Plenty of properties around Billinge and the surrounding villages have never been on mains gas, and heating oil has been the arrangement for decades. Tanks do not last forever, and spring is when most people replace them, before the next heating season rather than during it. Oil tank removal is a job with a strict order to it, and the skip comes a long way down the list. Our Billinge skip hire service covers this area regularly.
Why old tanks fail
Most of the tanks being replaced now are single skin, either steel or early plastic. Steel tanks corrode from the inside as much as the outside, because water accumulates in the bottom over years of condensation and sits under the oil. By the time a steel tank is leaking, it has usually been thinning for a long time.
Plastic tanks fail differently. They become brittle with age and ultraviolet exposure, and they crack, often at a fitting or along a moulding line. A plastic tank that has gone milky and chalky on the sunny side is telling you something.
Modern replacements are bunded, meaning a tank within a tank, so that a failure of the inner vessel is contained rather than ending up in the ground. That is the significant difference, and it is why replacing a single skin tank is worth doing before it fails rather than after.
The tank cannot go in a skip as it stands
This is the point people most often get wrong, and it is worth being blunt about. We cannot take an oil tank that has not been professionally emptied and cleaned. Not a steel one, not a plastic one, and not one that looks empty.
A tank that has held heating oil retains residue, sludge and vapour long after the last of the usable oil has been drawn off. That residue is hazardous waste, and the vapour in a supposedly empty steel tank is the reason cutting one up is a job for people who know what they are doing.
The correct sequence is that a specialist uplifts the remaining oil, cleans the tank and certifies it. Once that has been done and you have the paperwork, the empty cleaned shell is ordinary scrap. A steel tank at that point is worth taking to a scrap merchant rather than putting in a skip at all. A cleaned plastic tank can go in a container.
Our guide to hazardous waste and why it cannot go in a skip covers the wider category. If you are unsure where your tank sits, ring us before you book anything.
Contaminated ground is a separate problem
If the old tank has leaked, the ground beneath and around it may be contaminated, and contaminated soil is not skip waste. It has to be assessed, and depending on the extent it may need specialist removal and disposal.
The signs are usually obvious once the tank is off its base. Discoloured soil, a strong smell of oil that does not fade, and staining on the concrete. Do not dig it out and put it in a skip on the assumption that it is only a bit of soil, because it is not, and mixing it into a general load creates a problem at our end and a documentation problem at yours.
Where there has been a significant leak there may also be an obligation to report it. That is a conversation to have with the specialist doing the uplift rather than one to work out yourself.
What does go in the skip
Once the hazardous elements are dealt with properly, the rest of the job is ordinary. The concrete or slab base the tank sat on usually comes out, and that is heavy inert material. Old pipework, the fill point, the vent, any bund walling if there was a masonry one, and often a section of fencing or screening that was built around the tank.
The base is the heavy part. A tank base is generally a substantial slab, sometimes reinforced, and it will use most of the weight allowance on its own. Our page on skip size versus weight limits explains why that matters more than the volume.
For a base and associated materials a 4 tonne midi skip is usually right, and where a larger installation is coming out, or the work is part of a wider heating changeover, an 8 tonne builders skip is the next step.
Keep the concrete clean and separate where you can. Clean broken concrete crushes down and gets recovered, which our environmental and recycling page explains.
Access and placement
Tanks tend to sit at the back or the side of a property, often at the end of a long garden or in a corner reached by a narrow path. That distance is the practical constraint, because a concrete base has to be barrowed out to wherever the skip is.
Where the drive will take a skip, put it there and avoid a permit entirely. Where it has to go on the road, our skip hire with permit service handles the application with whichever authority covers your address, which around Billinge and the wider Wigan area is not the same arrangement as our inland Lancashire work.
Local coverage
We cover this side of the borough regularly, running Up Holland skip hire and Shevington skip hire jobs alongside Billinge, and our drivers know the lanes and the access out here.
Ring us on 01942 417456 once the tank has been cleaned and certified, and tell us whether the base is coming out. Our contact page is there if you want to check the sequence with us first.
