How we collect prices

Where prices come from

• Our Tuesday calls. Every Tuesday we call about 15 dealers in Windsor and Orange counties, Vermont, and Grafton and Sullivan counties, New Hampshire. We ask for the posted heating oil price and the minimum delivery, and the propane price for a home using about 800 gallons a year.
• Dealers who tell us. Dealers can email or call us whenever their price changes. We enter it ourselves and check it the same way as any other price. A dealer who reports a price or confirms their listing shows "Verified dealer."
• State surveys. Vermont's Department of Public Service and New Hampshire's Department of Energy publish weekly statewide averages from October through March. We show them next to local prices for comparison. Outside those months we use the U.S. Energy Information Administration's figures and say so.

Once club membership opens, the member price will appear as its own row.

What we ask dealers

We ask every dealer for the same thing, so their prices can be compared fairly:

• Where: If a dealer asks where the delivery is going, we say Lebanon, New Hampshire. If they don't deliver to Lebanon, we ask about the town closest to Lebanon that they do serve.
• Heating oil: No. 2 heating oil, delivered to an indoor tank.
• Propane: A 500-gallon tank the customer owns, for a home using about 800 gallons a year.

Propane prices depend a lot on the tank. If you rent your tank from the dealer, you'll likely pay more per gallon than the prices shown here. The best prices are almost always for customers who own their tank.

How quickly dealers give a price

On our weekly calls, we time each call from when we dial to when we have a price. A dealer's page shows how long it took on our most recent call: under a minute, 1 to 3 minutes, 3 to 10 minutes, or more than 10 minutes. It's one call, made by us on a weekday, so your experience may be different. We don't show a time when our last call went unanswered, when the dealer didn't give us a price, or when we last called more than 30 days ago. It never changes how prices are sorted.

How prices are labeled

• Date and source on every price: "Called" for our Tuesday calls, "Reported by dealer" for prices a dealer sent us.
• Terms: COD (pay on delivery), automatic delivery or will-call. When a dealer gives a discount for paying within a set number of days, we list that price and show the regular price too.
• Minimum delivery, in gallons, when the dealer has one.
• Propane prices vary more from customer to customer than oil, depending on how much you use and who owns the tank. Ours are for a customer-owned 500-gallon tank and about 800 gallons a year (see "What we ask dealers"). Your price may differ.

How prices are sorted

Always lowest to highest. Friendly Fuel Club LLC runs this price list and the buyers club. When the club's own price is listed, it's sorted the same way as every other row: it comes first only when it's lowest.

Old prices

After 10 days a price is greyed out. After 30 days it comes off the list.

How we check prices

A price more than 20% above or below the middle of other dealers' current prices for the same fuel gets a second look before we rely on it. Usually that means a call back to the dealer.

Fair to every dealer

• Every dealer is listed the same way, and no one pays to be listed.
• We never share a dealer's price with another dealer before it's published.
• We never suggest a price to a dealer.

How towns heat

The "How [town] heats" figures on each town page come from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey 5-year estimates, which we refresh each year when a new set comes out. They're survey estimates, and for small towns the margins of error are wide.

Report a mistake

Email admin@friendlyfuelclub.com or call or text (802) 526-6220. We'll fix it as soon as we can and note the change below.

Corrections

No corrections yet. When we fix a published price, it will be listed here, newest first.