When’s the Best Month to Buy Heating oil?
When do you usually stock up on heating oil? Autumn? Before Christmas? Or at some other time of year? We’re sure our other customers would be interested to compare notes!
Here in the office we were chatting about this the other day. Outside the weather was blistering hot so it wasn’t the most obvious time to think about central heating oil!
But our director Paul swears the summer months are the best months to stock up on oil. This is because oil prices tend to fall during the warm weather when… no surprises here… demand for heating oil drops.
The trouble is, when you’ve quite a few litres left in your tank and you’re only using heating oil to heat your hot water, you can be tempted to put it off until the weather gets colder.
But, just like buying petrol before the Budget duty hikes, the best thing to do is to stock up on oil while prices are still relatively low.
If you haven’t checked it out already, take a look at our Heating Oil Price graph. Every day we check the lowest 1,000 litre price of Kerosene 28 from all our heating oil suppliers. Then we log the minimum, maximum and average prices and put them on a graph on our website so you can track the change in oil prices and see if heating oil is going up or down.
Of course oil prices rise and fall like a roller coaster, but the general trend since the start of May 2010 is for heating oil prices to go down.
Obviously we can’t predict what heating oil will do over the summer… other things can affect oil prices; not just the weather… but historically oil prices usually go down.
Which is why our director, Paul, will be filling up his tank pretty soon.
When do you tend to top up with heating oil?
have nearly run out out of oil,i was shocked when i was quoted 75p plus per liter, i simply cant afford it, so we are sitting here in the cold, priced out by the big cats, we cant afford to replace the heating system, or run it, what do you do?
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jon December 24th, 2010 12:42 pmI know that the laws of supply and demand and the weather conditions have a strong effect on prices but it seems to me that those of us who have to rely on oil for heating and hot water get hit very hard by the oil companies these days. I had oil back in the eighties and don’t recall such huge fluctuations as there are now.
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David Reply:
January 2nd, 2011 at 12:05 am
It seems fairly clear to all of us who heat with oil that the someone using the cold weather create a supposed “shortage of heating oil” just to push the price up. The cold spell we have just been through has resulted in the price here in the Southwest rising from 40.5p per litre in October to 84.5p a litre at the peak in December.
Now I can’t tell you what the top price for oil in my area was last winter, but looking at the Boilerjuice avg price graph expanded out to 2 years produces some interesting facts. In Aug.2009 oil was approx 37p per litre, it rose by 13p to 50p per litre , a rise of just over 13% in Jan. 2010 (remember this was the coldest winter for 30 years). Now move forward a year Aug 2010 approx 40.5p a litre, by December it had risen to approx 74.5p a litre a rise of 84%!
Now the diesel in my car has gone up about 10p a litre including all the duty and vat since October and a barrel of crude oil has risen from around $84 to $92 over the same period. So the real question here is who is taking us to the cleaners? Is it the distributers, or the oil companies or has everybody in the industry got their feet in the trough and this just another facet of RIP OF BRITAIN.
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David Reply:
January 2nd, 2011 at 12:20 am
Ref my earlier post about price increases the 2009 percentage increase should read 35% not 13%
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Thankfully I tanked up at the end of August when the price was about 45p. I think the price of oil has been much more stable this year with the average hovering around that price for much of the year. All the comments are right about the weather – I tracked it last year and during this last cold spell – from the very first day of the cold spell the price rises daily and then drops with the temperature. I’m just hoping we can last till March without having to fill up at 75p a litre !!
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Julia December 14th, 2010 1:39 pmIt went down in the Oxfordshire rural area OK but now when we have several days of bad weather it triples.
Why do the English consistently try & exploit each other?
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Ian December 10th, 2010 10:26 amI was hoping to stock up on oil over the summer, but this year the price doesn’t seem to have dropped to its usual summer low of thirty something pence. Does anyone have any views on this? will it drop any more or have I missed the boat?
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EoA Reply:
December 6th, 2010 at 9:59 pm
Julia, I think you missed the boat as it has been around 75p recently, bizarre really as the oil by barrel has only gone up a few dollars, Maybe it’s the oil suppliers cashing in on the extreme cold weather we are experiencing at the moment.
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mark Reply:
December 17th, 2010 at 9:47 pm
We need to protest about this! Crude up 17% but heating oil up 71%, if it was petrol going up yhis much there would be riots!!
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