Six customers who need a tank monitor: #4 second home owners

The Six Customers Who Need A Tank Monitor

For the next in our series of difficult to track propane customers, we’re going to look at second home, cabin, and vacation home owners. If you haven’t been keeping up, check out the first, second, and third entries of this series. Our top six list is a result of analyzing the thousands of connected tanks we monitor across 46 states and Canada.

When propane is used solely to heat a primary residence degree days and k-factors can be a fairly accurate way to estimate usage. However, when a house is a second home most owners will turn the heat down drastically when they are not occupying the house. This causes long and random periods of low-usage, punctuated by heavy consumption – often on weekends and holidays. Your degree day calculations will become very inaccurate causing both small drops and run-out emergencies. Making matters worse, these second home owners often have additional difficult to forecast luxuries like generators, pools, and gas logs! Let’s look at a second home account in the graph below from our software portal.

This second home owner in New Hampshire purchased a consumer monitor from us but would like to share this information with their supplier. They rent their property on Airbnb as well as use it for weekend getaways. In a single week we see usage ranging from 1 or 2 gallons per day during the week and spiking to 50 gallons or 10% on a weekend. This varied use led them to run-out and order an emergency delivery in the middle of February. If the marketer would have had access to this tank monitor information they could have preempted the emergency delivery by offering to fill the tank before it ran out.

Propane Tank Level for Second Home Owner

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