Hi Tom Kelly,

I have deisel in my tanks,is there any way to clean them?

                                                                              Tom.

Not a pleasant problem, suggest lots of pumping flushing and Fairy Liguid. It might pay to ring your local water company to see if they can recommend any chemicals for a final clean out.

I have found that a bottle of "MILTON" put in the tank and then to fill the tank with water and leave for a week, is the best for removing biological/bacterial contamination, but diesel is definitely going to need detergents, solvents and then other chemicals to remove the detergents and solvents.

If you can get the tank out, the best possible solution would be to use detergents and then have it steam cleaned.

Don't forget the pipes, fillers and pumps will all need a thorough clean as well.

If you have a hot water system and a calorifier, it will also need cleaning, remember oil foats on water so it will get right through the entire system,

If you have the latter and suspect it is contaminated, I think you ought to have a discussion with your insurance company, it could run into thousands to get it completely clean!

Good luck with it!

Suggest proper detergent-you can get 5 litres of  seriosly concentrated stuff for about £12-modern fairy is useless-having said that can you get your tanks out to clean and purge?/purge in situ-ie keep filling with water causing oil etc to discharge into bilges if in situ-I find this works well on 25 litre barells if I wnt them clean.

Phil

Rather than use detergent, which in itself tastes and is mildly poisonous, try one of the modern products based on distilled citrus fruits/oils. They seem to work extremely well, used for cleaning up oilspills and such like. They are completely soluble in water and harmless to you and the environment.

Otherwise, as Phil says, industrial detergent such as Teepol will be far better than a domestic one.

If you have access to a motor workshop steam lance you will find this will solve the problem quite well, although it may create others!

It will help enormously if you can brush inside the tank, rather than just filling and emptying. Get the inspection hatch off, or make one if it doesn't have one. I find that a toilet brush (bought new!) is very good for internal cleaning of water tanks.

I've come across this before. The trouble is human taste is particularly sensitive to hydrocarbons. I mean down to molecular!

Sorry, but I think you'll end up replacing the lot.

Provided the tank is plastic very strong detergent and hot water and let it overflow for some time then flush with cold water to get the detergent out. Depending upon the capacity of the tank get some clear vinigar and mix it about 10 parts water to 1 part vinigar and leave it to stand for at least 24hrs, better for several days, but you must ensure that the tank is brim full.

Then flush with very hot water and purge with cold water and leave it overflowing. If you are on the hard you can rig up a siphon to keep the bilges clear during flushing.

You may find you have to repeat the whole process, but this has worked for me in the past, you may find that you need to take bottled water for drinking until the tank has been used for a period. But it saves fitting new ones.

The up side of this is you will have very clean bilges.

I noticed today in Morrisons supermarket, 5L mineral water for £2. Buy one get one free.

Refill with good ol tap water when they're empty.

It's a good enough system to keep you going until you are sorted.

Dont suppose I should ask how it happened-but then again I am lucky in that my tanks filler is in a completely different part of my boat-reminds me of once upon a time when I worked for AA-a very embarassed woman called in-she had put water in the oil filler-luckily pump  attendant(shows how long ago)witnesssed event.

Phil

Ron .... there is a common product in most houses that does reduce ... can kill of sulphur smells - Garlic.

As to HC fuels - yep the taint remains for a long long time. Even Steam Cleaning is only partially successful.

Short tale of diesel testing ...... A certain large Oil trader required testing of diesel stock loaded to a ship. So we did as they requested, even though I own and run a fully equipped fuel lab .... They wanted to reproduce movement of the cargo in the vessel en-route Baltic to Asia. A previous cargo had clouded during voyage.

We had to load 500 tons to one ships tank. Stop. Pump with ships pump at max rate to another tank. Take 1 litre sample. (We already had a base sample before). Then load remaining 59,500 ton. Sample as normal.... with an extra sample ex each ships tank.

In lab to place base sample at side. Take a composite of all tanks (1 litre or as near to ) place in Kitchen blender and blend for 20 mins. Compare samples ... and record how long till blended sample cleared. If cleared quickly - to blend again at increasing lengths of time ... till we literally destroyed the sample. We couldn't actually get the sample to cloud up for more than a few seconds.

Anyway the reason for telling the story - that kitchen blender is still in use - but in my house kitchen. It took ages and a lot of repeated washing and boiling of parts to get that diesel smell out of it ... even now 12yrs later you can sometimes get a faint impression of diesel from odd items to do with it.