Oil Companies and Furnace Cleaning

Oil Companies and Furnace Cleaning

Most people that have oil for heating their homes have a designated oil company. Some of the reasons they have this is because these oil companies offer great discounts on their home oil delivery service (some up to 30 cents cheaper than the listed price) and also provide yearly maintenance. These oil companies may provide their customers with great oil price discounts ‘if’ they sign a contract that says they will be used for your yearly maintenance. The maintenance contract usually has a dollar price attached maybe somewhere around $150 per year. Each company has their own policy and price range for this. The maintenance contract provides the customer with a cleaning and should anything break on their furnace it should be covered under that contract. These are great things! And for the homeowner looking for that umbrella to cover them on breaking parts, you can’t go wrong.

We no longer have a designated oil company and we shop around for oil prices based on what is going on in the market place today. It’s an all out war in the oil business it seems and each company tries to provide the best prices. We shop around and have a list of oil companies that we call for prices. The procedure is call, lock in the amount of oil you want/need ‘at that price for that day’ and scheduled delivery for tomorrow. Most of these companies are within pennies of each other, but pennies add up! This process has worked well for us.

So, we don’t have a contract with any oil company! Who will clean our furnace? Again, shop around for that by looking in your yellow pages. Make a list of these companies and start the calls. This year I found a company that deals with heating and air conditioning and will deal with residential clients. Some only deal with commercial clients, so ask. I interviewed each customer service rep on the phone and made notes for each company on what was included in ‘their price’. Some companies do not include ‘everything’, that is a customer assumption. Ask! When I reached the end of my list and reviewed all the information with my husband, I called the one who dealt with both heating and A/C. The customer service rep for this company was so nice on the phone. She was detailed and spoke clearly so that I could understand every word she was pronouncing. Some of the other companies I called had customer service reps who spoke fast, mumbled and it left me saying WHAT?

A few weeks later this company sent their employee to our home and I escorted him down to where the furnace was located. I asked if he needed anything and said I’d be back shortly. I was curious to see what the difference was between the ‘oil company cleaning vs. heating and cooling cleaning.’ When I returned I noticed that this guy had the entire top off the furnace and the flue that once was cemented into the wall was now on the floor. I was a bit rattled and asked him ‘why is that on the ground and why do you have the top off the furnace?’ This guy looked at me and said nicely ‘I am cleaning your furnace.’ Ummm ok, well I said ‘never in the history of furnace cleanings has that ever been done to this furnace!’ He replied with ‘I can tell! Come here I want to show you something.’ I walked over and looked down inside the unit and it looked like someone had taken boat loads of ashes and just dumped them inside. I asked him why it was like that and he replied with ‘nobody has ever cleaned this or it does not appear to have been cleaned.’ My head was racing with thoughts here! We once hired our designated oil company to take care of cleaning our furnace and this guy is saying it has never or appears to never have been cleaned???? What is up with that? I proceed to nicely interrogate this guy with questions relating to ‘cleaning’. He said most oil companies do not do a complete cleaning such as he was doing because they really see no need to. However, if the cleaning is not done then over a period of time your furnace will begin to not burn efficiently This will ultimately cause you to have money burn out the door. He also said that most oil companies are just cleaning the filters and making sure that the pump and other pieces attached to your furnace are in working order. I asked how he knew that and he said ‘I used to work for several of them over the years.’

This guy spent 2 almost 3 hours cleaning the furnace! The oil company spent half an hour to 45 minutes. He was able to get the efficiency of our boiler from 72% up to 83%!!! Wow!! That means: we are not burning oil as fast as we were before! YAY! We also had an issue where the furnace was skipping or shutting off prematurely. He found out that pump was set to a lower than average setting to slow the oil down that was running into the pump from the tanks. He was not sure why. There may have been some ‘gunk’ in the tanks or the line which was plugging up the flow and caused the furnace to make that noise. By the time he was finished, our furnace didn’t make that noise anymore! I thought a few times ‘this thing sounds like it is going to blow up’.

In the end, I thanked this guy for everything he did and how he just saved us tons of money with the thorough cleaning he did and also thanked him for allowing me to ask him tons of questions! I learned a lot that day.

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