buy new or rebuild

[tarbaby]

i have an old multifuel boiler, hs tarm ot 50 from the eighties, and i'm wondering if it makes any sense to have it rebuilt or replace it with a high efficiency oil burner. when the tarm was new, i burned both wood and oil pretty equally, but for the past several years i have only used it as an oil burner. i have a woodstove which does a nice job in maintaining the temperature when the nights are chilly. recently i had the tarm serviced. after removing the oil burner, the service guy from my oil co pointed inside and said the back insulation shield had slipped. he also said the overall design was kind of obsolete, the efficiency was not great, especially for oil use. generally speaking after 25 yrs he thought it may be time to consider replacing. so i'm wondering: do i have a professional from the oil co take the old tarm apart and fix what is broken, paying for time and material, or just haul it away and bring in a new oil burner probably at a higher cost. in the back of my mind is the thought how available is oil going to be over the next two decades and how high can the price go? also can a new oil burner be modified to run on biofuels? even though lately i never used wood in the tarm, it was nice to know that i could have if i wanted. thanks for any thoughts on this matter.

 

[Dave T]

I agree with the service man the old multi fuel units are much less efficient..As far as taking it apart the only thing that you can remove is the shields on the face of the boiler,the items inside the oil side of the Tarm are fire brick material mine were also crumbled in my Tarm,like you I was down to only running oil before I took the Tarm off line..I would weigh out the money factors and start saving for a new unit,in the mean time you could rip the front panel off the Tarm and replace the fire bricks yourself it would be a cheap job (I do not know what the fire bricks are made of but wear proper breathing protection). A single unit oil only, is much more efficient than the combo units..Dave