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 😊

I have a dumb question. If I order an amount , say 500 litres, and I've estimated badly and I don't need quite that much to fill the tank .... does the pump know to stop filling the tank? Or might I get in trouble for ordering too much and causing an overflow / spillage ?!

@HasaDigaEebowai what utter bastards !

You can't overfill, it's like filling your car, the pump clicks off when the tank is full.

If you order, say, 1000 litres and the tank will only take 870, then you're charged for 870. Some oil companies offer a lower rate if you order a minimum of 1000 litres but obviously you don't get that if you don't quite reach the 1000 litres. We used to have a 1100 litre capacity tank and it was a very fine balance between running the tank down to below 100 litres so we could get the discount, and running out completely.

We never ran out but got pretty close at times. We replaced our boiler with an ASHP 3 years ago so don't have that worry any more!

We've been in our house oil for 8 years and are still crap and remembering to order oil . We joined our local oil club because then I get a monthly reminder to check!

Phew thank you x