4x4 North

So been tossing around the idea of making a diesel space heater for awhile. In fact I ordered the biggest one I could find a few months ago and put it on a shelf. This cold weather had me in need of a space heater. So here is couple shitty pictures of my first attempt. Refinements to follow.
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Put it in a cheap ammo box and bolted the 15 litre fuel cell to the backside
Instructions were crap but got everything working the way it should only to turn it on and realized the lcd screen was smashed luckily a buddy had spare

I’ll clean up the wiring once I can prove it works properly


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So far I’ve learned a few things already

One the exhaust needs to be a long as you can make it my short bottom dump was causing it to melt the snow and ice surrounding the heater that then was drawn into the fresh air intake for both the burner and blower causing all kinds of problems. I’m running a four foot pipe now but will play with a short exhaust once it warms up.

Two ,The fuel tank needs to have some heat transfer from the box I going to drill a couple two inch holes for that. The solution right now at -25 is a cheap wool blanket covering it.

Three I believe there is still some fine tuning that will get me a better burn time. The first night was a right off and wasted over a gallon of fuel that night


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I can make it thermostatically controlled or even turn down the pump feed. Right now it’s averaging 15 hours per gallon


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I’ve been curious on this stuff as well. Thanks for posting. They seem to be really hit and miss with the quality from what I’ve seen

refilled and turned down the pump feed going to see how it does

I have a Toyotomi in my shop and it burns 250ml of fuel per hour on low, or something stupid like that... not exactly cheap but it has paid for itself many times over.

im dialed back to about 125 ml an hour now with this warmer weather ive dialed it right back just to see how well it will do

If you where tenting with a 4x4 this thing would be the cats ass. especially if you were hunting and gone for half the day

of course im just eyeballing the tank I might have time this weekend to actually put a measured amount in there and find out how efficient it really is

Can it turn on and off automatically with a thermostat? Or is the lighting procedure too complicated for that?

Hmm, might have to look at one then. Would be nice to have as a backup.

I have been using 1 of these in my ambulance camper up at Powder King for 3 years now. Has worked great for me. I just bought a new 1 as the bearings were starting to make some noise. So will put new bearings in the old 1 and set it up for my RTT. I have been very happy with how well it works.

experimenting with used veg oil the last couple days. so far so good. I have a decent amount saved and a reliable source of relatively cleanish used oil

mixed up a 40/60 batch of veg oil and some contaminated diesel let that sit for a few days. then I mixed that 50/50 with fresh diesel for the first burn. you guys can do the math on that
I'd like to be able to run a mix of 25 percent veg oil thru the winter if possible. maybe adding kerosene on the cold days to the mix.

right now im just filtering it after mixing thru a cloth in a funnel to get the chunks out. But Ive grabbed a filter meant for a tidy tank with a water separator as Id like to get this as clean as possible

Guys use those big household water filters you can get from the Homodepot or similar because they're big and cheap. Or at least that's what they do with waste oil. A funnel with the fine mesh screen makes for a good enough first pass then, and is very easy to clean the chunks out of.

Go snoop around the airport for waste fuel. Lots of places will just have drums of contaminated jet fuel laying around because they're too cheap to get rid of it. Oil too, and often it's not very dirty. A couple years ago I cleaned up what Mustang had in Smithers, there was 4 drums of fuel and 8 of oil. I found some guy on Facebook that took it all to burn in his furnace and saved them a buttload on disposal.

good to know