todays photo

IanC

Well-known Member
The cattle at the concrete water tank. If you look close you will see the stack of the heater. I need some clarification. What I remember being told was that there was a submerged heater in the bottom of the tank, and kerosene dripped onto a corn cob or some such and kept an open spot in the water. There are doors that were shut over it whenever the cows weren't out. I kind of remember the system being in there, but it had been updated before I was big enough to have to have been dealing with it.
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Yes, there was such a tank heater as that. It was submerged, but needed a concrete block or some other type of weight to keep it from floating. There was a tank that held maybe 2 gallons of kerosene or fuel oil equipped with a valve that would control how much fuel, from an intermittent drip to a small stream. Corn cobs could be used to get the fire started but would not be needed once the fire was burning. It actually worked pretty good as long as you remembered to keep the fuel tank full.
 
Yes, you're correct about the kerosene tank heater. We used one for decades. Ours had a heavy cast iron hollow "donut" fire chamber at the bottom. It would not float. It had two stacks on it. One is the exhaust stack that you see sticking up in your picture. The other one is shorter and is the air/fuel intake stack. it has a flat metal "spoon" with holes in it that serves to spread the fuel that drips into the burner. Mounted above the short stack is a small tank holding the kerosene, with a drip valve on it.

We started ours by pouring a small amount of kerosene into the burn chamber first. Then you poured some onto something flammable. We usually used newspaper. Light that and shove it down the intake stack with the flat spoon, into the burn chamber. This ignited the oil in the chamber. Then you just set the valve to drip kerosene and keep the fire going. Worked great.
 
Yep, light it in the morning. The chore coat smelled like kerosene smoke for the duration of the winter. On the one I was involved with the rate of fuel delivery was finicky. Too high and we had steaming water, too low and we had a little flickering flame down there that didn’t do anything. It was more convenient than the cob burning heater we had. Come to think of it I think I still have the old cob burner back in the corner of the machine shed.
 
In case you guys didn't know. The later production cabooses, early had little pot belly coal stoves. The late ones had oil. Was a drip into a bowl affair as you describe. Burns Kerosene or diesel with a little drip going on. After a little while the whole end of the caboose would get reasonable warm. Not your living room but not too bad. The bowl is about 6 or 7 inches across. Not an expert, just had the pleasure to ride in several cabooses on tourist lines.
 

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