Petroleum, as it is a complex mixture of hydrocarbons, may contain paraffinic compounds which, when subjected to low temperatures, can deposit and gel. The study of the behavior of petroleum in this condition is very important for the industry because, once the waxy crude oil gels, the restart process may demand extra energy addition to the system, whose dimensioning is expensive for high operation required pressures. Restart pressure values of the gelled oil found from laboratory tests often show a significant difference from the real values found in the field. In order to compare the yield stress and the effective stress, the present work simulated the flow restarting process through an experimental rig to reproduce the static cooling applied to a pipeline with waxy crude oil. In addition, two methods are presented for calculating the thermal shrinkage formed during the cooling and gelation of the waxy crude oils, in order to verify if there is a relationship between the shrinkage and the difference between the yield stress and the effective stress to start flowing. The first method proposed is the Pipette method, which consists of the use of a pipette, coupled to a container with temperature control, to measure the volume of liquid. The second method proposed is the PVT cell method, which consists of the use of a closed system of known volume in which the measurement of the liquid volume variation is estimated by the variation of the gas volume at low pressure with the adoption of the Ideal gas hypothesis. The fluids selected for the studies to represent paraffinic oil were laboratory-synthesized fluids with different concentrations of paraffin, mineral oil and kerosene, and they were characterized rheologically by stress ramp and creep tests for the determination of the yields stress. The results showed that thermal shrinkage is a difficult quantity to measure, which gives it a high degree of uncertainty, but it is possible to estimate the magnitude order of the thermal shrinkage for the fluids studied.