HEATING-OIL SCAMS

Hopefully, that's an anomaly – and fortunately, there are precautions and sensible steps you can take to help avoid such scams. Here's some background and four recommended ways to protect yourself.

The Basics

Once the driver has checked the tank in the building, he starts the truck engine and leaves it running throughout the delivery to power the pump. Then he inserts a ticket into an automatic meter at the back of the truck. The super should check that the meter is set to zero before the delivery begins. If the meter hasn’t been zeroed, you could be paying for gallons that you aren’t receiving. Finally, the driver walks the hose out to the fill-point for the building. At some buildings, the heating-oil tank has a whistle that indicates when the tank is full.

Ross Andersen, director of the New York State Bureau of Weights and Measures, describes the four basic methods that have been used to skim oil: meters can be recalibrated to register more oil than is being delivered; bypass piping can be built into the truck so that oil is diverted from the delivery hose back into the truck; delivery tickets can be forged; and air can be mixed in with the oil to inflate the meter readings.

Protect Yourself Method 1: Use a Dipstick or a Petrometer

The driver and your building superintendent should go to the basement of the building together, suggests Carla Romita, senior vice president and director of marketing at Castle Oil. Then, the driver should push a long metal dipstick marked off in inches through a small hole in the top of the tank. The super should note how many inches the tank holds; a chart allows him to convert the inches into gallons.

In practice, it can be a dirty job to get to the dipstick hole, or it may be almost impossible if there's too little headroom above the tank for the super to manipulate the long dipstick. In that case, he can consult a petrometer gauge, which uses a probe to estimate the weight of the oil and offers a rough idea of the volume. These gauges are notoriously imprecise, however, and could easily be as much as five percent off.

After delivery, the meter automatically prints out the number of gallons that have been pumped in. Before signing it, the super should return to the basement with the driver and “stick” the tank a second time to check that the gallons marked on the ticket match the gallons added to the tank.

Note: There are three types of heating oil. If you’re using No. 6 oil, it can’t be pumped until it’s heated. So you'll receive a delivery that seems greater than it is because the oil has expanded at the higher temperature, and the dealer makes a standard "temperature correction" to compensate. Unfortunately, most buildings have no way of themselves checking the temperature of the oil, so unscrupulous dealers could claim their oil is 115 degrees Fahrenheit when it may be only 90 degrees. The temperature correction will then be too small, and you'd be paying for oil that isn’t delivered.

Protect Yourself Method 2: Look for the New York City DCA Seal

“If you’re going to defraud people with oil, basically how you do it is you sell them air,” says John Browne, supervising inspector of the petroleum products squad at the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA) Division of Weights and Measures station in Brooklyn. “ Every truck has an air-eliminator device that is supposed to stop you from doing that.”

As the oil is pumped out of the truck, the driver pushes up a lever to close each oil compartment after it empties. It isn’t completely empty, though. It’s full of air. The DCA does an annual “product depletion” test on every oil-delivery truck to confirm that air isn't getting into the meter and being registered as oil. The meter-calibration chamber is then wired shut and lead tags seal the wires in place. If the truck passes all the tests, the inspector attaches a lead and wire clamp over the adjustment controls of the meter and places an official circular seal to the meter.

If the seal and clamp are not intact when the truck arrives at your building, you should not accept the delivery.

Protect Yourself Method 3: Go High-Tech

Greg Carlson, manager of the Fairview co-op in Queens, has been trying out ultrasonic sensors that monitor the volume of oil in the building’s tanks. When a delivery is made, the Verifier, from U.S. Energy Group, of Flushing, Queens, automatically records the time and duration; the amount delivered, in inches and in gallons; and the temperature of the oil in the fill-pipe entering the tank. A computer panel provides constant readouts that you can read directly in the boiler room or dial into remotely. The $3,200 device also provides an hourly track of oil usage, and a low-fuel alarm.

Protect Yourself Method 4: Don't Forget Low-Tech

The Environmental Protection Agency requires every building to keep a daily log of oil usage and inventory. If your super is diligently maintaining these records, they can provide a good idea of whether you are getting the oil you’re paying for. If the boiler is running out of oil frequently, and there’s no obvious reason such as additional demand, that’s a warning sign: Check your deliveries carefully.

Adapted from Habitat, November 2007. For the complete article and more, join our Archive >>

Photo by Renee Serlin