Advice: 'Boiler Room' rebuild (how much, shingles, furnace, water tank)
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Our funky house, once electric heat, has since been converted to oil (long before we purchased it). A split level with a finished LL, in order to do this they built a 'boiler room' addition to the kitchen (in LL) - Maybe 4.5-5' wide x 12-14' long?. One 'wall' of this room is the exterior old shingles/siding of the house. This room only contains the furnace and the hot water tank, plus a door to the back yard.
It's definitely not fine craftsmanship - at the moment it's shoddy single pane windows, (an uneven) cement slab floor, half cinder block wall and regular wood frame/slanted roof.
There are a number of issues with the room (the least being it's unheated and the biggest being the number of gaps it has, which in the past has led to rodent intrusion.)
I'm considering getting quotes to have someone rip the 'frame' down and rebuild a more solid encasement. As a fun side note, the oil tank is stored in a very crappy looking 'shed' that backs up against one of the boiler room walls. If I were to re-do, I'd want everything to be inside one room.
I guess my long winded question is: a) is this a good idea and b) what are things I should make note of to do/ask/think about when restructuring?
Without photos I realize this is hard to picture..
Second, it would help to know where you are, at least the region, and an idea of how much oil you expect to burn per year. It may or may not make sense to rely on oil as a primary heat source, it does have the advantage of having fuel on site and so it's a decent backup, but the first wakeup call on oil as space heat was in 1973...
I'm assuming natural gas is not available, and your electric rates are high. What about wood or coal as a primary heat source?
I'm also assuming that this system, while the "shed" it's in is not so hot, works OK and is your source of hot water in the house so you don't want to ditch it, at least not right now.
This might be a better project for summer, particularly if you want to tear down what's there and re-do it radically.
I'd keep the oil tank outside the room. My main reasons are fire danger, filling the tank and fumes entering the house from the tank. Do you want them to come into your house to fill the tank. Also, there might be building code restrictions not allowing the tank to be in the same room.
I'm embarrassed that I've gone this long without replying so I wanted to touch base briefly:
1) We have a pellet stove. THis has been out primary source of heat (80/20 split) this winter. That in itself hasn't come without a slew of problems - since the oil tank is outside and furnace is in an unheated attachment, we've had three bouts of frozen pipes/sludge in the oil tank that cause the furnace not to fire (since we weren't using it as much).
2) I appreciate the suggestions, as our oil company also did - but to covert to even propane is about $8,000 to begin. Sorry, we do not have that kinda cash
3) We're doing our own rebuild of the oil tank 'shed' this summer - recently the oil line was brought up a couple inches and fed through the top to prevent taking the sludge from the bottom. Line was also insulated. We are also running the oil on super cold nights to avoid any frozen pipe problems (We have a backup heat sensor on a couple of the pipes, but I don't trust it).
Still would love to rebuild the exterior part of the room.. but now with a driveway in need of repair, this might take a backseat...
I'd keep the oil tank outside the room. My main reasons are fire danger, filling the tank and fumes entering the house from the tank. Do you want them to come into your house to fill the tank.
Please, such a dumb response.
The oil tank fill and vent pipes have to terminate OUTSIDE of the shed/boiler room/basement, or wherever it is.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
