Weber Realty Management manages a number of small-medium sized residential buildings across NYC, and producing enough heat to keep everybody comfortable through the winter requires quite a bit of fuel. But due to the geopolitical turmoil in Europe, fuel prices have skyrocketed for residential real estate owners. This is partially due to NYC having stringent laws regarding the type of fuel grades that can be burned. Under the Clean Heat Program, NYC banned the use of residual fuel oil #6 in 2015 and fuel oil #4 will be banned by 2030. In order to comply, owners switched to cleaner heating fuels which are more expensive and rising way more than general fuel prices.
For instance, Weber Realty Manages a 40 unit residential building in Morningside Heights, Manhattan. It cost $6,034.00 to fill up their oil tank on 1/10/2022. Two months later, on 3/11/2022 it cost $10,653.86 to fill up the same tank (which needs to be refilled around every 2 weeks). Therefore heating oil prices jumped 77% in just 2 months for this building.
Weber Realty is re-balancing 2022 operating budgets in order to factor in higher fuel bills. To save money on future heating expenses, it’s important to have a boiler maintenance company do a full cleaning of the tubes and combustion chamber inside the boiler. Soot accumulations of as little as 1/32 of an inch will raise a fuel bill by about 2%. Another way to save money is to install a heat timer panel on the boiler which is connected to computerized sensors that help better regulate heating cycles. This monitoring system can save buildings anywhere from 15% to 30% on heating costs. Some buildings are also utilizing financial instruments to fix heating fuel rates at current levels for a specified amount of time. However, premiums are high now because of the uncertainty of where prices are going.