You probably haven’t given much thought to the oil tankers that deliver your heating oil to your door, I know that I didn’t before I went out with the drivers at Heating Oil but they have some quite interesting features. The first is that they often carry more than one type of oil as the tanker can have different compartments for each of the different types of fuel they can carry: Kerosene 28, Gas Oil, red diesel or premium oils.
I wondered why is Kerosene is called 28-second oil? Not 3-second oil or 30-second oil? It seemed like an arbitary number. Of course it isn’t but rather it is to do with the viscosity. The definition of Kerosene 28 is that it takes 28 seconds for a volume of 50ml to flow through the standard sized nozzle of a Redwood viscosimeter. Try it! (No. On second thoughts, don’t. It will end up in a mess of oil.) Diesel is also known as 32-second oil.
How is the oil is delivered? If your oil tank is in a difficult place to access, a smaller 4 wheeled tanker should be able to manouver close enough for the long reaching motorised extendable hose to reach your oil tank.
How does the tanker driver pump the exact amount of oil into the oil tank? When you fill up your car at the petrol station the volume of fuel is measured but when you decided that is enough, you control the pump so you stop it. When heating oil is pumped to the tank, the exact quantity is counted on a volume flow meter and when it reaches this value it automatically stops pumping. (Although it can be stopped so don’t worry about your tank overflowing!)
I hope that has helped answered some of those nagging questions about heating oil that keep you from sleeping at night.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 31st, 2010 at 9:19 am and is filed under heating oil. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.