What we offer
Rural properties often run on oil. Our engineers service, repair and replace oil-fired boilers and tanks, with safety checks and efficiency tuning included.
Off the mains gas network, oil is still the default. The villages and farms west and north of Newbury — Lambourn, Kintbury, Chieveley and the downland around Hungerford — are largely oil-fired, and those systems tend to be older, harder to reach and further from a spares counter than their equivalents in town. Oil firing is a genuinely different discipline to gas. It involves a stored liquid fuel, a supply line that can admit air and water, and a burner that has to be set up with instruments rather than adjusted by ear.
A proper annual service is a strip-down, not a glance. The burner comes out, the nozzle is replaced rather than cleaned because the orifice and spray pattern wear, electrodes are reset to the manufacturer's gap, the photocell is cleaned and pump pressure is checked against the data plate. Both filters are changed, and baffles come out so the heat exchanger can be brushed through. The visit finishes with a combustion test — smoke number, carbon dioxide percentage, flue gas temperature and calculated efficiency — recorded so this year's readings can be compared with last year's.
Tanks carry most of the risk and attract most of the neglect. Plastic tanks age under ultraviolet light and eventually craze, bulge or split along a seam; steel tanks rot from the base upwards, where water sits unseen beneath the shell. The base must be non-combustible, level and supporting the tank's entire footprint with a margin all round. Building Regulations Part J and BS 5410-1 govern how far a tank sits from buildings, boundaries and openings, and where that distance cannot be achieved the answer is a fire-rated barrier rather than a compromise.
Containment is a legal question as much as a practical one. Oil storage above 200 litres at commercial, industrial, institutional and agricultural sites requires secondary containment under the Control of Pollution (Oil Storage) (England) Regulations, and domestic tanks over 3,500 litres are caught by the same rules. Below that threshold, BS 5410-1 calls for a risk assessment. Proximity to a watercourse, a borehole, a drain, or hard standing that runs to one normally pushes the answer towards a bunded tank. This is chalk country, and putting a spill right is a long and disruptive business.
Fuel condition explains a surprising share of winter breakdowns. Condensation leaves water in the bottom of the tank, water supports microbial growth, and the resulting sludge blocks filters and ruins nozzles. A boiler that ran cleanly in October but starts locking out in January is often being fed from the bottom of a tank that has not been de-sludged in years, sometimes with water frozen in the supply line. Draining the sump, changing filters, fitting a water-absorbing element and cleaning the tank tackles the cause rather than the symptom.
The supply line deserves the same attention as the boiler. Buried runs should be plastic-coated copper with no joints below ground, sleeved through structure and protected where they emerge, and a remote-sensing fire valve is part of the installation rather than an optional refinement. Where the tank sits below burner level, a two-pipe arrangement or de-aerator lifts fuel reliably instead of you chasing air locks every few weeks. On replacement, a condensing oil boiler needs a condensate route that will not freeze on an exposed north wall, and tanker reach is worth settling before a new tank is sited.
- Oil boiler servicing with recorded combustion analysis
- Burner strip-down, nozzle, electrode and pump set-up
- Lockout diagnosis and emergency breakdown repair
- Tank inspection, de-sludging, replacement and decommissioning
- Tank siting assessed against Part J and BS 5410-1
- Fuel line, filter, de-aerator and fire valve work
- Oil boiler replacement — internal, external and boiler house
Common questions
- How often should an oil boiler be serviced?
- Once a year, and ideally before the heating season rather than during it. Oil burners foul in normal use: the nozzle wears, the heat exchanger sooties and filters silt up with whatever the tank is holding. A serviced burner puts more of the fuel's heat into the water instead of the flue. It is also the visit where a failing tank, a weeping fuel line or a seized fire valve gets spotted while it is still a small job.
- My burner keeps locking out — is it safe to keep pressing reset?
- Reset it once. If it locks out again, stop and call us. Repeated resetting pumps unburnt oil into a hot combustion chamber and masks the real fault. Lockouts normally trace to a worn or partly blocked nozzle, a dirty photocell, air or water in the fuel line, or a clogged filter, and all of those get worse with each attempt. Note the boiler make and what happens in the seconds before it stops.
- How do I know when my oil tank needs replacing?
- Look for bulging or distortion in a plastic tank, fine surface crazing, discoloration from years of sunlight, or weeping around the outlet and seams. On steel tanks, check the base and lower seam where water sits and rust starts. A sagging or cracked base is reason enough on its own, since an unsupported tank will eventually split. We inspect the tank during a service visit and tell you plainly whether it has years left or months.
- Do I need a bunded oil tank?
- Often, yes. Commercial, industrial, institutional and agricultural storage over 200 litres must have secondary containment by law, as must domestic tanks over 3,500 litres. Smaller domestic tanks are decided by risk assessment under BS 5410-1, and the usual triggers are a watercourse, borehole, drain or hard standing draining to one nearby. Given the chalk geology across West Berkshire, a bunded tank is frequently the right call anyway.
- Why did my boiler fail the moment the weather turned cold?
- Two causes dominate. Water collected in the bottom of the tank freezes in the outlet or supply line and starves the burner. Or demand rises, the tank level drops, and the burner starts drawing sludge that has been sitting at the bottom all year. Both look like a boiler fault and neither is. The fix is de-sludging the tank, changing filters and checking the line rather than fitting parts to the appliance.
- Can an oil tank be moved to a better position?
- Usually. The constraints are separation distances from buildings, boundaries and openings under Part J and BS 5410-1, a properly constructed non-combustible base, containment requirements, and tanker access to the fill point. A remote fill line can solve access problems where a tanker cannot reach a tank tucked out of sight. If the tank is being replaced anyway, that is the moment to reconsider its position rather than rebuilding the same compromise.
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Areas We Cover
Oil Fired Heating across Newbury, Reading, Basingstoke, Oxford, London and the wider South of England — covering Berkshire, Hampshire, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, Dorset and Somerset.