I've upgraded my Wood Burning Stove so that it can also burn any kind of waste oil, such as engine oil, diesel, kerosene, cooking oil etc. This one is bit different to others I've seen on the Internet, that use forced-air ventilation and gravity-fed oil delivery. I didn't really want to go that way as this stove is in my living room, I wanted to be able to burn normal firewood too, and just be able to add the oil fuel to the fire if I want to.

Being in the house I didn't want a run-away possibility from a gravity-fed fuel supply. I know this is highly unlikely but I wanted a system I could leave running and not worry about. I see a risk with gravity fed versions of the oil becoming more "runny" as it warms up, and coming into the stove quicker than intended and over-fueling. No offence intended at all to people who've made very good gravity-oil feeders for stoves, if this was in my workshop outside and I knew I would always be close by then I'd probably have gone that way too. But I know if I get it wrong my living room might end up looking like a scene from a Pearl Harbor movie, which I'd like to avoid if possible.

My particular design "fails to safe" in that if anything goes wrong with it, it just stops adding fuel. It cannot ever add more fuel than intended regardless of viscosity. I therefore consider it safe to leave running unattended, and I'm quite happy to leave it going for long periods.

It does need something hot in the stove for the oil fuel to drip onto, this can be a few burning logs or hot coals. Or even an iron frying pan pre-heated with a blow torch - which will then self-sustain once the oil is burning.

I find that a few chunks of oak work really well. The oil burns on the surface of the logs, and the logs themselves burn extremely slowly, so that it will run all day no problem without having to replace the logs.

On full-heat the system will go through two litres in a couple of hours.

If I was going to build this again I think I'd have the pump box outside, with a large fuel tank outside, and just the pipe coming through the wall at the back of the stove. This way I wouldn't hear the pump, and it would be more discrete, and I could have a larger tank. But the motor-speed controller would still need to be inside somewhere, but this is only small. Perhaps I will modify my system in this way at some point.

An obvious improvement would be to replace my saw-blade timer circuit with a solid state electronic control. This would be simple for someone good with electronics, but it's not something I've much experience with, so I've made a crude mechanical one which does the job. Although not silently.

Also - regular watchers of Miles content will notice that I've experimented with a different presentation style on this video. It's a bit "Open University 1987" with static camera positions and simple bland humorless narration. I personally quite like it as it actually delivers quite a lot of information in a fairly short time (whilst seeming to be slow paced) and it's also very quick and easy to edit. I recorded and edited this video entirely in little over an hour. I welcome any feedback!

Also putting a newly acquired 4K camera to use, which is a good notch up from what I normally use! Just starting to get to grips with it. It does give a lovely clear image, and now that I've finally got a good Internet connection I can upload higher resolution video files than I could before.