Last winter we woke up to a house full of smoke with the detectors blaring. We shut off the furnace and went down stairs to investigate. A black smoke was seeping out of our furnace. We called a service company. The service guy told us that the nozzle was clogged and the furnace needed cleaning. That seemed to fix the problem.
Two days later the furnace stopped again and we had to replace another nozzle. He told us that we had sludge in our oil tank and that it was clogging things up. We were told that we would need to replace the oil tank at a cost of several thousand dollars! The tank is in good shape and we hate to replace it if we don’t have to.
We started our research. There were companies that offered sludge removal service. That process seems like it had limited results based on the reviews we read. Then there were sludge cleaning chemicals. It seems like most sludge cleaners are just solvents. Again these had limited results. We were told another very good way to prevent sludge from getting to the burner is to run a single line off the top of the tank. We didn’t like the thought of running more lines through the basement.
After talking to several furnace repair companies we finally found our winner. Install a second oil line filter and make sure to replace the filters frequently.
This is the old filter left in place:
And this is the added second filter:
They also recommended that when we fill our sludgy oil tank to turn off the furnace for a few hours to let the sludge return to the bottom of the tank.
We haven’t had a problem since and we saved a lot of money. Hope this helps others with sludge in their oil tank.