How To Bleed An Oil Burner

There can be many reasons why you will need to bleed the air out of the lines from the oil tank to the oil burner. The most common reason why you will have to bleed an oil burner is because you either ran to low on oil, clogged the lines, or you ran completely out of oil and the burner pump has now sucked air causing the burner to not ignite because the air to fuel mixture is just all wrong.

This method of bleeding lines on an oil burner will work for most units including Beckett, Carin and Riello burners. This method is also good for oil fired water heaters, as well as oil fired boilers and furnaces. When you bleed an oil burner you are removing the air from the lines. The oil lines run from the bottom of the oil tank to the burner.

So keep that in mid when you are bleeding the lines. It really does not matter what is oil fired, you just need to make sure you get all of the air out. You will need an adjustable crescent wrench or pair of pliers to loosen the oil bleed screw on the pump. Most Beckett oil burners will come with a Suntec oil feed pump. Some other brands like Reillo and Carlin have different oil feed pumps. You will see the bleed screw towards the front of the pump. Take your pair of pliers or crescent wrench and loosen the bleed screw so that its completely loose.

Once you have the bleed screw loose, re tighten it to just hand tight. What you will want to do now is to hit the reset button on the motor so that the motor will turn the pump and create a suction in the oil line. Once the motor starts on the oil burner wait about 2 seconds and then loosen the bleed screw about a half a turn and you will see that a gush of air should spit out followed by a nice stream of fuel oil.

If you open the bleed screw and the motor turns of before you get all the air out of the lines you will need to hit the reset button again and repeat the same process until you have a solid stream of fuel. If you hit the motor reset again and the motor does not turn on or you get a “locked out” message you will have to override the lock out command by holding down the reset button for ten seconds and then depressing it to only press it again to get the motor restarted. That safety lock out short cut will only work with older and only certain newer oil burners because most of the newer models have timed lock outs that can not be overridden because of safety reasons. Once you have completely removed all of the air out of the lines your oil burner should start right up after you hit the rest bottom for the last time.