Hi, I've owned a Clarke XR155 (the biggest one they did) for about 20 years and it's been run on Diesel all that time. Runs well but you MUST set the internal blanking plate to the "Diesel" position. I only really use it for short bursts (it warms the workshop so quickly) but then I lent it to someone who needed it to heat a remote church for a winter funeral and they said it cut out after about an hour..... as it was well out of guarantee there wasn't much I could do and it didn't really affect me so I thought no more of it. This year I was in the workshop on a long project and it started playing up and eventually stopped altogether. I sent a video of it struggling to start to Clarke and they confirmed it looked like fuel starvation. I checked the fuel pipes for splits asd Clarke said because it runs on a venturi process rather than a pump they are very sensitive to air leaks through a perished pipe. There were no splits or air leaks but I could see through the clear filter that it was struggling to pick up fuel. I thought I'd start by dipping the tank to make sure it hadn't just run out of fuel - the tank was approximately half full according to the dipstick. So I thought I'd take a look at the pipe pick up and pulled the pipe out of the tank (it goes through a rubber grommet) and the pick up pipe was bone dry!! (Note that there is no strainer on the end of the pipe - just a simple bit of standard fuel hose). Perplexed by this I measured the length of pipe coming out of the grommet (so the amount actually inside the fuel tank) and confirmed that it was way short of the bottom of the tank and so was unable to pick up fuel once the tank got about half full. It has been that way from new as I'm the only one who's ever serviced it and it is obviously the reason for it only running for about an hour. It's only because I usually keep the tank topped up that I haven't noticed this before.
Just thought I'd post this in case anyone else has the same problem.
Just thought I'd post this in case anyone else has the same problem.
