Aug 26, 2008 10:15 pm US/Eastern
Neighborhood Oil-Buying Groups Saving Big Bucks
WESTON (WBZ) ―
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Worker hauls his hose back to the truck after delivering home heating oil in Andover (2004 file photo).
AP
It may still be summer, but home heating oil trucks are fanning out across New England filling tanks for what is to come.
This winter, some home owners will be paying less for heating oil than their neighbors, even if they use the same company. That's because they learned there is strength in numbers. The larger the order, the less you pay per gallon.
A few years ago,
Jan Fine helped organize families on his street in Weston into one oil buying group.
"Last year we averaged about fifty cents per gallon savings over retail cost," Fine told WBZ.
"So if you use a thousand gallons that saves you 500 bucks. Two thousand gallons - it saves you a thousand bucks. It's quite a bit of money."
While working on this story, it became clear that local home heating oil dealers do not want to talk about this savings. WBZ called five of them. None wanted to talk about neighborhood groups getting big discounts.
Though they may not want to talk, those local dealers do want the business.
This winter the Weston group will buy more than 100,000 gallons of heating oil while saving more than a dollar on the current price for a gallon. Oil companies submitted bids, and the group members will vote this week on which company will win this year's contract.
Jan Fine is proud of what his group has accomplished.
"We are not an organization. We are simply a group of people who got together on the same database."
In Weston, the local oil buying club became so successful they had to stop taking new members. It grew from just a dozen or so families a few years ago to more than 78 families this year.
Eileen Bogle is the director of the town's council on aging. Once she told all of her members about the oil buying group, the phone never stopped ringing.
"I also got calls from neighboring towns asking for more information. They were saying, 'Why is Weston involved and our town is not?'"
"It would be nice if some of the advocate groups for the state would go out and train people how to do this," Fine said. "It is not a difficult thing to do."
If you want to explore organizing a neighborhood oil-buying group of your own, Fine shared the steps he took.
First, he contacted neighbors, had them pledge their interest, and collected their email addresses in an online database. Once he knew the interest level, and about how many gallons of home heating oil the group could pledge to consume, he started contacting oil companies.
Fine asked each oil company to quote a price based on the bulk amount of oil his neighbors would buy. He found the prices quickly started dropping.
After the group's initial success, Fine started reaching beyond his immediate neighbors and into his community. He reached out to civic groups and clubs within his town, recruited new members, and collected more email addresses and pledges. The more members, the more oil, and the lower the price has dropped. Oil companies now compete for their business.
Fine says all the work was done over email and online, and it has been remarkably simple to manage.
If you would like to contact Jan Fine about starting your own neighborhood group, he
has started a web site just for that purpose.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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