Paraffin

suki1964

gbloon wrote: »

That was last winter. This winter it is 130p. I have only been able to find one store within about 25 miles that sells it "loose". Otherwise pre-pack is available at an even higher price. Obviously I do not have a 500 litre tank.

I wish I could find someone within 25 miles who uses that 28 kerosene for heating and would sell me about 25 litres of it from the tank for a reasonable price - say 65p, which is half what I am paying now. I am in Lechlade, Glos.

Anyone?

Here the big heating oil suppliers sell 25 gallon drums it may be worth your while phoning around

ILIVEONABOAT

4 years ago I swapped from using vented diesel heating on my boat because the law for using red diesel changed and also it shot up in price from 40p a litre to 80p and now over £1,so i swapped to paraffin. I thought this was going to be easy, but oh no! I started buying PREMIUM paraffin at 60p and this soon went up to 90p and more . A local dealer told me that he could supply kerosene for 75p and it wasn't any different, so I started using that. Now the confusion starts, so I am going to call it fuel. Fuel to burn in appliances without an external vent should satisfy British Standard 2869 class C1 for burners with a flue British Standard 2869 Class C2, the difference being the sulphur content of the fumes and a possible build up of Carbon Monoxide. (my detectors have never gone off) More investigation revealed that if the appliance has a vaporizing burner you could use Class C2 and that most fuels today exceed the old british standard anyway. So the only way to feel happy if the fuel is safe is to get the technical fact sheet on the fuel being supplied. The sulphur number for Class C1 on this standard is 0.04 and class 2 is 0.2. If the supplier does not have the tech data sheet beware as in my experience both fuels burn the same without any difference in smell or co detection Good luck

Ben84

Have you considered an air conditioner which can run as a heater? By moving heat they emit much more heat than electric resistance heaters, for example good units can emit more than 3 kWh of heat for every 1 kWh of electric input. This may be a cost effective way to heat with electricity, but it it depends on your electricity costs per unit and might take some time to pay back. I would however consider the air conditioner unit convenient as no need to fetch fuel and refill it, as well as safer too.

bernithebiker

Interesting thread.

The key differences in kero and paraffin are sulphur content and aromatics.

Sulphur content of kero can be as high as 0.3%, (compared to road diesel which is 0.05% max, or sulphur 'free' which is 0.01%)

So paraffin has a much lower sulphur and aromatic content, (how low depends on the brand) which results in cleaner, and above all, odourless burning.

Kero would work in these heaters, but it would quickly become unbearably smelly.

So essentially, paraffin is a 'super-kero'.

Heaters like these are popular in France, where you can buy big 20 litre containers of paraffin, not sure what the current price is. They can electronically maintain the temperature of a room.

ILIVEONABOAT

I am really grateful for any additions to this subject. In addition to my experiences a friend who also lives on a boat burns kerosene from the same supplier in a old style blue flame heater (with a wick). he has it on low 24 hours a day as background heat and it only smells when turned off to refill. the smell goes within minutes and it burns blue without smoke or yellow flecks

bernithebiker

Although kerosene has a max sulphur level of 0.3% (relatively high), it is often in practice much lower as refineries are set up to have alot of desulphurisation capacity.

I used to trade cargoes of the stuff all over the world. Most often, the sulphur would be well below 0.1%, often alot lower than that.

So it's luck of the draw; you may well be getting quite low sulphur kero that burns quite nicely, but another batch may be less so.

chris1973

I use Paraffin for a portable space heater too, and that pre-packed paraffin is a complete rip off. Its virtually impossible to buy 'from the pump' locally any longer due to some European legislation bullcrap introduced some time ago (despite the pre-existing method of pump dispensing working happily for 50+ years).

I buy in 40+ litre quantities as Paraffin is around 10p KW/H cheaper than my E7 daytime electricity so I use it for my main form of heating. To buy this in pre-packaged form would require at least 10 plastic containers, where 2 x 20 litre recycled (got free from an IMO car wash - ex shampoo containers) is good for collecting and transporting 40 litres from a forecourt pump, and can be used over and over again. Seems a needless waste of packaging and resources to encourage the sale of 4 litre containers, for people wanting to buy large quantities. In the interests of saving the world, I suggest banning 4 litre containers and encourage people to collect using their own recycled ones!.

After following the advice suggested by another Inverter heater user on here, i've switched from paraffin to using 28 second kerosene (home heating oil), so far no adverse affects, smells, soot, fumes, condensation etc, in normal running the heater runs and acts exactly like it does on paraffin. Every other fill I add a thimble full of 'exocet' kerosene additive, no idea if that actually helps in any way, but Aga users seem to rate it highly.

I buy heating oil from a friends tank, who uses Oil heating, I pay him the same price as he pays to the supplier, which was 53p / litre on his last delivery back in August. So effectively it now costs just 5.3p KW/H to heat using this heater on Kero, exactly the same as I pay for E7 electricity, however heat from this heater is far more useful as it actually heats the room when I need it, as opposed to storage heaters which barely manage to get it to 17c.

As with anything, trying a different fuel in a heater made for paraffin comes with a 'do it at your own risk' disclaimer, but I haven't seen any adverse affects, or nothing any different when running it on paraffin. On the heater fuel tank, it actually has 'Kerosene' stamped on it, and right or wrong, thats exactly whats now going in it.

Prior to trying / risking Kero, I used ordinary C1 Paraffin, I purchased this from an allotment society, who buy in bulk in order to sell to their members to run greenhouse heaters. Its cost was 70p a litre, meaning 7p per KW/H in real terms.

w50nky

I use kerosene in my green house heater when cold weather dictates. I have oil heating so it makes sense to use it. There is no apparent smell whilst in use but, you do get a small amount of fumes when you extinguish them in the morning or if your flame is too high/wick needs trimming.

starsweeper

We have been getting Paraffin from local B&Q at £6.98 for 4 litre can, and find it unbearably expensive. We are now looking into using cheaper Kerosene at 80p per a litre from domestic heating oil supplier.

Methusela

When my children were young, in the 1970’s we moved into an all-electric house, where the bills soon proved horrendously high. We bought some heaters and used “Esso Blue” paraffin (does anyone else remember those cartoon TV adverts for the “Esso Blee Dooler” - a.k.a. the Esso Blue Dealer?). We bought all we needed from the local hardware shop or from a self-service pump at the local petrol station for less than 2 shillings (10 pence) a gallon, far less than the cost of petrol in those days. Those were the good old days.

More recently, my wife and I spent some time living in Cyprus. It gets very hot in the summer there but can get very cold in the winter, especially as even new houses have virtually no insulation. There is no public gas system so in many properties the heating choices are electricity, Calor gas or paraffin. We bought a large, efficient Japanese heater and obtained all of our paraffin from the local petrol station, where it was around £1 a litre; cheaper than petrol and still the old blue colour. It worked very well, so on returning to the UK I went out to get some paraffin for this heater and was incensed to find that I was expected to pay around £2 per litre. A long way from the cheap fuel of the 1970’s and also double the cost of the easily available fuel I used in Cyprus (also an EU country of course, so any legislation our paraffin has to meet should apply equally to theirs).

Although this thread has been running since 2009 I can’t see any answer to the original question: where can cheaper paraffin be purchased at a reasonable price without having to buy hundreds of litres of the stuff? If anyone can provide an answer, please let me know. I live in the greater Manchester area.