of oil and they can’t schedule a truck to fill up their tank any time soon. They’ll usually just dump enough kerosene into the furnace to get them by for a few days until the truck comes but I’ve never known anyone to have any trouble with it.
Poking around on the net though, it seems that this can cause problems with some burners, due to the fact that kerosene burns hotter and the viscosity is a bit different.
I would therefore say you can probably burn kerosene in your furnace without a problem, but check with your burner manufacturer first just in case you’ve got one that doesn’t handle it very well.
I don’t know the exact reason for it other than that it reduces emissions (no idea on the “protect the catalysts” part of that) but here is a cite from the EPA related to the 15 ppm spec:
[QUOTE=EPA]
A 15 parts per million (ppm) sulfur specification, known as Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel (ULSD), was phased in for highway diesel fuel from 2006-2010. Diesel engines equipped with advanced emission control devices (generally, 2007 and later model year engines and vehicles) must use highway ULSD fuel. Exhaust emissions from these engines will decrease by more than 90%.
[/QUOTE]
From here: http://www.epa.gov/otaq/fuels/dieselfuels/index.htm
In addition to not flowing very well (or at all) when cold, WVO tends to clump up and those clumps don’t burn completely. In a car, this causes gunk to build up inside the engine over time which can cause a major problem, and it ends up being an issue even in two-tank cars since people want to run the diesel as little as possible and switch over to WVO too early.
WVO in a furnace has the same basic issues where it congeals when cold and clumps up if it’s not hot enough. You could use it in a pinch in an unmodified furnace but to avoid the gunking up issue they usually use line heaters to preheat the WVO as it comes into the furnace. An inside tank probably wouldn’t have any other issues but an outside tank would also require some sort of heating to prevent the WVO from freezing solid in it.
The systems that I have seen have just used heaters to preheat the WVO. I’ve never seen them use a two-tank system and cut over as is commonly done in cars.
Uk heating fuel isn’t dyed pink, only commercial/farm fuel is. In fact i was left to oversee a delivery of “Pink Diesel” on a farm once, and the guy filled the farms tank, then changed the hose to a different spigot to do the last few gallons. I asked what was going on and he said, his next delivery was domestic fuel so he wanted to flush the Pink out and it was exactly the same stuff…
Yeah, I’d always heard that kerosene would damage most furnaces designed to run fuel oil, but I suppose the reason why they felt the need to say that is because it will work in a pinch. It does sound like you can run rather large kerosene blends without major problems though.