PORTLAND, Maine — California computer scientist Bob Silverstein has launched a website he hopes will give buyers of heating fuel new confidence when ordering No. 2 heating oil, kerosene and propane.
In a phone interview, Silverstein said he hopes to build his Fuelwonk site into a repository of price reports for different heating fuels, a crowdsourced model similar to the gas price site GasBuddy.
“It’s so difficult to contact private vendors and wade through all the marketing and sales information that you’re going to get to make a quick decision,” said Silverstein, who’s worked in software development and data science. “This is a way to share information about certain commodities.”
The site is still in its infancy, requiring more information and input from visitors to allow someone to base a purchasing decision on its data, but he envisions detailed pricing information will eventually enable the site to recommend advanced tips such as when to buy a certain fuel to get the best deal.
“I’m trying to give more information to people to make more informed buying decisions,” Silverstein said.
In some cases, Silverstein said he hopes that kind of information might compel someone to take a second look at an existing fuel contract, to compare competing supply prices. Growing up in Queens, New York, he said his father had paid little attention to fluctuations in fuel oil prices.
“People like my dad stay with one vendor forever because it’s convenient,” Silverstein said.
Silverstein said he’s still learning about pricing dynamics around the country, but he had one site user survey local options and report back a 60-cent per gallon spread between suppliers for fuel oil.
A search Wednesday showed nearly a $1 per gallon spread in prices between suppliers in the Portland area, but Silverstein noted data is still coming in for suppliers in Maine. A search of the Bangor area generated no price information.
The Governor’s Energy Office in Maine also has provided benchmark heating fuel pricing based on surveys of fuel dealers around the state.
Its latest survey, which put the state average for heating fuel at $2 per gallon, found that there was about a 60-cent spread between the highest and lowest prices, both of which were found in the eastern region of the state.
The site also will allow customers to compare that with the latest surveys from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which provides periodic averages by state for certain fuels.
Silverstein said one challenge is collecting relevant purchasing information other than price, such as the quantity of fuel purchased, whether there were any discounts for the purchase and the customer’s form of payment.
“We collect a couple of bits of information,” Silverstein said.
The site is free to access as Silverstein’s company Imperfect Markets LLC tries to amass more input for Fuelwonk. The site may eventually charge a “very small” subscription fee, he said, similar to what might be paid for a smartphone app.
“This is not something that is going to be like a Bloomberg [terminal] where someone is going to have to pay thousands per year to get this information, but I think that people are amenable to paying for a service that is helping them save money,” Silverstein said. “That’s what the site has to prove to people, and I can’t charge for the site until that’s the case.”