Hello everyone! I have been reading on the site for a while, and recently purchased my first kerosene pressure lantern. I have been a collector of other various Aladdin kerosene, and old Coleman table lamps/lanterns for several years. I was excited to pick up my first kero pressure lamp. Its nothing fancy compared to what many of you have, but its a start for me! Its a brand new Britelyt 500cp lantern and its been quite a bit of fun so far! The only issue I am having with it is the preheater, it does its job just fine and gets everything up to operating temp nice and quick and the lamp runs great! Had it going to several hours last night sitting out on the patio reading. But its leaving quite a bit of soot all over the inside of the hood, and a decent bit on the nickle plating on the outside of the top vent slots on the hood too. It will also haze up the inside of the glass a little too. Is there any way to help reduce this at all, or can the mixture from the preheater be adjusted at all? Mine burns with a very yellow sooty flame. When i was researching kero pressure lamps before buying one many of the videos would see had very blue torch like flames from the preheaters, and they appeared to be burning much cleaner than mine currently is. I have tried various pressures in the tank from about .5 bar up to about 2 bar while preheating with pretty similar results. I am currently using the Klean-Heat synthetic kero (>145F flash point) from Lowes if that may be an issue at all, fresh jug just opened. (Same stuff I run in my Aladdin's with good results) I can't really see any way to adjust the preheater, so I could always just run alcohol to preheat instead to avoid the issue all together, but if there would be a way to reduce the soot and be able to use the rapid preheat without the soot that would be nice too. Thanks, Patrick
Those pre heaters are not adjustable. They are an atomiser with a fixed fuel to air ratio. Sounds like yours is not getting quite enough air. It might be worth dismantling the device to make sure the air feeds are clear but other than that there is nothing you can do to improve the burn. It may help to add perhaps 10% gasoline to the fuel mix but I don't like doing that in a Petromax type lantern. Should be safe enough though and the lamp will certainly work ok on a mixture. ::Neil::
If you think the atomiser is too large, solder it up and resize it with small diameter piece of wire, or if you have access to small diameter watchmakers drills ,re drill it . when you have done it ,clean the face of the jet off so that the sealing pip will seat correctly
You say you bought a new lantern , so I assume you bought it from a dealer or from BriteLyt directly so in that case you must have some type of garanty. Why do not use that before you start to alter the preheater. Personally I have stopped using the quick preheaters in favor of preheating by spirit long ago. Michael
Well using the warrantee would just take all the fun outof it! I did figure out the issue though. The atomizer was machined slightly wrong. The holetter was slightly off center causing the fuel to spray against the side of preheater burner tube. I have been using alcohol to preheat it the last few days and will just stick with that method. The preheater still works in an emergency, so I still have it as a backup. I did just finish fighting through an issue with the mixing tube glowing red afterit had been running for a while. I tried all the normal fixes I could find on the site here and what eneed up being the problem was cleaning up the cut edge of the mixing tube that's directly over the jet. The cutting process they used to cut that tube left a pretty rolled over edge on the tube disrupting the airflow. Cleaned that up with a fine rat tail file and sand paper and she runs great now! Thanks for the suggestions everyone!
Sorry for the horrible spelling in the previous post! This is what I get for trying to post from my cell phone!
