Hi all,
In the cellar of our house we got a tank with heating oil for the heating system.
We noticed that the smell of heating oil becomes more and more annoying. Since we have never had before experiences with such kind of house+heating system, we said that this is normal for such a heating system. (Previously we were living in a tower block) .
So the question: is it normal to have such a smell in the cellar of house using heating oil? How could we get rid of it?
Apart of the inconvenience with such thing, my concern is that it could lead to fire.
Thanks,
Ask a boiler technician to come and smell it & look at it?
Was it filled recently?
How old is the tank?
Is it leaking?
IE do a visual inspection of the tank - especially any pipes going into and out of it - and look for any leaks. Where there is a connection wipe it clean with and old rag and then go and check 30mins later - and check again with a clean rag (or your finger) to see if it is moist.
Minor weeping is not likely to cause a fire unless you apply an ignition source.
When the system starts up, it can be normal for a fuel oil smell to occur for day or two, but no longer
If your worried get a technician out to check the system, won't cost much for peace of mind
Thanks all, i will follow your suggestions.
Reading your replies I am assuming there should be no smell at all, am I right?
Thanks,
Open the windows.
Lacking ventilation, the smell will build.
Tom
Yup it's an option. However, no one is smoking in this house.
This absolutely.
Any place where fuel is stored needs to ventilated.
dodgyken's asked you the best questions so far..... answering them might help us guess at what the problem might be!
I'll add a question of my own; has the heating system been serviced recently? It really should be done by a professional once a year (preferably early Autumn before you fire it up for the coming Winter).
If you own the house then you'll need to arrange that yourself, otherwise contact your landlord/letting agents and insist they sort it out.
Hi,
Right now, i cant to answer those questions since i moved recently and i have to dig into the papers.
Thanks for your support
We have an oil-fired house heating system at our place in France. For the first couple of years we got such a smell in the boiler room/laundry (which didn't make the drying clothes smell very nice if you forgot to leave the window open), and here was no oil leaking per se, but the boiler was old and inefficient, so it seemed that the smell was coming from inside the boiler, where unburnt fuel on startup could potentially seeping back from the burner area into the air via the unsealed wood-burning part below.
The smell reduced dramatically after it was replaced, but still lingered, and didn't finally disappear for good until the chimney was lined with a metal fuel all the way up - years of partially burnt fouel had built up in the brickwork and seeped out through the less-than-perfect seal at the bottom.
Now the only place there's any smell is in the sealed room containing the tank itself. This has a solid steel & concrete hatch door at more than a metre off the ground to stop any fumes escaping into the house, and is otherwise unventilated, so if I need to climb in the check anything I still notice it there, presumably as a result of old oil spillages.
If your oil tank is not sealed off I'd suggest getting a heating engineer to check for leaks, although I suspect that building regs would insist that they weer always in a separate sealed area, so this is probably moot.