The Oil Tank That Leaked When I Touched It
I was in the basement of a Sharon house last month, looking at an oil fired hot water boiler and the storage tank next to it. The house was empty at the time. The boiler was not running and had an error showing at its control.
There was a blistered area on the lower wall of the oil tank. I touched it and it released oil. That is a pinhole failure through the tank wall, and it was leaking while I stood there.
Here is what was actually in front of me. A blister on the lower tank surface. Oil on contact. No notable exterior damage anywhere else on the boiler itself. The boiler was inoperative and showing an error, and I suspected the tank may have been empty, though I could not confirm the fuel quantity. I disclosed the leak on the spot to everyone who was there and put a container under it to catch the drip before I moved on.
The thing to understand about a steel oil tank is that the outside is the last place the problem shows up. A blister on the lower wall is not the start of anything. It is the point where what has been happening inside finally reached the surface. Nothing about the tank looked alarming from across the room. It took contact with one spot to find it.
What I told them to do. Get a qualified oil heating or tank specialist out immediately, not next week, and replace the tank as necessary. Then have the area around and under the tank checked for oil contamination and cleaned or remediated as appropriate, because that part does not fix itself and it gets more expensive the longer it sits.
Oil heat is still common in this part of Massachusetts and most of these tanks sit quietly in a basement for decades doing their job. My opinion is that this is the failure people are least prepared for, because there is no noise, no smell you notice in time, and nothing to see until somebody happens to put a hand on the wrong spot. If you have an oil tank and nobody has looked at it closely in years, that is worth an afternoon of somebody's time.
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