80% of Dealers Surveyed Run Tank Monitors. About Half Use Them to Forecast.

The Situation

Every runout your tank monitor saw coming is an unplanned stop on somebody's route. With a will-call customer, that same missed warning can be the moment they phone another dealer.

Cargas Energy's 2026 Technology Trends in Fuel Delivery survey (cargasenergy.com/tech-trends-2026) found that 80% of respondents list tank monitors in their tech stack. Only about half of respondents told Cargas they use monitors to improve forecasting accuracy. Cargas's own reading: the data "primarily serves as an alert system rather than a planning tool."

The Facts

Bigger companies are more likely to run monitors, Cargas found. Among dealers without them, 50% told Cargas they don't need them for their kind of business, such as a small service area or a cylinder-exchange focus. Another 38% of those dealers named cost as the barrier.

Dealers who do run monitors gave Cargas a few top reasons: reducing runouts, managing tanks with uneven usage and improving delivery efficiency. Nearly 60% of respondents mention customer satisfaction as a reason to invest in monitors, the Cargas report says, though it does not spell out whether that share is of all respondents or only monitor users.

Most of those reasons sit on the alert side. The report then asks dealers to consider planning: "Is our monitor data feeding into our routing and dispatching? Can we use it to run ticket pulls or automatically generate tickets?"

The survey measured forecasting, not what dealers do once a customer is running low. Farid Widjaya, Energy Product Marketer at Cargas, takes that up in an Oil & Energy Online column (oilandenergyonline.com/articles/all/how-tank-monitors-and-other-tech-maximize-delivery-efficiency/). He writes that monitors paired with texting modules and automatic emails "can play a role in customer retention, particularly for will-call customers." He adds: "Will-calls are on the rise as customers demand more control over the fuel-buying process."

Business Impact

When tank readings stop at an alert, dispatch still plans the old way. A low reading lands on the board as a same-day add-on stop instead of a planned slot on the route. Widjaya's column describes the choice dealers faced before monitors: "wait and risk a runout, or deliver and check tank levels more frequently at the risk of smaller drops and overwhelmed drivers." Monitor data wired into dispatch is the way out of that bind. A runout also carries a safety step, so confirm with your AHJ what leak check your state requires before service is restored.

Action Steps

1. 1.This week, check whether your monitor readings feed routing and dispatch or sit in a separate app.
2. 2.Ask your monitor vendor about automatic low-tank texts or emails for customers who order when they're low, so they hear from you before they switch.
3. 3.Rank unmonitored accounts by past runouts and pick the next ones to put on monitors.
4. 4.Price a monitor rollout against what last winter's runouts actually cost you.

Competitive Advantage

Readings that feed the route plan mean fewer runout calls for dispatch to scramble on. On the customer side, Widjaya writes that automatic reminders and alerts from monitored tanks keep the dealer in front of will-call customers when they're ready to fill.