It was a sunny Sunday morning in the third week of February, 2013. Inside my modest 2200 square foot property, it was 53° Fahrenheit on the first floor. I’d like to tell you that the root cause of this condition was simply the case of my 14 year old propane forced-air furnace finally giving up its ghost, but I am afraid that it was more of a self-inflicted wound type of deal – I basically ran out of propane. Since it didn’t get above 38° outside that weekend in my little neck of the woods, it was a pretty chilly time for Your Faithful Servant. The story behind this latest instance of “aging gracefully” highlights the timeless correctness of the KISS Principle with equal parts of “If It Isn’t Broke, Don’t Fix It” and “Don’t be Such a Dumbass” thrown in.
Up until the fall of 2012, I was on this “automated delivery” program whereby every few months in the winter months, the propane dealer will (unsolicited) show up and pump 150 gallons or so of propane into my 500 gallon tank. No fuss. No muss. A perfectly workable system – until I got a bug up my butt last spring and decided I could do much better. At that time, I was piddling around out in the yard and decided to check the tank level. I was perturbed by the fact that it was sitting at around 300 gallons.
As I sat staring at that tank last March, I was noodling on the fact that the 300 or so gallons sitting in that tank represented a pretty nice chunk of cabbage (at $3.50 per gallon). All that LP certainly wasn’t doing me any good just sitting in the tank – it wasn’t going to be used between March and November or so. I envisioned so many other more productive uses for that money: paying down the mortgage a bit more, throwing it into the 401(k) or the market – hell even moving it into some dog-shit money market account might yield enough interest for a case of beer or two after a year or so.
So I decided to take action last year. Called up the propane dealer and told them to “get me off that automated delivery program”. Yeah – I’ll take care of it. I’ll just call them up when I need the stuff. Naturally, such a plan change requires some additional level of responsibility and maturity on the part of the home owner in terms of monitoring the tank level and initiating LP delivery before it gets too low. So, I added a monthly scheduled reminder on my work PC using some freeware program to tell me to check the tank level on the 16th of every month between October and March.
I remember checking the level at the start of Christmas vacation, and chuckling to myself that it looked like, based on the tank level, the burn rate, and our (to that point) mild winter, I might have timed it perfectly. It looked like I would get to middle of March without refilling – the tank would be around 5% full all summer – which is about as low as one should let that tank go. My great plan, hatched last March, would have come to complete and fulfilling fruition in its first year.
Fate intervened in the form of a hardware upgrade at work and an unexpected cold snap. Coming back from holiday, I had a brand new Lenova W530 waiting for me ( 64-bit, 16GB RAM, 2.60 GHz CPU, nice). I migrated my environment from the old machine to the new one and had pretty much weaned myself off the old machine by middle of January. I shut it down and returned it to surplus. Only one hitch – I forgot about recreating the monthly reminder to check the tank on the new laptop. It all comes together when a pretty severe cold snap hit the area after the New Year, resulting in a higher burn-rate. I failed to check the tank level from mid-December to mid-February and the rest was history. I did notice it before I completely ran out, but it was well below 5% and I remember the grave warnings I had read about running out of propane or letting it get below 5%, so I shut the entire system down for that weekend.
My propane dealer has their normal M-F business hours and a 24-hour “emergency” number. They don’t really define what an emergency is though. I interpreted it as some condition where something is about to go “boom” or where a family with young kids doesn’t have any heat. Well, I had heat upstairs, so I, literally, just chilled out that weekend and called the dealer up Monday morning. I explained my predicament. Friendly Telephone Lady told me I could schedule a delivery – that would be out another week or so - or have an emergency delivery (with additional fee of course) that day. There would also be a special “fuel reclamation/system check” fee or something like that due to the low level of the tank. (I found that an odd name for that fee – if there was actually fuel to be reclaimed, it seemed it wouldn’t be an emergency in the first place). Friendly Telephone Lady also took the time to tell me about the “automated delivery” program they have. Touché. I wonder if she looked at my account history and was busting my chops?
Needless to say, the extra fees more than covered whatever interest I could possibly earn on that G that I was so concerned about last spring.
