Clear a Path to Your Oil Fill Pipe
The snow has arrived and your heaters are continuously running, keeping your home comfortable and warm. Since you heat your home with heating oil, you are well aware of the fact that a skilled technician has to come and deliver your oil to make sure that your home stays this comfortable even when it is frigid cold outside. However, when scheduling a heating oil delivery, there are some things that you can do to make sure that you help your technician and in some cases, even yourself.
If you don’t shovel a path to your fill pipe, some heating oil companies will not fill your tank. They will see that there is no available path to your pipes, especially under extremely unfavorable conditions, and they will keep driving. This is the busiest time of year for these companies and many scheduled appointment do not allow the time necessary to clear a path. Most homeowners don’t even think about what a heating oil company has to do in order to make sure that they fill your tank safely. In the following article by WTNH News 8, they discuss how some heating oil companies may not deliver if you don’t clear a path for them:
Oil delivery drivers appreciate a clear path
Bill Mitchell’s job is tough enough in this cold weather and but when he comes across a yard like the one he dealt with in Colchester it adds to the frigid challenge.
No pathway was cleared for him to the intake pipe and he had to trudge through two feet of snow all the way across the front yard.
“It was about a hundred foot pull,” says Mitchell who says that delivery was very difficult.
The homeowner who had been away on business last week didn’t get to clear a path which Mitchell and other drivers with Mohegan Oil out of Mystic would appreciate.
“It would be nice,” says Mitchell. “It would be nice.”
He almost left without making the delivery because he couldn’t make it through the front yard before the homeowner helped.
This article clearly states the importance of shoveling a path prior to your heating oil delivery. Fuel delivery companies in Westwood, NJ claim that this ensures the safety of your delivery and their drivers. As this article mentions, some heating oil companies will not deliver your oil if you haven’t made the effort to prepare for it. They want to keep their drivers as safe as possible. It is dangerous to have their techs struggle through two feet of snow with a 150 ft. pull. This means that you will have to reschedule a delivery if the delivery driver sees that you have not prepared your home for the scheduled delivery. If your heating oil tank is low, this could mean that you run out of heating oil which leads to other issues that you do not want to experience.
