Diesel Fire Risk

[Pelagic]

At the fire fighting facility, they had a very large steel tub maybe 15ft in diameter and 6ft high that had a diesel top layer (assuming water underneath)

The instructer started it with just a lighted newspaper.

Slowly it would build to an inferno and the exercise was to approachtge significant heat of the steel tub to put out with a fog spray.
A backup hose cooled the side of the tub and the lead hose team.

It surprised me how easy the instructor started the fire, but maybe they poured some gasoline on top first?

[a64pilot]

Originally Posted by noelex 77

The Reflex heater does nothing more than drip diesel into a tray. There nothing under pressure in fact there is no pump or electricity consumed by the system at all.



Drop a match into the the diesel that has been dripped into the tray at the bottom of the heater and it will ignite the diesel and produce a very healthy fire in short period of time. This of course is exactly what you want in a heater, but not the way I imagined diesel would behave. Hence the warning.

In the Army our tent heaters and the heaters we used to heat water in trash cans for the mess hall worked exactly the same way. A can with a valve sat on top of the heaters, open the valve and a slow drip would start, it dripped down into a donut shaped burner, dripped into one side, the exhaust pipe was on the other side, once a fire got going it would pull air into the pipe the fuel dropped into and of course the smoke went out the exhaust pipe.
You could really get them going, you knew it was getting dangerous when one started humming like a furnace, then you had better turn the drip down, but to be so simple with no moving parts, they were amazingly efficient and pretty clean burning.
They were very easy to light, but I think it’s because there was always a little carbon or something that would act like a wick to light it off.

I believe gasoline is much easier to light based on its vapor pressure, diesel has I believe a much higher vapor pressure.
Your not by chance burning #1 or Winter Diesel are you?
I’m thinking maybe up there, that is what they burn year round?
Or maybe it gets mixed with regular Diesel in Summer, cause I doubt they have separate tanks. I’d think they would just burn #1 all year round, as Summer is only a few months.

[hpeer]

Curious, what was the ambient temp? I’ve a Dickenson ships diesel cooker in our hunting cabin. They suggest using a little bit of toilet paper to get it going. The TO wicks up some fuel and helps it atomize until things get warm enough to make it work on its own. Something like that may be going on where you have a confined space so that the small vaporization is sufficiently confined.

Gust guessing.