Hurricane Irene and the Future of Fuel Delivery

       Even though Hurricane Irene was just a big, wet storm, we all lost power, most of us had flooded basements, and we all secretly worried about how bad the next one might be.  At our end of the telephone, Irene felt pretty familiar:  Lots of worried customers calling to get their tanks topped off ahead of the storm, or filled during the storm, or right after.

80% of those calls were unnecessary, but we had to take them seriously because we never really know until someone reads the gauge or until we make the delivery.  And that brings me to the future of fuel delivery!

Scheduling fuel deliveries hasn’t really changed much in the past 75 years.  We keep track of how cold it has been, and we plot that against a home’s historical pattern to predict when it will need fuel.  This “Degree Day” system works great for heating buildings, but it’s worthless at predicting fuel used for a generator.  It’s also useless for predicting fuel for pool heaters, commercial kitchens, and other irregular uses.

And that is why we made deliveries all day Sunday and Monday of Hurricane Irene… because we just didn’t know what was in those tanks.  Got it?  OK… now are you ready for the future?

In the future (which should be within the next nine months), we will fit a little tiny device onto the tank, which will measure how much fuel is in it, and send that information out over the internet to our office… How cool is that???

Not only will we make far fewer deliveries based on fear and anxiety, but we can virtually guarantee that those tanks will never run out.  The technology will also appeal to people with second homes, and even those of us with only one home but who don’t have a fanatical faith in the 75 year old Degree Day system!

[I should repeat here that the good old Degree Day system is remarkably accurate for predicting heat needs… just not so good at anything else.]

This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned the wonders of remote tank monitoring, but it’s special now because we finally converted our 20 year old computer system to a brand, spanking new software “platform” that can handle remote monitoring with ease.  It’s just a matter of time now.