Martin Lewis: Heating oil & LPG price hikes – are firms playing fair? We need your feedback…

Van_Girl

Boiler juice quote. I paid around 56ppl on 8th Jan

byrdfan

I was quoted 130 ppl by a local firm on 7th March; quote expired at midnight same day. I decided to hold off, and try and heat odd rooms of the house as necessary with electric heaters. While this will obviously be more expensive, per kWh of heat, than using oil bought at just under 55 ppl (what I paid last July), I'd be interested if anyone has the exact calculation for heating yields from oil vs electricity. This would help give me an idea of whether it would still be cheaper to order oil than use electicity (if I can get any!) if the war and/or the high oil prices go on for more than a couple of weeks.

(My logic is that once you have paid a certain price for say 500l of oil all the heat generated from that oil is at the same (high) cost. So it might be worth paying more for electric heating for a few weeks until the oil price comes down significantly - though of course who knows when/if that will happen, so it is a gamble…..)

At least the sun is shining today!

KittenChops

Luckily for us, I ordered 700l of kerosene at around 65p per litre on 17th Feb which came to £451.85. excl VAT & was delivered on 24th Feb

The same order today would be at 159.43p per litre = £1171.81 excl VAT (which I think is just under 250% increase)

(ETA typo)

lohr500

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81918722#Comment_81918722

1 litre of heating oil generates +/- 10.35kWh of heat, assuming a 100% efficient boiler.
Depending on the boiler age and type, real life efficiency will be less.

Our Grant Vortex Blue has a claimed efficiency of 93%.

If we use 90% efficiency, then that means 1 litre of heating oil will yield around 9.3kWh.

to work out the cost per kWh, take the heating oil cost per litre and divide by 9.3.

So when oil was say 60p per litre, the kWh cost was 6.45p per kWh.
At say £1.30 per litre, the cost is then 14.0p per kWh.

In reality, the actual boiler efficiency may be less than 90%. But compared to the SVT cost of electricity at say £0.26 per kWh, oil is still considerably cheaper than running electric radiators, even with the current inflated costs.

Acky1969

I was looking at topping up my heating oil this week and then saw the price, the start of Feb 26 it was going to cost £0.544p a litre, now going to cost £1.40 to £1.50 a litre. My question is that the UK has around 1.8 billion barrels in reserve and that the Oil company's have put the price up by almost £1.00 per litre when they have brought at the old price, this is profiteering and should be stopped. the heating oil company's need to come under Ofgem and be regulated.

I am British Army War Veteran of 25 years on low income and will not be able to afforded to top my heating oil up at this price, when the Gas prices went up at the start of the Ukraine War there was help from the Government to those that where on Gas and those of us on heating oil got very little

What is the Government going to do this time to help those of us on Heating oil????

HHarry

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81918113#Comment_81918113

There is some serious misunderstanding there as well.

They might both produce heat, but the way they do it and the system specs you need to acheive their best performance are so different you can just ignore it.
A heat pump isn’t (wasn’t) ‘considerably’ cheaper than an oil boiler. With a SCOP of 3 or 4 it might match or slightly exceed it.

Sure a poorly insulated home will be lose heat whatever. But an oil boiler can overcome that. Running a heat pump at low flow temps for max efficiency probably won’t provide enough heat. Running it at high flow temps will be ruinously expensive.

Croesonnen

I recently ordered 1000litres of heating oil from Boiler Juice who sourced my order onto Halso Ltd I paid for the order and the order was accepted by Boiler Juice

The supplier Halso then cancelled the purchase order via Boiler Juice quoting uncertainty in the global oil market

This is the first time this has happened to me

What are my legal rights here am I protected by Uk Consumer Rights legislation? Is the supplier obligated to supply my order regardless of whole price fluctuations once the purchase order has been accepted

It feels like my supplier is in breach of contract and is therefore breaking Uk law

Should I be seeking compensation for my loss via the small claims court? The amount of the claim could be the value of my order plus costs plus any price difference caused by oil market price changes

Who is in breach of contract is it Boiler Juice or Halso as my payment was to Boiler Juice?

Any advice on how to proceed would be greatly appreciated

davidego

I too have been caught by the price hike between ordering (and paying) and delivery. This was Bell Fuels Ltd.

Ordered March 1, confirmed March 3 and cancelled March 10 with offer of refund or half the quantity of oil. I chose refund. Their 'Force Majeure' clause in T&C really does let them get away with anything.

I don't understand why the heating oil price doubled when the price of crude did not. With costs of refining and distribution included, the heating oil price increase should be less than the crude increase surely?

RuralKentGirl

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81917410#Comment_81917410

Just an update on our particular situation - the Oil Club contacted us to say that now the IEA (International Energy Agency) are to release 400m barrels of oil from the EU reserves, a number of suppliers are removing or reducing their rationing (at least for the time being). Our supplier (CPS Fuels) have now advised that they will honour our order at the agreed price paid and deliver within the next 10-12 working days. If anybody else is following this forum, it might be worth checking with their own suppliers, if they haven't been contacted already.

lohr500

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/81921179#Comment_81921179

That's a good result.