Oil Tank - Update

Yesterday was installation day for our new oil tank. The installers arrived at 9:30am with our new tank, and scoped the job before starting.  Other than the fact that the new tank must be at least 2 feet from the house, they were fine with the location we selected for it. 

Installation of the new tank happened first.  It's a 275 gallon tank with a rain cover to protect the fill pipes, the gauge and the leak sensor that are located at the top of the tank free of elements falling from the sky.

New oil tank

The installers drilled a new hole into the masonry for the oil line, and installed the line near the duct work in the basement so it will be hidden inside the bulk head when we finish the basement.

Once the line was installed, they cut out the old fill pipes, and transferred the oil left in our old tank into the new (we have a little over half a tank left).  They filled the holes left by the old fill pipes with some kind of concrete filler.

Old tank (the red one - the black tank is for our water softener)

Once all that was complete, they removed the old tank from the basement.  Apparently, this big red honker was about 350 pounds and "the heaviest one we moved this week!".  Yikes. 

They were done by 2:30, including a test of the new line by running our furnace for a little bit, bleeding the new oil line, etc.  We were told that it's likely the new tank will settle so although it was installed level (they even borrowed our level), the ground is so soft from all of the rain that it may well sink.  If so, they told us to call and they'll come back out to re-level it.

So now that we have a big shiny outhouse-looking thing in our back yard, we have a few more ideas.  We have the ugly-as-sin propane tank that's sitting at the back of our deck.  We'll move that to that same corner.  And when it's time to install a high efficiency air conditioning unit, we'll put that unit over there in that corner, too.  When that is complete, we'll put down a lot of lawn fabric and rocks.  Then we'll either fence it with a gate or put in lattice of some kind to hide it, but have it still be accessible to those who need to service them.  This won't be done this year... but it's in our 3 year plan. 

Luckily, our neighbors to that side couldn't care less about the eyesore outhouse oil tank because that side of their house is the garage and they'll only see it when they back out of their garage bays.  They already told us that they don't care.  We told them we're going to hide it all anyway.