Update!
Here is update from what I put here last Thursday night
I received a fair amount of information / advice via this computer or on the telephone. Here are the “highlights”.
1) One former college classmate from 50 years who is in the oil leakage / spill remediation business scared me sufficiently that I almost wanted my oil tank out of my house as soon as possible!
2) I had been 100% against mini-splits out of the firm belief that they are not the thing for New England. Or, at least not the sole thing since I thought that they did not work below a certain temperature. Which would then require a backup heating system causing me to ask what then is the point of mini-splits? But someone was so adamant that I could have mini-splits as my sole system, with no backups necessary. Which caused me to totally turn my thinking around from them being “No way!” to them possibly being “THE way!”. I was also quite excited when I found out that Artic Refrigeration sells and installs them. Artic Refrigeration sold me my present oil furnace, installed my present how water heater, and sold me and installed my 100 AMP electrical service. I have known the owner for 40 years from him being a major vendor to two different organizations / vendors I’ve been associated with. I trust him 100%. If I were to look at mini-splits, I might just go with him or get only one other quote. The trust factor with him is huge. But, on the other hand, I have no interest in air conditioning. I am decidedly NOT an air conditioning fan! I have been in offices where I feel like I am being put through a second winter. During 2020 I did not once turn on the air conditioner in my car. Open windows with fresh air will always be my preference. My house is East / West (front). I have two large trees in my front yard which blocks much of the summer sun from my house. I keep cool enough with ceiling fans and various fans blowing directly on me. Therefore my concern with going with a mini-split system is that much of my investment would be going to the cooling hardware aspect of it, which is not something I really want or need?
3) I am trying to identify what temperature various rooms in my house would be at if there were ZERO heat anywhere in the house. I assume that after a while (days?) that my house would be at the same temperature as it is outside? Why would not that not be so? Unless there would be some heat retention from the sun enters the house through the windows? Today I realized that is so. While the thermostat was set at 54, it was 58 to 60 in my living room. I attribute that to the small south facing window and the extremely large west facing picture window on that room AND with it being a sunny day? But the basement could be a different story because most of its walls are in contact with the earth and the earth never gets as cold or as warm as the outside air temperature? For example, last week when I had the temperature in my house set at 54 degrees and my garage was at 28 degrees it was at 46 degrees in the basement. How does it maintain that much of a higher temperature than the outside temperature? The furnace was barely running. All the heating ducts from the furnace are insulation wrapped so I do not believe they are putting any heat into the basement. There is no insulation between the basement and the room where I am right now. Just a floor and a subfloor? Is any of that 54 house heat going through the floor to give some heat to the basement? All this is an attempt for me to understand if in a worst case my furnace just stopped entirely for any reason and for a good length of time what are the possibilities of the water pipes in the basement freezing? It does have to reach as low as 32 degrees in the ceiling area of the basement for pipes to freeze, correct?
4) I had one extremely long discussion with someone Sunday night. It was about a lot of things but, at the end, we heavily focused on my heating system issues. Much of the following comes from that discussion.
5) We decided I should follow a parallel track. Pursue both replacing my current oil based heating system with one utilizing mini-splits while at the same time determining the best way to maintain my current oil based heating system.
6) Decisions need to be made and more information is needed regarding my present oil tank. If you go back to #1 you will see the advice I got to get rid of the tank as soon as possible. It was here when I bought my house in 1982. Therefore at least 38+ years old. I do not remember it looking new then. Is it possible it is original to the house (estimated build late 1940s)? The heating system that I finally replaced in 1998 certainly seemed like it was. The tank has never leaked? But is it a ticking time bomb? Do I just replace it sooner than later so that as I get older it does not turn into this bigger problem that I’d rather not deal with at an older age? On the other hand the person who I had the long telephone discussion with stated that he bought his house in 1977. He’s still using the same furnace and oil tank. Has not had his furnace cleaned in five years. Says his tank looks fine.
7) We also discussed getting the sludge out of the oil tank. The sludge IS and been the cause of my heat issues for well over a decade He located for me a company in Keene, New Hampshire that does this work for $345 and suggested to me that if they do it then, maybe, there is someone closer to me who also does this work.
We also discussed trying to find someone who could do the thickness measurements on the tank, and most importantly, its bottom so as to get information of its current state of soundness or unsoundness. That would be an extremely important piece of information. If deemed unsound then that automatically answers a big question. Then the choices are either stay with oil heat and replace the tank. Or, abandon oil heat and go with a mini-split solution.
