Tank Cleaning

What tank cleaning covers

Tank cleaning is the controlled emptying, cleaning and certification of a storage tank, vessel, silo or pit, together with the compliant disposal of everything taken out of it. We arrange the whole job: the survey, the method statement, the licensed contractors who carry out the work, the removal of the residues through registered carriers, and the documentation that proves where it all went.

The tanks we deal with most often hold fuel oils, process chemicals, effluent, coolants, food-grade product and interceptor-adjacent wastewater. The residue at the bottom is usually the difficult part — it is rarely the same substance the tank was holding, and it is frequently hazardous when the bulk product was not.

Who it is for

Manufacturers with process vessels on a maintenance cycle. Sites decommissioning redundant plant. Landlords and agents preparing a unit for reletting. Facilities teams who have inherited a tank nobody has opened for a decade and who need to know what is in it before they can price anything else.

If your tank is part of a wider clear-out, it will usually be cheaper to handle it alongside the rest of the site — see full site clearances and de-commissioning.

How a tank cleaning project runs

We start with a free site survey. We need to know what the tank held, what is in it now, how it is accessed, and whether entry will be required — because a confined space entry is a different job, with a different method statement and a different cost, from a clean that can be carried out from outside.

You then get a written proposal setting out the method, the classification we expect to apply to the residues, the disposal route, and the price. Nothing is booked until you approve it.

On the day, the contractors we appoint isolate and purge the tank, remove the residues, clean the internal surfaces to the standard the next use requires, and where necessary gas-free and certify the vessel. We co-ordinate the work around your operation and attend where the project warrants it.

Compliance and documentation

Tank residues are one of the areas where classification most often goes wrong. Sludge from an oil tank is not the same waste as the oil, and describing it as though it were is a duty-of-care failure that sits with you as the producer, not with the contractor who moved it.

We classify each stream properly, apply the correct European Waste Catalogue code, and consign it through a registered carrier to a permitted facility. Every project returns to you with the transfer or consignment notes, the carrier's registration details, the receiving site's permit reference, and the final disposal confirmation. Where a tank has been gas-freed for hot works, the certificate comes back with it.

What it costs, and what drives the cost

Three things move the price of a tank clean, and none of them is the size of the tank. The first is access: a vessel that can be cleaned from outside with jetting equipment is a fraction of the cost of one that requires a permitted confined space entry with a standby team and a rescue plan. The second is what comes out, because the disposal cost of a hazardous residue can exceed the labour cost of removing it. The third is downtime, which is usually your cost rather than ours — and it is the one worth planning around, since a clean scheduled into a shutdown is far cheaper in total than the same clean carried out in isolation.

Because we appoint contractors per project rather than running our own equipment, we can put the right specification of kit on your site instead of the kit that happens to be available. On a straightforward vessel that generally means a lower price; on a difficult one it means the job is done once.