Why is Modern Heating Oil Showing a Sludge Problem?
When we serviced heating equipment in the early 1970’s, we often found oil fired heating boilers or furnaces that had worked ok for years without any oil filter installed whatsoever!. We were amazed until we learned the history of heating oil cleanliness. We’re not talking about the number of BTU’s per gallon of heating oil, just how clean or dirty it is. Before the 1970’s oil crisis when much of the heating oil sold in the U.S. was from the middle east, if you put some heating oil in a bottle and examined it, it was a lovely clear yellow color, much like cooking oil. Currently (2008) heating oil in most of the U.S. is black goopy stuff with lots of large molecules that tend to settle out as black sludge in an oil tank, heating oil line, or oil filter. Heating oil companies are not to blame for this messy stuff. Heating oil is being produced by “cold cracking” – it is chilled and centrifuged rather than distilled into clear oil as in the “old days”. A result of this change in heating o
