![]() How many liters will the tank hold?Ī car can travel 480 miles on a full tank of petrol. If you need to expand your propane truck fleet, contact us for pricing on renting or purchasing from our inventory of equipment.When 150 liters have been drawn from a tank, it is 3/8 full. Use what you’ve learned about heated degree days and K-factor here to get your schedule laid out. It also improves your bottom line by only sending trucks out when a propane tank refill is needed. When you can get your customers on a schedule for propane refills, it not only improves customer service. Higher temps mean fewer degree days, so you can wait longer before the next delivery. Use the actual degree days since the last delivery and the predicted degree days until the next to target a delivery date.īecause degree days correlate with outdoor temperatures, lower temps mean more degree days, and fuel delivery will have to happen sooner. If you plan to deliver around 100 gallons each time, that gives you around 500 degree days between deliveries. Let’s look back at our example with a k-factor of 5. That gives you the time span between deliveries in degree days. You calculate this by multiplying the amount you want to deliver by that customer’s k-factor. Now it’s time to use all those numbers to schedule your next delivery. You can make fewer deliveries by delivering that maximum amount each time. Hitting that delivery goal allows you to make the most efficient use of your drivers and their time. It’s typical to try to keep customers from going below 10 percent or some specific gallon reserve amount. The last piece is how much fuel you want to deliver to the customer each time. Now that you know how to figure degree days and k-factor, you have most of what you need to determine when you next need to visit a customer to refill the propane tank. This means longer-term records of fuel use and degree days between deliveries. K-factor is a useful baseline for calculating, but it does require historical data to get it accurate. The more accurate the number, the easier it will be for you to figure out a proper delivery schedule for each customer. For a propane tank, the formula is degree days since the last delivery divided by the number of gallons delivered. If the car goes 300 miles between fill-ups and you need 15 gallons to fill up, you got 20 mpg since the last tank. You calculate k-factor the same way you figure mpg for your vehicle. As long as none of those things change, k-factor is a reliable number to use for forecasting. It depends on insulation levels, energy efficiency, house size, propane tank maintenance, and even how many people are showering and for how long. ![]() If we go back to our example day with an average temp of 40 degrees, the house will burn five gallons of fuel that day. You can then divide that number into degree days to calculate usage for a specific date. If a customer’s k-factor is five, that house will get five degree days per gallon. You are calculating the number of degree days per gallon of propane or how many degree days one gallon of propane will last. ![]() You can think of it as similar to miles per gallon for a car. The higher the number, the less fuel burned each day. The lower the number, the more fuel burned each day. Understanding K-FactorĪt its core, k-factor is a number that lets you know how fast a customer uses propane. This can be used as a backward measure to figure how many heating degree days the past month had or as a predictive measure using historical highs and lows. That number is then subtracted from 65 to give you the heating degree days.įor example, if the day’s average temperature is 40 degrees, it has 25 heating degree days. To calculate the degree day, you first get the average of the day’s high and low temperatures. The standard temperature for measuring a degree day is 65 degrees Fahrenheit, chosen because it tends to be the point at which people begin considering turning their heaters on. ![]() More energy tends to be used the lower the temperature drops. Knowing the range of outdoor temperatures is a reasonable measure for calculating heating energy demand. A degree day is a way of measuring how cold or warm a location is, and the more extreme the weather, the higher the number of degree days. The first number you need to figure out is the heating degree days in your area. Let’s take a look at two numbers to help forecast when propane tank service is needed. Once you have the formula in place, scheduling your drivers for delivery becomes more efficient. The more information you have about your customers’ historical propane use, the easier it will be to develop a reliable formula for deliveries. Predicting when those tanks will need more gas comes down to some simple math related to how much propane a specific customer uses. With more than 50 million American homes using propane, there are a lot of propane tanks out there that need to be filled and ready for use. ![]()
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