Test of 32 jet Propane Burner controlled by Honeywell VR8300A4516 Continuous Pilot Gas Control

This is a post I made elsewhere about a year ago, and I'm just copying it over to here. This test was with propane. I plan to use natural gas when I brew my first test batch in a couple months. Just have to change the burners and a spring in the valves.

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Have I ever mentioned how little I know about gas plumbing and electrical wiring? Well, I know very, very little. Priscilla has always been the one in our family that knew about electricity, and I've always relied on her. Sad, I know. But I'm determined to learn. Getting to the point where I could run this relatively simple test took me a month!!! It's not that I worked on it all the time, but I had to let everything slowly sink in.

So over the past month, among other things, I read all the manuals involved 10 times, read lots of info on web pages, asked my friends a bunch of questions, visited a propane business in Beuregard and an electrical contractor business in Auburn, and Priscilla and I visited Home Depot and Lowes several times to get little bits and pieces of information from whatever electrical or plumbing experts were working. Setting up this test was a big accomplishment for someone so unskilled at such things as myself, and Priscilla was a big help throughout the entire process.

Here's a list of the major components:

• Honeywell VR8300A4516 Continuous Pilot Gas Control (supplier) (manual)
• Honeywell Q314A4586 Pilot Burner (supplier) (manual)
• Honeywell Q340 "Bulls Eye" Thermocouple (manual)
• 32 jet Propane Burner (supplier)
• Rego LV404B96 Twin State Regulator (manual)
• 120v to 24v Transformer (supplier)
• 3 wire 14 gauge power cord (supplier)
• 14 gauge black and white wires
• on/off switch

The pics and videos below show the results so far, and it's obvious to me that my next step is to learn how to make valve adjustments to get the flame just right.

Here's a gallery with more pics of the Bluto 555's gas burner parts.

The first video is simply the pilot burner. Blue flame. No yellow. Very clean.



The second video shows the burner being turned on and off. The Honeywell gas valve is set to the standard, out of the box settings, which are going to need adjustment, as you can see from the height of the flames, and the amount of yellow flame. My understanding is that the higher percentage of blue in the flame, the better.



Just a short clip of the burner turned on in the dark.



And this video shows what can happen if there's nothing (like a kettle) above the flame. Sometimes only part of the burner will light. In this video, only the left half of the burner lit initially, and Priscilla blew on the flame like a candle to get the flame to spread to the right half. If the burner had been placed appropriately beneath a kettle, the flame on the left would have spread across the bottom of the kettle to the right and ensured that the right side of the burner let.