Heating oil is a fuel much like diesel, burned in a furnace to heat homes and buildings. The business runs on the cold-weather calendar.
Heating oil is a close cousin of diesel, refined for burning in a furnace or boiler rather than an engine. A home or building keeps it in a tank, and a delivery company fills that tank through the heating season. Because it is used off the road, it carries no highway tax, and it is often dyed to show that.
Demand swings hard with the weather. A cold snap empties tanks across a whole region at once, and a mild winter can leave a year’s plan short. Delivery companies lean on degree days, a simple count of how cold each day was, to predict how fast tanks are draining and time their trips.
For a fuel marketer it is a seasonal business built on watching customers’ tanks. Many run it on keep-full delivery, where the company decides when to fill so the customer never runs out, and it pairs naturally with propane as the other winter heating fuel.
In useWhen the first hard freeze hit, the company’s heating oil routes filled up fast, and its keep-full customers got topped off before any of them ran low.
See also Keep-full, Propane (LP-gas), Kerosene