If you use heating oil in your home furnace, don’t wait till winter to fill the tank. In fact, Department of Natural Resources fuel-price analyst Jennifer Moehlman says you’d better not even wait for late summer to try and get a good price. Moehlman says heating oil’s up from last month by more than 10-cents. She’s advising people not to wait for August, as many do, because it might not be any cheaper then. Moehlman says propane’s the same price it was last month, but says when someone recently called her asking whether to buy his winter supply of propane for heating, she told him the price is more likely to go up than down by the end of the summer. Moehlman says typically the price of one kind of fuel will affect others, and this summer is no exception. Natural gas is on the increase, and she says it’s actually causing the propane price to go up. The analyst says while we know cold weather in winter pushes the price of natural gas up, hot weather in summer can do it too. She explains especially in the northeast and southeast, hot weather means they’re using more natural gas to create electricity, to fuel the air conditioners. Crude oil closed at a record high price on Friday and analysts today (Monday) were predicting the sky-high prices, near 60-dollars a barrel, will continue.
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