EnerTrac Hopes to Transform Oil Delivery with Sensors to Monitor Home Heating Oil
Pictured is EnerTrac’s heating oil sensor, which can transmit information about the level of oil in the tank back to the distributor. (image: enertrac.com)
EnerTrac, a New Hampshire-based company that designs and manufactures products to monitor home heating tanks, has developed a new automated device that allows for sensory-based monitoring of home heating oil. According to Mass High Tech: The Journal of New England Technology, the move could save oil distributors as much as 30 to 40 percent in delivery costs.
MHT reports that the EnerTrac sensors allow home heating oil distributors to monitor tanks from afar, electronically. As MHT explains the process, the sensors send information to a software interface, allowing distributors to efficiently schedule their deliveries. The wireless transmission adds a techie addition to the standard way a home heating oil system works.
EnterTrac also claims the sensors are fairly easy to install. The company says the sensors, which come with a promise of a 10-year battery life, simply screw into your existing tank. Once screwed in place they then wirelessly transmit the oil level to your distributor.
EnterTrac’s Patrick Mansfield told MHT that the company’s relatively low-cost sensor—there’s a $30 per month charge for the service and a $3 per month charge for each tank that a customer wants monitored—gives distributors the ability to change their monitoring practices. Since sensory monitoring has typically been expensive it’s been used sparingly; oil distributors were using sensory monitors on only about 0.5 percent of their tanks. As Mansfield told the publication, the only people getting the service were “the most important customers, or the ones in the middle of nowhere.”
Given the low cost of adding a sensor to measure tanks, EnterTrac is, as MHT pointed out, looking to make its money on the software service it offers as opposed to trying to build revenue from device sales. The company, which was founded in 2006, has made some headway already. It has installed some 700 sensors, a number that has grown significantly in recent months; it had only 175 in the field in September. But EnerTrac has ambitions to install far more than 700 sensors, and is trying to secure $1 million to fund expansion. One plan the company has for that funding is to market to mid-sized distributors that serve in the neighborhood of 5,000 to 15,000 tanks. Mansfield also told MHT that if EnterTrac gets traction with smaller distributors it could hopefully convince the bigger players to come on board with the sensory technology.
