Oil heating guides

Why there is a whole cluster of these

Most heating advice on the internet assumes a gas combi in a terraced house. Across large parts of Norfolk there is no gas main, and oil is not a fallback – it is the normal way a house is heated, and it behaves quite differently.

The differences that matter:

• You buy the fuel in advance, in bulk, and store it on your own land. That makes you responsible for the tank, its condition, and anything that leaks out of it.
• The tank is regulated. Where it sits, what it sits on, how far it is from a building or a boundary, and whether it needs secondary containment are all governed rather than a matter of preference.
• Running out is a real event, and restarting afterwards is not simply a matter of turning it back on.
• The boiler is a burner, with a nozzle, an electrode assembly and a combustion setting that drifts. It genuinely needs an annual service in a way a gas boiler can limp on without.
• A spill is a pollution incident, with a clean-up cost that dwarfs the tank.

None of that is covered by generic heating advice, which is why these exist.

Start here, depending on what you are dealing with

The boiler

An oil boiler burns a spray of atomised fuel, ignited by a spark across two electrodes, in a controlled flame inside a combustion chamber. Every part of that drifts with use – the nozzle wears and its spray pattern opens up, the electrodes erode and the gap changes, the filter loads with sediment, and the heat exchanger accumulates deposits that insulate it.

The consequence is that an oil boiler that has not been serviced does not simply carry on at the same efficiency. It gets steadily worse at converting fuel into heat, and you pay for that every week.

• What actually happens during an oil boiler service – the full sequence, including the combustion analysis that separates a real service from a wipe-down.
• Oil boiler lockouts – what the reset button does, and the point at which repeatedly pressing it is doing harm.
• Smoke, soot and oil smells – each of those symptoms points somewhere specific.
• Understanding where efficiency goes – flue gas losses, cycling, distribution and control, in the order they actually cost you money.
• Internal, external or boiler house – the siting decision, and how it affects noise, servicing and the flue.
• Brands compared – Grant, Firebird, Warmflow, Worcester Danesmoor and Mistral, on parts availability and serviceability rather than marketing.

The tank

The tank is the part people think least about and the part that causes the expensive problems. It sits outside in the weather for twenty years with fuel in it, and it fails slowly enough that nobody notices until it is leaking.

The regulatory position is worth understanding before you need to act on it. Where a tank may sit, what it stands on, its distance from buildings and boundaries, and whether it needs secondary containment are set by Building Regulations and by the oil storage regulations – and a tank that was compliant when it was installed is not automatically compliant if you replace it in the same spot.

• Oil tank siting rules – separation distances, base requirements and fire separation.
• Bunded or single-skin – what secondary containment is, and the conditions that make it mandatory rather than optional.
• Plastic vs steel – two materials that fail in completely different ways, on different timescales.
• Eight signs a tank is near the end of its life – what to look for, and which ones mean act now.
• Buying heating oil sensibly – order size, timing and keeping the tank in a condition that does not wreck the boiler.

The single most useful habit: look at the tank properly twice a year, in daylight, all the way round including the back and underneath the supports. Most tank failures announce themselves months in advance to anybody who looks.

Oil and what comes next

The question of whether to stay on oil is a live one, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a sales pitch in either direction. Oil vs heat pump for an off-grid Norfolk home sets out what actually decides it – the fabric of the building, the emitters already in it, and the flow temperature the house can be heated at.

We should be clear about our own position: we are not an MCS-registered heat pump installer, so we do not install them and we have nothing to sell you either way. That guide is written accordingly.

See also oil boiler servicing, oil tank replacement and the off-grid heating data for Norfolk.