9) Prior to getting all the sludge pumped out some other tactics could be tried like using oversized oil lines from the tank to the burner. Or either using two filers or oversized filters or two oversized filters. But obviously that work would have be done by someone who knows how to do that work plus believes / advises that that would be a good solution to try.
10) As pointed out he had had his furnace since 1977 – 43 years ago. I replaced my furnace in 1998 – 22 years ago. Plus, two years ago I had serious work done to it, similar to rebuilding significant parts in a car. Prior to those repairs I’d asked the person doing the work if he thought I should replace the furnace. He said no. Other than when the sludge causes the problem of oil getting to the furnace the furnace has worked flawlessly. Therefore is it not possible for it to run without major problems for another 5, 10, 15, 20 years?
11) The furnace has never seemed to run much. I’ve always read that that is a sign of inefficiency. Is that a sign that my furnace is oversized for my house? Or, is that a sign of me generally having much lower temperature settings in the house?
12) I am attempting to manage when I finally have to make a decision. Running out of oil or the furnace stopping because of a problem that just keeps recurring or something happening to the oil tank in the dead of the winter is about the worst case. Again the house is being heated to only 54 degrees. Yet in this room it is 76.5 degrees. It started at about 68 degrees this morning around 9:30 AM. In the last six hours the only heat sources have been what has been coming out of the back of two computers and a 100 watt heating pad my feet are currently on.
13) Can I safely set the house at 52 or 50 degrees or will that increase the possibilities of heating problems with the furnace running even less? I can easily take the rest of the house being at those temperatures because in this room I have two space heaters which can easily drive the room temperature to 75, 80 degrees. Of, even 90 (or more) if I so desired!
14) At the start of heating season the tank was 3/8 full. I’ve since lowered the temperature from 58 to 56 and recently to 54 (and, as noted above…I am just itching to set it at 52 or 50!) I just checked the tank level and I am below ¼. But not much. Maybe, at most, a ¼ of the way towards 1/8. Therefore, I started at 12/32’s (3/8’s) full and am now at an estimated 7/32’s full. I’ve used 5/32’s of a tank so far. Or, about 43 gallons in total for nearly the first three months of the heating season. Seems that with proper thermostat management I might be able to stretch out the remaining 7/32’s of a tank or about 60 gallons for another month? To the end of January? Maybe even longer?
15) We are assuming that that the sludge is just sitting in one unmoving lump that is not presently getting mixed into the oil. That the sludge only causes problem when a fill up happens and the huge amount of incoming oil with it attendant pressure it generates unsettles and stirs up the sludge so that now it does get mixed with the oil getting sent out of the tank. That sludge now mixed with the oil either clogs up the filter or the oil lines to the burner. But while that sludge is currently just sitting at the bottom of the tank, unstirred, and completely separate from the oil, as the more and more oil gets burned then that sludge daily becomes a higher percentage of what is in the tank. Once the rest of the oil gets down to a certain level could that sludge get drawn into the filer, ending up with another no heat issue?
16) The person in #4 above and I had another one and one-half hour discussion last night. Here is what we concluded should be my next steps in the following order:
a. Continue the parallel path of pursuing mini-splits or continuing with an oil based heating system as the end solution.
b. Find out if someone can do a measurement on the integrity of the oil tank by measuring its thickness at various locations, particularly its bottom. If that person says that the present oil tank still has integrity, then keep it. If the person says it’d be wise to replace the tank then that opinion would be followed. If the decision is to keep an oil based heating system then that tank will be replaced.
c. If the oil tank is deemed to still have integrity, get a fill up of oil. Turn off the heating system, the night before the delivery and do not turn it back on until a few hours of the delivery so as to minimize the possibilities of any stirred up sludge getting drawn into the oil flow system. Also, get a notice when the delivery is to be made so as to in-person ask the delivery person to deliver the oil into the tank at a slow rate to minimize the stirring up the sludge that is resting at the bottom of the tank. Also, make sure that prior to the oil delivery make sure that a can of the additive is used that is the same as my prior oil person had successfully used for years so as to prevent the sludge issue causing problems.
d. If there is a no heat issue after getting the oil delivery, get either an additional oil filter installed or a double sized filter installed or two double sized filters installed. A regular sized filter costs about $10.
e. If soon after there is another no heat issue after doing d., then put in a new, double sized oil line. A 15’ oil line could not cost more than $20? But since each service call is going to be about $125 maybe this should automatically be done at the same time as d?
f. If another no heat issue, have the sludge pumped out of the tank. I have been led to believe that is possible even with a full tank of oil because the sludge is sitting all at the bottom of the tank since it is heavier than oil.
If you feel like spending money you could put it into more insulation and air sealing, and new windows.