Fuel Storage at home

Apr 13, 2004 11 Replies

I've been looking at ways to save a bit of money, and one that occurs is to buy fuel in bulk and store it until it's needed - given that I go through maybe 100 gallons of fuel per month at the moment I could justify a



250-500gal tank at home.

I'm just wondering if anybody's done this and what the pros/cons are.



I was thinking along the lines of a minibulk of diesel in the garage waiting to be pumped into the car at the appropriate time.



P.


Hope the neighbours are friendly with good fire insurance :-))

I know for LPG you can get a bulk tank for home, providing you can keep it

20m (i think it was) from a dwelling.

I theory, you could setup a biodiesel maker, 200 gallons at a time I think they are - there was a piece in farmers weekly a couple of weeks back - i'll see if I can find it.

Si

You'll never get it any cheaper for such a small amount - it may well work out dearer.It may be a lot to you, but the oil companies deliver in the thousands of gallons, sending a lorry out with just 500 gallons would not be cost effective. Alan.

There are two grades of fuel used for heating, and one of them is essentially diesel (but marked with dye and not taxed for normal road use). So storage of diesel isn't a special problem, from the safety point of view.

You may have problems with Customs and Excise, but it's not uncommon for companies to have their own DERV storage.

I don't know what the cost per litre would be for a bulk delivery of DERV, but you may need a much bigger tank to get any advantage. You need to consider not just the cost of the fuel, but the cost of the tank and the interest you might have earned on the money.

I doubt there's any advantage.

The advantage I thought I might get was less one of scale - I'll never use enough diesel to get the 50-60ppl that big companies can get, but more one of beating the pump prices - I'd have bought my diesel up front and for at least a few months I should be better off than pump prices.

Of course, the ideal would be a fuel cooperative with a single 40kl tank and

50ppl, but I doubt enough peeps round here would be willing to stump up for a few hundred gallons in advance.

P.

On or around Tue, 13 Apr 2004 18:50:54 +0100, "Paul S. Brown" enlightened us thusly:

I looked into it a bit back, but the saving on 500 gallon sized lots is minimal to say the least. At the time, the local garages were noticeably more expensive than Safeway 30 miles away, but so was buying in bulk from a local supplier. When I mentioned that safeway were charging (whatever) per litre, the local supplier said thhey can't buy 20,000 litres at that price.

We find that shopping at Safeway is pretty good .. £100+ a week gets 20p per litre off the price .. which is already pretty cheap. Changed shopping habits a bit, and probably paying a little more, but the saving when filling up 70 + litres a time is substantial enough to make it worthwhile we think .. ;)

A change of underwear for the neighbours may be in order once they discover your plan.

Get it while you can - the 'offer' is about to end.

Hardly , many people have a thousand or so litres of what is fundamentally diesel sat in a large tank by their back door to feed their oil fired heating.

a lot of farmers and hauliers have sizeable above ground diesel storage tanks.

in terms of others comments about he oil companies - they deal in many thousands of litres at a time , but a lot of fuel and oil suppliers don't - dealing in hundreds to thousands of litres on a day to day basis

probably easier to get a keyfuels card

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