Got Propane?

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The prices in the Northeast skyrocketed from the train incident in Lec Megantic they are not allowing the railway to transport LPG.

I pay $ 2.67 a gallon and everything in my 2600 sq/ft home is gas we use right around 900 gallons per year. I had thought about buying my own tank and filling when prices are low then I would have to look at a 1000 gallon tank in my yard or bury it. How much would I really be saving after spending a grand on the tank?
 
[Hearth.com] Got Propane?
Leonard said:
The prices in the Northeast skyrocketed from the train incident in Lec Megantic they are not allowing the railway to transport LPG.

I pay $ 2.67 a gallon and everything in my 2600 sq/ft home is gas we use right around 900 gallons per year. I had thought about buying my own tank and filling when prices are low then I would have to look at a 1000 gallon tank in my yard or bury it. How much would I really be saving after spending a grand on the tank?
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Well, if you pay any lease fee on it you'd save that and usually they charge just an extra nickel per gallon to fill their tanks. I had to buy mine when I started to burn wood since I wasn't using enough gas to keep the lease fee at $1 a year. I have a 500 gallon tank but I do wish I had a bigger tank (1000 gallons). I find that if the tank is repainted every so often it looks ok in the yard. I've seen so many that are never painted and they are real eye soars!! I sprayed mine in gloss white with a gloss blue cap.
 
Mother Nature has found a convenient way to keep our propane tank out of sight! :D

(broken image removed)
 
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Very good to hear of lowered prices, wasas an aweful squirt for some folks.

13,410 pounds burned here and still counting.
 
I don't think in Maine I have ever seen the price below $ 2.00 a gallon. I switched suppliers last year as Downeast was going to raise the price to a dollar more than I currently pay! I told em too pound sand.
 
Leonard said:
I don't think in Maine I have ever seen the price below $ 2.00 a gallon. I switched suppliers last year as Downeast was going to raise the price to a dollar more than I currently pay! I told em too pound sand.
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Ugh, that sucks, all last winter I paid $1.32. So that's why this year with prices close to $5 was such a shock.
 
Yep, last winter LPG was cheap here in the Midwest. $2 or a little more wouldn't be too bad if you burned scrounged wood in a stove like I do. It's nice to have the choice of wood or gas up here where it gets fairly cold. I let the furnace kick in at night at 60 F after the stove cools down and fire up the wood again when I get up early... Or not!
 
aimee750 said:
Ugh, that sucks, all last winter I paid $1.32. So that's why this year with prices close to $5 was such a shock.
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Yeah, that's like a 220 volt shock.
 
WiscWoody said:
So, are you saying that it was a conspiracy of some sort?
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Probably not a conspiracy. Just run of the mill price gouging.

BoiledOver, how did you generate that graph. I'd like to pull up the same for NH.
 
Wholesale cost for propane did indeed hit the high the range of $2.50 to $3.00 per gallon. The factor that really drove spot pricing was transportation costs. The big regional guys in our area where paying equivalent of $.75 all the way to $2.00 per gallon to just get it here from much farther distances than usual. I saw tankers on the expressway with plates from as far away as Texas and Utah and that costs big bucks compared to getting it delivered by rail to a central distribution point.

That is an interesting chart Boiled Over. Interesting in that you can clearly see the trend since the early 2000's. Ignore the high and low marks and just trace a line through the middle. It shows propane costs have doubled over the last decade. If the same happens over the next 10 years we will be looking at an average consistently over $3.00 / gallon.
Anyone here think it will go down?
 
AK13 said:
Probably not a conspiracy. Just run of the mill price gouging.

BoiledOver, how did you generate that graph. I'd like to pull up the same for NH.
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Those are federal stats, I don't think they generate them for each state. It's more likely that Michigan is just a proxy for the LP prices for the nation.
 
heaterman said:
That is an interesting chart Boiled Over. Interesting in that you can clearly see the trend since the early 2000's. Ignore the high and low marks and just trace a line through the middle. It shows propane costs have doubled over the last decade. If the same happens over the next 10 years we will be looking at an average consistently over $3.00 / gallon.
Anyone here think it will go down?
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Seasonality starts to show more strongly in the 2000s, because that's when they started recording weekly data, January 2000. Before that, it was bi-weekly.

A doubling in price in 10 years is about 7% annualized, which is almost what it did in the 94 to 2004 period as well, when it went from about $0.87 to $1.49, then ten years later to $3.15.
 
AK13 said:
Probably not a conspiracy. Just run of the mill price gouging.

BoiledOver, how did you generate that graph. I'd like to pull up the same for NH.
Click to expand...
I know they can mess with supply to inflate the price. Some refiners in CA were caught doing so not long ago. One refinery even said they were shutting down for maintenance when supplies were already tight. Thing is, they were filling their tanks yet and got caught by the states pollution monitoring. They could tell that they were still refining oil from the air samples being taken daily! Lol
 
I shopped my propane rate last Friday. I use about 750 gallons a year. And I was paying $4.35/gal. The new company will charge me $3.35/gallon. This is for Southwestern, NH.

They said that the rate would be 0.10 cheaper if I had my own tanks. But the tank cost was $700 so that would have a 10 year payback and I decided not to bother (for now anyway).
 
You can shop around if you own the tank. If you lease your tank only they can fill it. I'm surprised the price is still that high there, it's around $2 a gallon up here now. It sounds like everything costs more in the eastern states!
 
Propane price graph for Indiana:

(broken link removed to http://indianapublicmedia.org/news/files/2014/03/IND_Propane-Price-Gouging.jpg)

A woman in Indiana was charged $7.14 per gallon after being quoted $2.89 by Ferrellgas:

(broken link removed to http://indianapublicmedia.org/news/hundreds-propane-customers-file-price-gouging-complaints-64575/)
 
I just got my newsletter from my LP supplier and they're saying the propane crisis isn't over yet, saying that much of next years LP stocks have been bought up already.
 
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