Cheaper Oil for Fuel?

manda1205

I wanted to try and hang out till new year, but with 3 pips left on watchman and having to have the heating on nearly constant as kids off school now, I don't think I can risk it. Calling my usual 6 local suppliers, managed to get down from 65.95ppl to 63.69ppl. So should be £535 for my 800l, although generally it'll end up less because Im sh*te and judging whats left in the tank, lol. Had to laugh though, first bloke I rang said "does that sound good to you?", I said "considering last time I got oil was in March, no it sounds horrific!" Shocking isn't it though. Also annoys me that you can't get anything off for paying cash. I like saying to people what's the cash price, nearly every time you can get a further 10% off(even in chain shops if spending a lot), but no with oil they don't care.

Lotus-eater

I would imagine that the last thing oil companies would want, is the tanker drivers to be carrying around large amounts of cash, as well as large amounts of horrendously expensive oil.

Val75

Hi, does anybody have the problem of when you ring up your local suppliers, or reasonably not too far away suppliers they always ask, are you a customer, if so what is your post code, we have usually bought at some point from them all, always ring around, however, we do wonder if you regularly buy from one supplier if you get a better price, or not?
Why should it matter whether you are a customer or not. We ring around and go for the cheapest, we try to get them down, but it never works. We wonder if they charge you more if you do not buy much from them.
However, this time, a few weeks ago now, we could not get the full thousand in, and were panicking in case it went up a lot, they honoured the price 800 or more.
As it happened, we only got just over 600 litres in, heck, price goes up , however, talked nicely to the driver (oap's) and said no use buying it in if price more, so he phoned the depot, (private company) and they said we could have it at the price quoted.
We were relieved!!
We ended up with 625 litres at 58.75p plus vat on 30 Nov, however, they have changed one thing, we used to pay by credit card, but now they charge for this, so gave them a cheque.
We do save up all the year round, but since the big price rise, put extra away as well every week out of our pension.
Then the electricity board want to up our electric from forty five pounds a month to fifty nine pounds, no way, we said fifty and then see how we go. The price rises are very high.
This is on a promise that if we go above we will settle by credit card in March!!! Up to now we have always been in credit. We were £9 over, that is not fourteen pounds a month!! Direct debit.
We use an electricity monitor which is a great help in knowing whether or not we are keeping to the daily price.
OK until the family arrive!!

We are fighting with keeping our heating and electric down to the mininimum, just have two thousand litres of oil a year but at 80 and 76, we are in more, feel the cold more and are very glad of the money from the government towards it. Now they are thinking of doing means testing, that is us out, we are borderline on income,
hubby's company pension, which we paid into for more than 30 years, but is low because of redundancy at 53, just takes us over the limit, but have paid all our taxes and insurance all our lives!! HMMM.!!!

Happy Christmas to all. Val:T

G_M

In the lead up to Christmas, and since, Boilerjuice has been quote gradually reducing prices - 55.75 today.

Doubtless the warm weather so far has had some impact, but is the trend likely to continue? Thoughts?

Lotus-eater

I suspect in a cold spell they will bounce up, looking on BJ's price chart, they seem to have gone up a little lately.
But really they haven't moved much since stabilising after last years massive spike.

fyr

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/292882/One-million-are-hit-by-huge-rise-in-price-of-heating-oil

werdnareklaw

fyr wrote: »

http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/292882/One-million-are-hit-by-huge-rise-in-price-of-heating-oil

Interesting read but would have thought there are more than 1.1 million oil heated homes?

LittleVermin

werdnareklaw wrote: »

Interesting read but would have thought there are more than 1.1 million oil heated homes?

I think you're right!

From the recent Office for Fair Trading Off-grid energy report (here):

About 1.6 million households use heating oil in the UK. 2.5 million tonnes of domestic heating oil were sold in 2010.
Around 150,000 households use bulk LPG and 25,000-50,000 use cylinder LPG for central heating purposes in the UK.
Around 2.4 million households use electricity as their main form of domestic heating.
..

Mister_G

Ah! But we all know how good the press are at checking the facts!

LittleVermin

Mister_G wrote: »

Ah! But we all know how good the press are at checking the facts!

The Express journalist may well have been using Consumer Focus (here) as a source - which was, apparently, quoting OFT!

There are around 3.9 million households in Britain without gas heating (2.3 million are heated by electricity, 1.1million by heating oil, 310,000 by solid fuel and 170,000 by LPG)

(my bold again)

If you google you'll find many different figures: "1.5 million households" (Citizens Advice, quoting OFT again!) / "more than a million" (Telegraph) / "2 million" (directoil) / "over 3.5 million" (comparefueloil), etc, etc. The most accurate figure will never be better than a guesstimate. It could be also that the OFT is inconsistent, but I've no wish to wade through its report, annexes, and press releases!

Irrespective of this, Which? has a fair point that last winter's price rise of around 70% in 3 months coincided with only a 17% rise in Brent crude (from which heating oil is derived). OFT, in its report, estimates that 90% of the fluctuation in heating oil price is due to changes in the price of crude....
..