Arkansas HVACR NewsMagazine May 2022

News Magazine May 2022

FEATURE STORY

Even so, it is not uncommon for an urban contractor to travel 20 or 30 miles between calls . Let’s be conservative and use 25. It also depends on your vehicle mileage. I hear anywhere from 12 to 18 miles a gallon. The older your fleet, the less mpg. Let’s take a middle road and say 15. Now, how many calls per day do you make 4, 5, 10. Again, let’s take a middle ground and say 6. That means your service vehicle travels 150 miles per day; but we also have to add in the miles it travels if the tech takes it home. Again, let’s be conservative and say they only live 25 miles away and travel 50 commuting miles per day total. We’re now u p to 200 miles per day. The following chart demonstrates how much more a HVAC contractor is paying for gas in May 2022 compared to April 2021.

When you look at the previous chart, you can see that each service truck could be costing you up to $3,468 or perhaps even more in INCREASED fuel cost. By the way, the numbers on diesel are double that amount. So, what are you to do? Well you can — • Hope that prices go down and o Explain to your employees why they don’t get a raise o Explain to your wife and kids why the vacation is cut back or even out • Raise your price to your customers via o Add a trip fuel charge onto your bills o Add it to your hourly rate If raising prices scares you, now might be a good time to adopt flat rate pricing. It covers you in times like these. Whatever you do, make sure you understand that

Avg Mileage to Call

# Calls

Daily Call Miles

Commute Miles (25 miles x 2)

Total Daily Miles

Annual Miles 50,000

Gal Gas

Mpg

25

6

150

50

200

16

3,125

Regular Gas Prices, Arkansas

Cost Comparison

# Service Trucks

# Gal Gas 3,125

Increase Cost

2021

2022

Difference

2

3

4

5

$2.68

$3.79

$1.11

$3,468 $6,936 $10,404 $13,872 $17,325

the consequences of doing nothing could be devasting to your bottom line and your ability to grow your company, reward your employees, and give your family what they deserve for all the extra hours

What hurts even more is that gas in April 2021 was already $1 per gallon more than it was in April 2020. That is not a totally fair comparison because we were in the throws of the pandemic and everything was shutting down and the economy was in a nose dive. Now to be totally honest and not use numbers to manipulate a point rather than make a point, the national average for regular gas over the past ten years is $2.80. You can check me out at eia.gov.

you spend owning a company. It’s a tough decision but that is why you get paid the big bucks.

National Price of Gasoline 2012 to 2022