#2 fuel oil quality

When i was out in service, Irving customers had the worst looking filters strainers and nozzles. Always almost black looking. Irving ships their own oil direct to their own bulk plants from their own refinery. All other local dealers get their oil from the racks in Albany in one way or another. Those customers had nice pink filters and clean strainers. So, I definitely saw a difference in oil from various suppliers.

I've seen comments that certain biofuels blends are causing issues, dissolving old sludge or something?

Are they referring to before delivery or home tank storage?

ISTR fuel quality was one reason burner makers started using higher pump pressures. The higher pressure produces smaller oil droplets, which burn cleaner since more of the oil's surface is exposed to the air.

We got 2 new 275 gallon Granby tanks in 2019, to replace similar old tanks that had a date stamp that said they were from 1960, so about 60 years old, if I recall. I've been here almost 20 years now, and I started using FFPF 4-in-1 Heating Oil Treatment (HOT) regularly about 10 years ago. I think we did have one time where the filter or nozzle clogged and the boiler wouldn't run. Probably like @EdTheHeaterMan said, the HOT started breaking down the sludge and after a few years it gunked things up enough that the oil stopped flowing. I didn't get a peek inside the old tanks when they were removed a few years later, but I would have been curious to see what the insides looked like.

Now that we have new tanks, I use HOT religiously to prevent future sludging. There are a number of different additives on the market, and I was curious to compare ingredients to find which is "best." HOT seems to be the most expensive, and from my limited research, I think it's because it has a high percentage (30%-60%) of dipropylene glycol methyl ether (DPGME), which apparently is a 100% water-soluble solvent used in a wide variety of water-containing emulsions like latex coatings and cleaning agents. Presumably that's what makes HOt so good at removing water. HOT is significantly more expensive than other treatments that don't contain DPGME and seem to be mainly petroleum derivatives and which may not be as effective at removing water (I don't really know). But I'm willing to spend the few extra bucks for HOT on the theory that the DPGME is the magic ingredient, and I've seen posts by some pros here at HH who use and recommend it.

@pedmec even here in Romania there are problems with heating oil quality.

Either from supplier ( questionable ) or the tanker that delivers it...

I never had the patience to find out(constant nozzle problems in a Riello G5RK...

Switched to natural gas plus hard wood.

Happier than ever.

But the storage tank is also a problem.

Too much humidity/water in it and you'll get problems with rust and degraded fuel...

Skip a tank cleaning and next winter you'll be constantly "in there" fixing problems...

The bio-stuff in the fuel will shorten the time fuel keeps its properties.

Expose the fuel tank to prolonged heat and you're done...

@EdTheHeaterMan No, I think you need a plasma cutter for that. 😀

Fire extinguisher‽

I remember having the fire department show up on three different jobs in the same week while I was on a service call.   The first one I called them when a customer called me for a Smoke and Odors service call on their oil burner.  You know what that smells like….  When I arrived I smelled cedar burning.  Not a common oil burner smoke or odor.  Turns out the customer has a dry base spare  boiler in his garage.  When his wet base boiler failed I installed the dry base boiler without the benefit of the instruction manual.  “Not To Be Installed On Combustible Floor”  was on the rating plate in the fine print under clearances to combustibles section.   

So I called the FD as soon as I smelled that odor from the floor under the boiler.  I asked for the IR camera to look at the floor under the boiler.  YEP it was hot and smoldering.

The fire fighters lifted the boiler after I cut the pipes and they cut the floor open to extinguish the smoldering cedar floor and floor joist.   That was #1  

The next day I answered a call from the Sister of St Joseph summer home in Cape May Point.  The combustion chamber was saturated so I took the proper precautions and burned off the small saturation of the combustion chamber which let a plume of black smoke out the chimney.  A concerned neighbor called the FD and by the time the fire chief arrived I had the burner operating properly with no smoke.  

To make matters worse, the fire chief was also the oil company owner that happen to carry 10 gallons of #2 oil in containers in his truck in case one of his customers called without heat as a result of being out of oil.  When he exited his truck he radioed into the central dispatcher that he was at the scene and there was a strong fuel odor on site.  

By the time he came around the back of the building with the adrenaline rush to prepare for a tragedy, only to see me adjusting the oil burner in the boiler room, he was able to tell the incoming trucks to stand down.  There was no emergency and to be careful driving to the scene.   That was #2

The third one happened at the end of the week when I told another customer in the same town that they had a saturation on their hands and this one had the possibility of being a real problem.  I called the business line of the fire chief’s oil company and asked if this was his customer, since I have never been there before.  The Chief’s wife  indicated that the customer was not theirs. I then called the chief’s cell phone and asked for a pump truck with fire extinguishers on hand to be on site before I tried to light off this saturation.  He arrived with two trucks and the rest of the volunteers were starting to joke with me about how many times T was going to need them next week…

I then removed the brick combustion chamber from the furnace and placed it in the parking lot and lit it off with a blow torch.  It burned for 3 hours while I attended to the cleanup of the oil in the heat exchanger and the basement floor.  I was a one man operation at the time so I had no other qualified people to watch the chamber while I was in the basement.  After 3 bags of oil-dry on the floor and in the heat exchanger was removed from the basement the heater was ready for reassembly.   With the fire proof cloves the two piece brick chamber was placed back in the HX and the furnace reassembled and the customer had heat within 6 hours of the service call.  

Not cheap, but Safety First.  

I joked that the customer only hit the reset once!  

What are the odds of needing the FD three times in one week?