Does Home Heating Oil go Off

149oaks

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WE put in a stove and are now in our 3rd winter with it. It has really cut down on our use of Home Heating oil to approx 150ltrs/year. I reckon there's about 200ltrs left in our 1100ltr oil tank. With the price of oil now low I was thinking about filling it up but it could be 6/7 years before I need to fill it again. I was wondering if oil is ok in a tank for this length, does it lose anything or have a best before date like food?
 
it should be fine as long as your tank is in good condition.
If any water or dirt gets in to the oil it may cause problems with your boiler
 
Thanks, couldn't find any info on google!! Has nobody asked this before or should I just have assumed it?
 
Wev oil for years as same as you solid fuel..only thing we do sunday morning normally is run the oil on timer to keep system going n working..
 
Sorry to piggy back on to this thread - there isn't one which suits my query. We are trying to determine how much oil is actually left in our oil tank. It's a 1000 litre cylindrical tank, lying on it's side. When we measure the remaining oil, it shows 25% of the height of the tank. As the tank narrows at the bottom due to it's shape, we are wondering how much is actually left. Main reason for the query is that we will be going away for most of Feb and don't want to buy oil unnecessarily before we go. Is there a formula which calculates the actual amount or percentage volume of oil remains?
 
Sorry to piggy back on to this thread - there isn't one which suits my query. We are trying to determine how much oil is actually left in our oil tank. It's a 1000 litre cylindrical tank, lying on it's side. When we measure the remaining oil, it shows 25% of the height of the tank. As the tank narrows at the bottom due to it's shape, we are wondering how much is actually left. Main reason for the query is that we will be going away for most of Feb and don't want to buy oil unnecessarily before we go. Is there a formula which calculates the actual amount or percentage volume of oil remains?

The short answer to your question is that when your 1,000 litre tank is down to 25% of the full height, you have 200 litres left. For the long answer, read on.

Assuming the tank has perfectly regular dimensions (unlikely, but might do as an approximation), then the cylinder has volume of
gif.latex
where
gif.latex
and
gif.latex
are its radius and length respectively. Since the length doesn't change, the fraction of remaining volume is the area of the end divided into the area of a circular segment of height
gif.latex
, that is:

gif.latex


where we obtain
gif.latex
by substituting
gif.latex
into the formula given by Wikipedia, and using the fraction
gif.latex
for the fraction of the total height of the cylinder lying on its side, thus:

gif.latex


You probably can't be bothered working this out yourself, so here is a table showing the height remaining as a fraction of your tank height, and the corresponding fraction of the total volume remaining:

Height remainingVolume remaining
50%50%
45%44%
40%37%
35%31%
30%25%
25%20%
20%14%
15%9%
10%5%
5%2%

Here's a pretty good approximate rule of thumb:
  • above one third full -- volume% and height% are about the same
  • one third or less -- volume% is about 5% less than height%
 
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Wow! Really good answer, and the required one too. Many thanks Nerd.

(ps In the response section I just see lots of square brackets, with 'tr' or 'td' in them with various numeric percentages)
 
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Using a tablet with a stylus, methinks I hit the 'Quote' as well as the 'Reply'!

I've fixed that, you had removed the closing square bracket from the end quote tag rendering your reply as part of the quote.

Hitting the reply button on a post automatically quotes the entire post. Overkill in most situations.

PS - Nice work dub_nerd.
 
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