The Mysterious Art of Burner Tuning

Burners should be tuned on a regular basis to capture peak performance and efficiency. Referencing the manufacturer’s literature and keeping a log of past settings makes tuning the modern burner a straightforward and scientific task.

Once you know how to tune burners, watching the uninitiated try their hand at it can be amusing at best, frustrating and costly at worst. We’ve put together a list of some burner tuning basics to help remove the guesswork.

Burner Tuning Basics

1. Ensure your safety devices (gas and air pressure switches, flame supervision, etc.) are correctly set and in working order. Device settings should be found on the combustion schematic for the equipment.
2. Remember that burners are really just fancy mixers of air and gas — but the proper amount of both is critical.
3. Lighting a burner requires all three points of the fire triangle (heat, fuel, oxygen). Once you have the right amount of gas (fuel) and air (oxygen), all you need is to supply a spark (heat) to produce flame.
4. Burner manufacturers publish empirically proven air and gas settings necessary for igniting and running their burner — never attempt to tune a burner without this information!
5. Use quality tools to help you determine air and gas flows, as well as exhaust gas composition (especially the amount of O2).
6. Practice, practice, practice!

Beyond the basics, you can encounter many challenges to setting a burner correctly. Igniters need to be clean in order to provide a competent ignition spark, blower and fuel filters should be changed regularly so flow is unimpeded, and flame sensors must be cleaned and tested frequently.

For scientifically sound, professional combustion tuning, contact us!

Combustion Comics

We ran a series of combustion comic strips ten years ago, as part of Baron von Olsträd’s Sketchbook. This was our second. We’re pulling them out of the archives and dusting them off a bit, giving them a fresh look, and re-releasing them into the world. The idea is to make light of some pet peeves and common issues. We hope you enjoy them!