ETTER Engineering - Technical Tips

Cash for Burners vs. Cash for Clunkers
For big savings, keep the car and upgrade your burners instead!

By: Tom Etter

You heard about the program for cars, but what about your burners? We are going to show you from a savings standpoint how much better a commercial or industrial burner replacement is than the recent hot government program.

The car program was based on fuel efficiency improvements, and rebated the consumer anywhere from $3,500 up to $4,500 on a car that was replaced with a new one getting between four and ten or more miles per gallon better than their trade-in. For a driver that puts 12,000 miles per year on their vehicle, and with the average price of gas at $2.75 per gallon, it will take about 6 years before seeing a return on the government's investment. Since the life of an average car is just over 6 years, this new car will likely be off the road just when it finally starts paying back for the program. As we all know, in the real world this is not a good plan. And remember, as a taxpayer, the government's investment is your money!

Now, look at your commercial or industrial burners. If we take a typical burner at 5 MM Btu/hr, running 16 hours a day, and replace it with a new burner with an increase in efficiency of five to seven percent, this is what happens: The annual operating costs of the burner, at $10.00 per Deca-therm, goes from $230,400 per year to $207,360 per year. That's a savings of $16,000 per year!

Your burner upgrade will only cost you about $8,000, so this upgrade pays back the investment in 5 to 6 months, not years. Given that the average life of a burner is well over 10 years, this course of action will save you piles of money over its lifetime.

But wait - there's more! The efficiency increases can be further improved by upgrading old fashioned controls with new linkageless controls. This can increase your efficiency savings by another six to ten percent, making your short and long term savings that much greater.

If you're really looking to hit one out of the park, adding active exhaust control or LEL monitoring can reduce your system fuel requirements by over 20% by minimizing latent heat losses going out of your stack.

Do you want to help the enviroment while still saving money? Upgrading your burner equipment to Low Emissions burners and controls can reduce your NOx and CO outputs by 30 to 40 percent, all while saving money. That's "GG2" - Going Green Squared!

Other benefits to keep in mind that can justify a burner upgrade alone are improved process quality, reduced maintenance and down time, increased safety, reduced insurance costs when upgrading to satisfy current code controls, and potential rebates from local utilities.