gas oil vs natural gas

Hello All,
I am having a rough work out, wonder if you can help?
I have a boiler burning 15ltrs gas oil per hour, how can i work out how much heat this is giving me in KW?

Also, what would you suggest is better value for money? gas oil or natural gas?

before you wonder what i do with 1000ltrs of gas oil per week, this is a boiler in a cinema.

thank you for your help and suggestions

 

1 litre of gas oil gives about 11KWh of energy, so your 15 litres should be giving 165 KW if your boiler was 100% efficient. So about 150KW if it is 90% efficient.

Price of heating oil is very variable but normally gas works out cheaper.

 

Thank you MikeyD,

165kw sounds good, the boiler is an old ideal britannia, was burning solid fuel until the '70s. so i am not sure of its efficiency, probably 60 /70%?
we are looking at getting a potterton nxr3 boiler, which claims to be 92%

we have a gas supply which is rated at 250kw which should be more than enough

 

If you look at the opening door on your britannia boiler there should be a cast badge on the top of the front plate immediately above the combustion chamber door (with the sight glass) this will say something like 3-8KO or something like.. if you can find this and reply I have all the old Ideal Britannia manuals so will be able to tell you the output in Kw if this will help, with regard to combustion efficiency I would expect a Brity to be about 75% efficient allow 15% thermal losses so a thermal efficiency of about 60%.

The potterton NXR would be a very good choice for replacement as it has large internal waterways which are suited to elderly heating systems such as a cinema, and can be fired on oil or gas so you have the choice

 

Hi boilerman,

thank you for your help, i will go and have a look later and post back, i will post a pic or 2 as well as i know we all like pics,

your post confirmed my thoughts, half of my heat goes out of the chimney,
glad the potterton is a good choice, the system we have is original (75yrs old)
your help has given me more info to get an expert in to see what we need
Pete

 

OK, the boiler says 49KO on the plate.
I will post some pics later today,

Best

Peter

 

I think that the units quoted above should be KWh.

A solid fuel boiler converted to oil might be somewhat lower efficiency than the 75% suggested.

A cinema has a very specific heat requirement.

I appreciate that it might require more installation costs, but I would expect a gas fired warm air unit to be far more efficient as long as the noise level can be kept low enough.

This arises because the auditorium is only occupied for relatively short periods of time and warm air only requres to be turned on a very short time before occupation because the specific heat of air is so low.

Another aspect is that the humidity also needs to be controlled as that influences the feeling of heat and general comfort.

It always makes me wonder how much longer cinemas will survive. Friends go sometimes but I have not been for about 12 years since I had a bad experience at the Odeon Leicester Square where I had gone because I expected the theatre to have the best sound system in the country. In fact it was seriously faulty and they did not even offer me a refund. Worse they were not aware of it either and no one else had complained.

My 46" and suround sound makes a cinema of little advantage unless its just kisses and cuddles someone is after.

Tony

 

Tony, you are quite correct about warm air heating, in the winter the heating is on for 12 / 15hrs per day, just to be occupied for 3. I have Reznor coming out this week to discuss warm air...

Your comments about cinemas are quite correct, that is why so many close, the manager is normaly 18yrs old with no clue about customer service, the staff are normally more worried about going out or finishing early, all makes a bad experience.

Luckily, I have a purpose built "Odeon" which is run personally, and I have a very good loyal customer base, but, how long it will last, who knows?

 

I'll post back the output of your 4-9KO tomorrow, but be warned a size 4 boiler with 9 sections will comeout at about 1,000,000Btu/hr (Approx 330Kw) as said I will confirm your boilers original rating tomorrow (when I get my van back with the info inside)

 

a Britannia 4-9KO is rated at 811,000 Btu (236Kw/h) Output

A bit of history the "KO" Series was built to fired on Coal or Oil (or Gas with a forced draught burner)

Th "K" series was designed for coal only as the boiler sections incorporated water cooled fired bars, -these could be fired by oil but by the time the combustion lining was fitted over the water cooled bars, the burner mounting height was very high which depending on the burner used caused some problems

Hope this useless information helps - My advice would be stick with a wet system ,as air noise could be a problem in your auditorium (this is why Odeon always fitted wet systems (is your cinema and ex odeon??)

 

Its all very well having a wet system but the costs of fuel was very low in those days as was the number of people going to the cinema.

Much of the year the cinema was heated and then cooling was needed soon after the 300 ticket holders sat down! Those were the days!

Even worse the S/N of optical soundtracks was around 60dB whilst the current digital media are up to 90dB so the background noise is even more intrusive now.

To me its such a pity as the cinema was such an institution in its day. I even attribute much of the decline to an inability of the providers to keep up with technical developments.

Churches, cinemas, piers, dance halls have all waned! Now people can do similar things at home!

Tony

 

Back to the original question, I think you'll struggle to find oil at anything like the same price as gas and can't imagine that changing in the foreseeable future.

 

Hi Boilerman2,
thank you very much for the information, to me, certainly not useless, very interesting. your help has given me some help in deciding what to do next, yes, the cinema is an ex odeon,
I will post some pics of our "Britannia" later on today.

iammiann, when my company purchased this place in 1993, gas oil was 9p per ltr, today its 55.83p !
Soooo, i guess natural gas is the way to go

 

Personnaly I wouldn't bother with reznor but be looking at either a Hoval ultragas or sr-plus and keeping a wet system.

 

here is "Bertha"...