New England oil-heat customers try to hedge heating-season bets

MONTPELIER, Vt. (AP) – Bill and Jane Purdy are doing it again – locking in a set price for next winter’s heating season for fuel oil to heat their big, old, drafty brick house in the Connecticut River valley village of Bellows Falls.

“Both my wife and I are self-employed,” said Purdy, a 50-year-old building contractor. “We do it for security.”


They’re guarding against a price spike that could hit hard in a home that this past heating season consumed 1,700 gallons of oil and more than four cords of firewood.

And they’re doing it despite a lament heard last year from many oil-heat customers who either bought their season’s worth of heating oil in advance or signed fixed-price contracts with their dealers and ended up paying above the spot market when oil dropped 25 percent late in the year.

AP