Six customers who need a tank monitor: #6 propane restaurant

The Six Customers Who Need A Tank Monitor

1. Propane Pool Heater
2. Propane Greenhouse Heater
3. Propane Generator
4. Second Home Owners
5. Propane Refill Station
6. Propane Restaurants

This look at propane restaurant customers completes our series of difficult to track propane customers.  In case you missed it our first five posts we highlighted pool heaters, greenhouses, generators, and second-homes, and refill stations.  Our top six list is a result of analyzing the thousands of connected tanks we monitor across 46 states and Canada.

A propane restaurant customer is tough to forecast because of their multiple uses all pulling off of a single tank: space heat, cooking, hot-water, and often a generator.   Of course cooking itself comes in various forms with a bakery’s propane oven burning gas at a different rate than a burger shack’s propane cook stove.  Making it even more difficult to predict these propane restaurant customers is that these accounts often have seasonal demand either catering towards summer or winter activities and food preferences.

Looking at the tank level graph below we can see this supplier has chosen to put this restaurant on a weekly delivery schedule. Trying to avoid a run-out the marketer set the delivery cadence to cover peak usage in the middle of August. This schedule created some acceptable deliveries at about 40%, but if this marketer was using a tank monitor they’d have been able to drop 20% more or 200 gallons every delivery.

In addition to increasing efficiency with every drop this propane fueled restaurant has seasonal traffic. Not able to predict when the season will begin or end this marketer has to start earlier and end later than a tank monitor would recommend. This resulted in 4 unprofitable and avoidable deliveries.  After tallying up these inefficient fills and unprofitable deliveries the marketer is looking at an opportunity to avoid more than 6 drops or, at $50 cost per delivery, save $300 with a monitor!

Tank Level for Propane Restaurant

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Request a free trial tank monitor from Generac and see how you can improve delivery efficiency and reduce run-outs.