Oil Most Popular Heating Fuel

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31349, 20 April 1967, Page 19

Oil Most Popular Heating Fuel

JT is preferable to install heaters capable of overheating rather than underheating, as manual or automatic control units can adjust any excesses.

The heat you will need to raise the temperature of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit is called a British Thermal Unit—the measure by which all fuel-oil heating appliances are rated.

We talk about a heater giving us 50,000 B.T.U.’s an hour, or such and such a fuel yielding twice as many B.T.U.’s cost for cost, as another fuel.

Surprisingly, the human body gives out several hundred B.T.U.’s an hour. So In theory anyone of about average weight, using the heat of his body for an hour, could minutely raise the temperature of a small tank of cold water he hap- • pened to be lying in. Until recent years, that was precisely the impression that many office and factory workers were left with after only a few minutes of wintry weather in their buildings. It might have felt to them that their own precious B.T.U.’s were ■ the only warm things

around, and that they were trying, unaided, to warm an impossibly large space. But no matter how cold their offices may have seemed, undoubtedly boiler men, janitors, custodians or even stokers were keeping the heating arrangements going down there in the depths of the building. And doing a good, but usually rather wasteful, job. Those days saw the delivery of great mountains of coke, coal, or wood—at frequent intervals. But now the trend is to greater use

of oil and electricity. Oil, gas, and electricity for heating industrial premises have slowly proved their worth—particularly on the score of cleanliness. Heat for processing is still often provided by

steam. In factories of this kind, auxiliary steam mains are usual. Very often, the steam is used to heat water, and the resulting hot water is used as an air-heating medium by way of water radiators. More often than not the steam is produced by a boiler fired by fuel oil or gas. Increasing numbers of coal-fired boilers are being converted to oil-fired operation. Naturally, many establishments have no need at all for facilities for producing

heat to process some product or other; and nowadays such buildings are most usually heated with warmair heaters, somewhat larger of course than the units marketed for domestic use. Most of the air heaters in use today burn oil, and most use some form of pressure jet burner, but although the tendency in industry is certainly to-

wards the more and more extensive use of oil, electricity runs the fuel a fairly close second for popularity. You have only to consider the number of electric fires that' appear in offices as the winter draws on, to appreciate that, in spite of all the talk of an evenly-distributed flow of temperature-controlled warm air within a building for the benefit of all, some people still feel the need for their own individual source of radiant heat.