Estimating Your Daily Heating Oil Use

Written on: January 29, 2024

We can help you moderate your heating costs and avoid run-outs.

With winter upon us in New Haven County and throughout western Connecticut, boilers and furnaces are running regularly in the homes we service. That means our customers are using more heating oil.

At Seymour Oil & Propane, we spend a good amount of time tracking the fuel usage of our Automatic Delivery customers to ensure they never run out of heating oil. This gives us some insight into how much fuel households need each day.

What Impacts Heating Oil Use

As a homeowner with an oil-fired heating system, you likely understand that heating oil use isn’t uniform. Many factors can affect how quickly you burn through fuel. Here are a few examples of these variables:

• Your home’s square footage and layout
• The age of your home
• The age and fuel efficiency rating of your furnace or boiler
• How often you service your heating equipment
• How many people live in your home (and how old they are)
• Your home’s insulation and other weatherproofing
• How warm do you like your rooms

Here are some general numbers. If average outdoor temperatures are about 50 degrees, you might only use 2 gallons of heating oil that day. But on a sub-freezing day, when the average temperature is about 20 degrees, your heating oil consumption can jump to 7 gallons daily.

Tips for Reducing Daily Heating Oil Usage

There are some simple ways to lower how much heating oil your home needs in the winter.

• Program your thermostat. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, turning your thermostat back 7 to 10 degrees from its standard setting for 8 hours daily can lower annual heating and cooling costs by 10 percent. It’s easy to do this with a programmable thermostat. You can arrange these fuel-saving adjustments for when you’re asleep or away from home.
• Let in the sunshine. There’s a free heating source you can take advantage of every day. Open the blinds and shades when it’s sunny, and you’ll warm up your home without using your boiler or furnace as much.
• Check for air leaks. You can lower your heating oil usage by preventing warm air from escaping your home (and cold air from getting in). Check your doors and windows for drafts. Then, apply weatherstripping and caulk as needed.
• Arrange a heating system tune-up. Bringing in a professional HVAC technician annually for heating maintenance will improve your system’s efficiency, boost its performance and reduce the chance of a breakdown.

Additionally, you can stabilize your heating oil budget and lower your winter bills with our SimplePay Plan. When you enroll in this budget, you no longer pay in full for your fuel on delivery. Instead, we’ll divide your annual heating oil costs into easy, even monthly payments.

Seymour’s Team Prevents Heating Oil Run-Outs

Are you tired of tracking your heating oil use? Seymour Oil & Propane offers a free way to ensure you never run out. It’s called Automatic Delivery. Our computerized system tracks how much heating oil you’re consuming based on your customer history and the current weather. Then, we arrange a heating oil delivery before you run low.

Contact the Seymour team today to begin receiving no-fee, no-stress automatic heating oil deliveries.