In today’s highly competitive heating oil market, you must ensure your customers are satisfied with your service. Heating degree day measurements are an effective way to forecast upcoming heating oil deliveries, and ensure your customers are never left cold with an empty tank.  

Heating degree days measure how far cold weather travels in a day, which has a direct effect on how soon your company will need to make that next heating oil delivery. Calculating and tracking daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal and annual degree days allows for seasonal or annual comparisons that you can use to forecast demand for your fuel delivery business. While some online services provide more sophisticated degree day calculations by factoring in wind chill, humidity and weighting certain times of the day, the basis for computing degree days hasn’t changed. 

Simply put, degree days are a measure of how cold or warm a location is. A degree day compares the average outdoor temperatures recorded for a location to a standard temperature, usually 65 degrees Fahrenheit in the United States. The more extreme the outside temperature, the higher the number of degree days, correlating to higher levels of energy use. In the United States, 65 degrees is used as a base temperature as it relates well to most climate conditions across the country.  

Calculating degree days for a given day is quite simple. If the high for the day was 70 degrees and the low was 40, the average daily temperature is 55 degrees [Calculation: (70+40)/2=55]. Thus, the heating degree days were 10 [Calculation: 65-55=10].  

Degree days, in combination with a burn rate, can be used to determine how many gallons of heating oil are consumed daily. A burn rate signifies how many degree days must elapse for a structure to burn one gallon of heating oil. This is easily determined by tracking degree days systemically and knowing the current reading each time a delivery is made. In the above example, if the burn rate was 5, then two gallons of fuel were consumed for heat that day [Calculation: 10 degree days/Burn rate of 5=2 gallons consumed] 

Diligently tracking degree days and tank measurements can allow your heating oil delivery business to measure burn rates over time and accurately forecast when to make your next delivery. By using a tank management software to track this information, delivery orders can be automatically generated and dispatched, ensuring that your customers are satisfied and their heating oil tanks are full.