Heating Oil tank testing - office block | West London, England, United Kingdom

A six-storey office block had an emergency electricity generation system on the roof comprising oil storage, diesel engine and generator. Oil could be pumped to the roof tank from a larger underground tank 20 metres away via a pipe that ran vertically through one of the structural piers of the building. The system was required to be operated annually as a test, starting with the filling of the roof tank from the underground tank. Even though the underground tank contained a substantial quantity of fuel, the roof tank failed to fill but the underground tank had emptied. The office telephone system stopped working. The owners believed that the underground tank must have been empty and suspected a leaking tank or theft.

MassTech lnternational licensees arrived and conducted a precision integrity test on the underground tank and found it tight. They advised a precision test of feed line, found that it failed catastrophically, then further advised exposing the line at a point before its entry under the building to establish whether or not the leak site was inside the building structure or outside. After exposing the line and cutting it to remove a short section, they tested each half of the line enabling them to prove that the only leak site lay outside the building. They used line leak location techniques to pin point the leak site - corrosion failure at an elbow - and found the ground heavily contaminated, probably causing the telephone line failure. The elbow was made good and advice was provided to the client to recover and polish the free product.