I work in the field as a technician who deals in remediation of oil tanks when they eventually rot out in the ground spilling their contents for unsuspecting homeowners to smell in their well water eventually.
Anywho, homes have heat sources (diesel tanks usually 250gal and 550gal, propane tanks etc) these are located either in their basements with a fill pipe channeled through the wall, above ground outside near the furnace location, or underground with respective fill and vent pipes sticking out. They have copper lines that feed fuel to the furnace and return copper lines that drip excess fuel back into the tanks.
What oil companies dont want you to do (which you can do absolutely I know people at my job that have done this) is use this home heating oil in diesel engines for vehicles.
Where else are these tanks located?
Farms have auxiliary tanks on their properties filled with both diesel and gasoline. These tanks are generally 550gallons. Larger farms have 1000gallon tanks.
Accessing: for ingame purposes syphoning gas from tanks works only if you can generate a gravity feed. Tanks above ground are used in this manner to feed furnaces in the home, they are not powered by electric pumps. Underground tanks would require digging to the top of it and cutting the tank open to access the fuel inside. These are also maintained by gravity feed.
Usage: obviously for vehicles but also for heating. Technically if you can fashion a home furnace to bypass the electrically powered burning and oil feed system you could have a basement furnace running off of the diesel heating oil tank. The tanks themselves are heavy and would be poor water collection containers unless throughly cleaned out. Now, the gauge is just a floating buoy that could be used to create a fishing bob.
Occurance: every home has a heating source. Rural homes always have diesel furnaces or propane. Suburbs will vary between diesel and propane and electric heat. Cities almost never have diesel furnaces but will be powered by city distributed propane or just electric air heater.
Game breaking? Is the ubiquity of diesel game breaking? If I were in an apocalypse I would absolutely go hunting for peoples oil tanks for fuel sources. Every house has one and most rural and suburban have diesel and propane fuel. For ingame carrying diesel would be slow and effortful if syphoned into a 5 gal bucket. Diesel is roughly 7lbs per gal *5 =35lbs. Accessing diesel via the syphon from the tank method would work great but even better for letting gravity already do the work for you by cutting the copper wires in the basement and draining the fuel out into a bucket. Some tanks even have pre-installed shutoff valves for servicing the furnace.
Tldr: just think the houses in the game need heating sources in service to realism.
Governments*. Here, the heating oil does not have fuel taxes added, and they add colouring agents to it so that they can detect if you are using it for driving (Though Iāve never heard of anyone actually testing what people have in their fuel tanks).
By āelectric air heaterā you mean resistive heaters? Where I am from(not New England), heat pumps are very common, and I personally heat my place using a highly efficient air conditioner.
Sounds really interesting! While I personally donāt have any experience in this (not in the US), it seems reasonable. Do you have any idea how common these would be in New England?
Additionally, how often are they refilled? The CDDA lore includes a period of 1+ year of social unrest, and this might negatively affect fuel availability and distribution, leading to partially or fully depleted tank by the time our survivor arrives.
HVAC forced air is what I should have said. The metal boxes are places outside and force air into the homes electric furnace and push the heat through the house. Edit: sorry youāre correct resistive heaters.
I grew up in two different states in NE and both houses had diesel heating fuel tanks that ran into their furnaces. (They are loud when they kick on and burn). One house was rural and the other suburb.
Yeah governments. The worry is that if you got into a car accident in a vehicle with red dyed gas (the color of home heating oil) and the tank ruptures and the cops see the coloring
My parents refuel them twice yearly because it also heats their water which actually is what distributes the heat through the house.
Also the 1+ year thing would affect fuel availability. How many people actually think to steal that fuel is a better question.
While these tanks would be a source of diesel, which would be very handy, they would also, in principle, be a source of heating houses. That, however, would require the game to support either a āstand aloneā heater that can actually be used, or fudge them as stationary vehicles with a heating component that doesnāt use an engine (and I believe at least some engine/vehicle heaters used in cold climates actually burn fuel from the tank, rather than depleting the battery thatās already under strain from the cold).
If there is no way currently of implementing a full house heating system which would certainly require electricity to pump through the home the furnace usually found in basements in the game could theoretically be used as a source of heat and light if they are tinkered with. Setting up a battery system to the furnace could activate the fuel control system and and pull fuel from the tank and light with the systems built in spark plug. (Or however furnaces light diesel)
The current system doesnāt support complex behavior from anything that isnāt a āvehicleā, although thereās been some speculation about using the vehicle system to provide electricity within buildings. The problems are in the game mechanics available rather than the concept (which makes a lot of sense).
Well perhaps at this stage just having fuel tanks of various types near homes with different quantities of fuel. I think it would at least help with making sense of there being furnaces in basements without any sort of fuel type feeding them.
In southern China, coal stoves and resistance heaters are more popular, while in northern China, state supplied heating is the main method, that is, hot water is released into pipes or blades to heat the air.