Oil tank - new house, gauge not working ?!

[EezyOozy]

Hi,

I'd be grateful for any help from those with oil tanks please.

Been in our new house 6 weeks. Rural area and oil heating. The oil tank looks fairly new but the push button sight guage is broken/ unreadable . It's just opaque and brown looking. Myself my husband an my neighbour can't read it. The button also doesn't move in or out. The boiler is very high from the ground on a concrete base. I thought about dipsticking it manually but I don't have a dipstick and even on ladders I'm not sure I could reach ?

I found , in a pile of paperwork from previous owner , the details of a oil heating engineer who has promised to come and several times and not showed up. I would like the guage fixing and an electronic one for in the house. I'm trying to find another engineer to attend instead but it's so hard to get responses !

I'm now really panicking as I've no idea how much oil is in the tank! I did manage to find the oil supplier (by calling around various firms) but they would only tell me that they have "filled the tank at this address previously". They wouldn't say when.

I have never had an oil tank before and am feeling a bit hopeless. Hopefully I'll get someone out next week. In the meantime, is there anything obvious I haven't thought of doing yet?! I do know that you must never let them run dry.

Thanks 😊

Hi! We've got an oil tank and the gauge on it, ie outside is the same as yours, ie useless. You can just ring the oil company and ask them to fill the tank up & they'll charge you for the amount they've put in. You don't have to know in advance how much you need. Explain your predicament to them, so they know why. Then order the electronic gauge that works in the house. Our oil supply company (CPS) fitted the indoor gauge.

Ah that's really helpful. I thought I had to book an amount in advance 🙈 that's what I'll do first then!

And I'll ask them for the gauge too. I'm so thick about oil tanks! Thank you

We had an oil tank at our previous house.
Any stick will do (e.g bamboo, or a piece of string with a weight on, or look in the filler hole and try and see your reflection) to give you an idea of the level.
Longer term I bought a remote gauge on amazon or eBay for about £50 which fits under the filler cap and sends a signal remotely to a gauge inside your house.

No problem. I was the same at first. Worse, in fact, because our oil ran out twice before I had the electronic gauge fitted.

We’ve got oil central heating too. We’ve never had a gauge- we just have a garden cane that we put into the tank through the opening at the top and touch the bottom of the tank - like an oil dipstick in a car. We do it every couple of months and order when there’s a few inches of oil above the pipe at the bottom that feeds the house.

We’ve had to order/pay for an amount in advance for the last few years.

You can just look in the tank (no need for a dip stick). It's really common for the external gauges to break/be unreadable

I didn't realise I could use a garden cane! I thought it might have to be something special. Might ask husband to go up a ladder tomorrow. I'd love to know if we've got loads of oil. I'll call our supplier in the morning too.

I thought, until this eve, that you had to have a special oil heating type person come and do these things... but I'm now thinking that any gas safe plumber could help. And I've spent weeks chasing one uninterested man thinking he was some kind of rare oil tank specialist 🙈🙈

Thanks @User0ne . Is so high up though. In this pic the bottom of the tank is about my waist height. It's a really big and quite tall tank so even up ladders I couldn't see in. But maybe husband can dip it tomorrow. I know I'm making this all sound v complicated. I really am that thick!

It is OFTEC registered you need. Gas Safe is just for gas not oil.

Have you tried pulling out the green button?
You can get a good idea of the level by tapping on the side of the tank with your knuckle - the tone will change when you get down to where the tank has oil.

I've tried pulling out the button and nothing happened . I'm going to tap it now. Thanks for the help everyone !

I'm optimistically going to say the the top half of the tank sounded a bit more echoey and empty than the bottom half! I'm not 100% sure though.

You can just place an order for an amount, e.g. 500 L. If the tanks full before they put it all in, they just charge you for what has gone in, it happens reasonably regularly to us. If you haven't looked into where to get oil yet, we get our oil through our local oil club as for us it's the cheapest (www.oil-club.co.uk/search/) otherwise boilerjuice lets you do price comparisons.

Bamboo cane is absolutely fine. It is what I have always used. Also just order more oil. It's a good time of year to fill up your tank anyway.

I use a bamboo cane to measure our oil. Keep meaning to sort out one of those sonar electronic tank gauges but haven’t. I’ve also done the tapping the side of the tank to see where the difference in tone between air and oil is-this works and before I was well practiced with the bamboo cane I’d use the tapping method to confirm my bamboo cane reading.

Our oil company want you to specify the volume of oil you want-they won’t take the instruction to fill the tank you need to give them the number of litres you want. So, to get a full tank, just order as much as the volume of the tank-they’ll only put in and charge you for what they can fit in the tank.

You could use a tape measure to dip the tank, if it is hard to read you can rub the flat tape surface with chalk to help identify the level.
There is no real issue with the boiler running out only that you will need to prime through fuel line to the burner and this can be a bit messy.
I always kept a 25ltr Jerry can of oil at our last house so in the event that the tank runs dry you have a few days heating available. This proved invaluable during "the beast of the East" storm where we were cut off for several days by snow.

Thanks for all the great advice all, and for not laughing at me!

When we bought this house we ran out of oil on day 3 in winter. The previous owners had drained it down completely..

We use a stick if I don't trust the very temperamental guage.

Also try boilerjuice or fuelfighter for oil. Prices vary a lot.

I used to have an oil tank and the gauge never worked. Everyone runs out in winter once

Options:

1. Use a garden cane
2. Book a company to come regularly and top up (it's cheaper to use Boilerjuice but takes effort - I did not possess effort)

Never been so happy as when I got rid of the oil for electric!

Ugh, I feel your pain. I moved into a house with oil supply and I had no idea having never had it before.

The gauge on the tank wasn’t readable so I had no idea how much was in there. It ran out during one of the worst winters in living memory and I had to call the oil company in tears after a few days of moving a gas heater around to try and stay warm.

I did mange to get in on the village community group oil buy which reduced the cost a bit.

@itcouldhave that sounds so grim . Almost definitely will happen to me at some point.

Thanks to those of you mentioning oil clubs - I followed the link and my village has one.

Thank god for mumsnet!