Your operation, your numbers
Every field is yours to edit — the numbers below change as you type. Fields marked illustrative default are your own estimate, not a Propane Insider claim.
Your own count — the customers nobody is watching between deliveries.
Your own number, if you have it — this pre-fills from a national delivery-data proxy, not a per-customer survey figure.
Pre-filled from the national average gallons-per-STOP (a proxy — your customer’s annual gallons is a different figure): 182 gal (Gray, Gray and Gray, 2024, National Propane Industry Survey). Adjust to your own number.
Your own rate. No published industry number exists for this — pull it from last winter’s emergency calls.
Your dispatch log is the real source — no published industry figure exists. Count the whole trip: the drive, the leak test NFPA 54 requires any time the gas goes off, and relighting pilots before your tech leaves.
Your estimate, not an industry number. Bill Stomp ran propane 15 years and puts it near 10% — a runout is the day a customer starts shopping you, and it’s worse when you can’t get there same-day, worse again when he owns his tank and can walk easily. We start you at half that. Edit it to your own book.
Starts at the national average for comparison: $1.42/gal (Gray, Gray and Gray, 2024, National Propane Industry Survey). Adjust to your own number.
Pre-filled from the national average delivery-driver wage: $29.08/hr (Gray, Gray and Gray, 2025, National Propane Industry Survey). Adjust to your own rate.
Monitor fee income
Company-owned tanks only — you can’t bill a monitoring fee on a tank your customer owns.
Your own number today — not a target.
What your numbers project
Built from your inputs above. These are the numbers your routes carry today — not a promise about what a monitor gets back.
Your monitor fee-income gap
Fee-income gap = your owned tanks × your unmonitored share, capped at 72% (the GGG 2023 industry offer-rate ceiling — not an assumed 100% of your fleet; not every tank is a monitor candidate) × the average fee dealers charge per monitored tank per year ($54.32/tank/yr — Otodata / Gray, Gray and Gray, 2023, National Propane Industry Survey (tank-monitoring white paper) — that fee figure is their cited number, not ours). The total above is our own estimate/our own arithmetic on your inputs, not a GGG statistic and not a promise of what any product recovers — your billing practice vs. the cited peer average only. Estimate, not a guarantee.
Every number above is arithmetic on the fields you entered — emergency runs avoided = your non-monitored customers × your runout rate; hours and dollars recovered = runs avoided × hours per run × your rate; accounts at risk = runs avoided × your churn rate; margin at risk = that number × your annual gallons × your margin. No hidden multiplier, no invented lift percentage, and the margin figure is your own margin — never a price for our product. Estimate, not a guarantee.
The churn share is not a survey statistic. It’s Bill Stomp’s own read from 15 years running propane companies — he puts customer loss near 10% when a customer runs out, and this tool starts at half that. Whatever you type in is the number that counts.
Where the industry actually stands
72% of propane dealers now offer tank monitoring, up from 40% in 2016 — the offer race is over. But most haven’t scaled it: 58% of dealers have monitors on 20% or less of their tanks, at an average fee of $54.32/tank/year.
Otodata / Gray, Gray and Gray, 2023, National Propane Industry Survey (tank-monitoring white paper) (adoption, fee) · Gray, Gray and Gray, 2016, National Propane Industry Survey (2016 baseline) · penetration-depth figure: Gray, Gray and Gray, 2024, National Propane Industry Survey.
Want these numbers saved? Optional — the calculator above works with or without this.