Questions about homemade natural gas evaporator

[Urban Hillbilly]

I'm running a natural gas line from the house to an evaporator I'm building. I've been doing quite a bit of homework and I am looking for some advice. Bottom line it looks like I could use pipe burners with venturis and orifaces or jet tip burners which basically integrate air mixing into the burner unit.

I'm using a 2x6 pan or two 2x3s so the square footage is the same. I've seen video of the jet tip burners and they can crank up like a jet engine but I have also heard they are more difficult to control and I won't be able to branch very many off a single gas line. Based on video I've seen of one burner it seems like a single gas line could power at least of few of them at a pretty good rate. I'd probably need at least 4 of them under my pan.

Examples of pipe burners don't seem to have as much power but I've been assured I could get a good boil with them.

Anyone using natural gas who understands the issues I'm debating, has any experience and has some advice? Thanks.

[Michi-Man]

Hello from the east side of Michigan! I hope that I can offer a little insight on your project. I'm just about complete with my natural gas evaporator. It's been a work in progress for the past couple of months. The evaporator that I have designed and built is just a small hobby sized unit. The burner took some trial and error to get the right kind of flame that I was looking for from a jet nozzle. So basically what I have is two burner rows that are connected and fitted with 32 jet nozzles for a total of 160,000 BTU when running full bore. I can adjust the height and intensity of the flame with a single ball valve. I did a trial run a couple of weeks ago and was able to bring 5 gallons of water to a full boil in just under 14 minutes. However, I still need to install all of the sides on the evaporator and will probably need to adjust the burner height to the bottom of the pan. My goal is to get this time down even more. Over the past few years I was using the side burner on my grill, so this should get the job done much faster. Depending on how well this design works, my plan is to custom fabricate the burners based on peoples needs and sell them separately or as a whole evaporator package. Once I get it all complete and have a proven system, I'll post some pics and maybe a video.

Based on the design of the burner set-up that I have, I'm going to guess that you will need probably not more than 96 jet burner nozzles. I kinda think that I may have too many in my configuration. But, like I mentioned earlier, it's a work in progress. For your application the nozzles should be spaced out in 3 rows, with 32 nozzles in each row. Something to consider would be to have two separate burner assemblies (one under each pan). This would allow you individual control under each one. So, I'm not sure if this really helps at all, but may give you something to think about and consider.

[maple man-iac]

I just installed a 3x12 natural gas evaporator. My gas supplied to the meter is 2psi via two inch pipe. The line has a second regulator before the burner. The burner is burning at approximately at 1.6 million btu. Gas usage is approximately ten cubic feet every twenty five seconds.

[brookfieldmaple]

I'm looking into converting from a fuel oil burner to a natural gas burner. Can you tell me what kind of burners you are using and where I can purchase them.
I have a 3'x12' evaporator. I found some natural gas burners from Carlin and Beckett, very expensive... I've seen other set ups that use some kind of a jet?, tube?, nozzle? where they have 3 or 4 sticking into the front of the arch. They have no blowers or ignitors or anything on them???