homeowners: how often do they re-fill your oil tank ?

[dquan97]

What's an oil tank? *relishing the sunny CA weather*

 

[Maetryx]

That seems like way too much to me. I have a buried oil tank. I think it's 500-gallons (bought the house at the end of July). It was full as of August 1. It still had 185 gallons in it as of a couple of weeks ago. And I live in Alaska as well. It seems to me that I'm burning maybe 100 gallons a month, maximum.

If you have a leak, you'll want to be quiet about it and clean it up yourself. I worked for an environmental engineering company for years, and that is mostly what I did. Clean up and monitor fuel spills. If you reported this to your state environmental agency, the cost of their cleanup could exceed the value of the property.

Find out if you're leaking. Rent some equipment and excavate the tank if you are. Overexcavate the contaminated soil and install a new tank with secondary containment and leak detection. If you have property, you can place the contaminated soil on a liner and churn it over every couple of months to let the fuel evaporate out of it (which will take several years, potentially).

Anyway, good luck. I'm paranoid about leaking fuel tanks....

 

[rh71]

It's an above-ground tank... I can see it right beside my house and there's no "borrowed" connections hooking into it as far as I can see. Only one outlet going straight into my garage where the burner is. So could it still be leaking?

Another factor is that my windows are single-sided, original from the 50's... we just bought some $6 rolls of plastic to cover it up and I'm optimistic that'll keep it warmer... we'll see how the oil level goes for the next week or two.

For the person who asked... it's $1.29/gallon for oil these days (I have it locked it in for a year). It may have gone up a bit since the Venezuela strike.

 

[waggy]

in my last house we had oil heat. man that stuff stinks. anyway we had a 300 gallon tank. it depended on the weather on how often we filled it. one year we had a real nasty winter (2000 or 2001) and we ended up filling it 4 times that winter!

We were glad when the heater finally died. we put in a gas furnace. it smelled way better but not really cheaper. i think we paid like $.30 a gallon for the oil.



edit: i should say that this was a old 5 bedroom farmhouse with NO wind blocks and crappy windows. i love farm houses but darn are they expensive!

 

[0roo0roo]

hehe, furnace turns on here once a day only, if that sweet california hehe