Spring Oil Delivery?
March 25th, 2009 | 
Author: I’m curious. Did anyone else get an unexpected delivery of heating oil at the end of March? Oddly enough I did even though there was over 100 gallons in the tank. The bill came to $252. This has never happened before. This last year the oil delivery company insisted upon a payment or cash to guarantee the lowest price and there was a big per-gallon price reduction when the price of oil plummeted. Why would an oil company deliver oil when our use of the heater has been reduced to a few mornings in the entire month?
Very puzzling. I hadn’t planned on this in my monthly budget so they will be getting an ear full from me today on the telephone.
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Posted in Rants | 
Tags: caveat emptor, customer no service, Customer Service, heating oil, suspicion
I had a little chat with the oil company by telephone. They said it was colder this year. I disagreed. We pretty much stopped using out heater like we had since March 1. We had just received a delivery in late February. They claim it was based on our rate of use (but they acknowledged they don't measure it before they fill the tank.) They also acknowledged this is the first late delivery we had had since we were customers.
In order to prevent your oil company from delivering automatically (they are going to make deliveries benefit them not you) you are going to have to call and place your auto delivery on a FALL HOLD.
In the meantime I'm going to look for a competing company. The only way for consumers to deal with incompetence is to try the competition. When enough people have had enough policies change.
My sense was that the company has excess fuel inventory because people have not wanted to pay over $2.25 a gallon for staying warm this Winter. The oil companies are feeling the economic pinch like everyone else so they are making late deliveries to improve their cash position. A tank fill up I would normally not receive until October was delivered in March and not because I needed it.
I would still like to know if people in Calvert County, Maryland got an unexpected oil delivery at the end of the season. If enough of us have then we know there is hanky panky going on with the heating oil deliveries.