Over the years I’ve written plenty of articles on pumps, vacuum and why things don’t always go as planned. I’ve begged the retail oil industry to use more fuel additives and treat the oil year round and not wait until a tank is frozen in the middle of the winter. It’s not just the frozen tank that bothers me, it’s the very irate customer you have.

I’ve also pleaded for the use of pressure and vacuum gauges and even just to follow simple rules of thumb when calculating the design of fuel systems and to use them while troubleshooting. I just don’t preach this stuff, I really believe in it. If it works I love it, if not, at least I tried it. Try things ‘ it only takes one new idea and keep an open mind!

Well, as we all know this was a very crazy winter and the cold never did show up. That was good because many problem jobs stayed quiet, but what will next year bring? I was just on the phone trying to get someone to understand that at over 10 inches of vacuum there are better ways to get oil to a pump in cold weather than a two-pipe system. You can use all of the tricks and gadgets you want, but I hate living with a recurring problem, a curse, if you will. You can keep trying to use your two-pipe systems, two-stage burner pumps, and everything else, but when you have to move oil, you just can’t beat a pump and pressure, FACT!

Way back when I was just an apprentice, I got hooked on booster pumps. I got hooked by reading an article from the old NOFI group, and it was an eye opener ‘ the proof is it really stayed with me. Here’s the basis of the story: You have a 10,000 gallon oil storage tank at just below ground level. The utility room is 225 feet aboveground level and your peak firing rate is 115 gph that is consumed by two boilers and a water heater. That’s right, 115 gallons per hour and this is all contained in a 32 story building called the Southdale Tower in Edina, Minnesota.  In a brief search of the Internet, I couldn’t find out if the building is still there, but I did find out that Edina is the home of the first covered shopping mall in the United States, cool!

So, the engineers needed to pump the oil up 225 feet and deliver 115 gallons of No. 2 oil to the equipment, so did they use a two-pipe system? Oh sure, did they use anything else? Yeah, they used properly sized lines and a couple of boosters. They really only needed one, but with a big building like this you build in a backup for the ‘what ifs.’ Figure 1 is my re-drawn version of the piping system that was laid out by the former Heating Division of Sta-Rite Industries, Inc., also known to many of us as Webster pumps, Figure 2.

Let’s look at a few key items. First is the oil supply tank at the top of the building, which is nothing more than a 10 foot long piece of six inch pipe. Using the following table you can calculate just how much that pipe holds.