Heating oil price doesn't add up?

mnbvcxz

I'm suddenly seeing heating oil quotes of 130p to 180p.

If petrol is 155p including roughly 57p of duty plus 20% vat then;

heating oil with 10p duty and 5% vat should be about 87p a litre.

Am I working this out wrong? Or is something going on. Presumably either panic buying or is there a genuine shortage? Or are sellers just taking advantage?

The news does say oil prices are dropping again but its all a bit odd. 

400ixl

Quotes at that price are artificial and to a degree to stop people panic buying. Around here, the local companies are in the 95-100p range with the aggregators like Boilerjuice in the price range you are talking about. The aggregators will at times like this be more expensive.

Speaking to a delivery driver recently, there is a huge bottleneck in delivery capacity which is meaning that deliveries are stretching out over a month now for many. Add this to the huge rise in the price of oil the suppliers are also hedging bets as to how long this will last and what price they will be buying at these inflated rates.

Hopefully the announcement that some of the OPEC countries will increase supply to fill the gap will gain pace and bring down the price and increase confidence in supply.

dunstonh

We noticed that the likes of Boilerjuice are coming out more expensive than the local suppliers.     My guess is that the suppliers are pricing lower for local regular customers and pricing higher of the likes of boilerjuice to reduce demand.

Our local supplier, who is normally around 10p more than boilerjuice was quoting 110p at the same time boilerjuice was quoting 199p.

Supply is not the problem.   Panic buying is.        Price is obviously higher but the big jumps are down to putting people off panic buying.

markin

Putting up prices will just make more panic, they could just say we are only supplying current customers this month.

We see it all the time on the forum with Boiler and electric quotes, sending people into a panic for no good reason when they could just say 'we are too busy'

Jaybee_16

Over the past week or so all I get from Boiler Juice is a message telling me that due to demand they are unable to offer any quotes for my area. Googling a couple of local suppliers I get responses that due to long delivery times they are not offering a quote price. Advice is to place an order and when they are ready to deliver they will contact with a price per litre.