For Suppliers

Tank monitoring without telemetry: a software alternative for propane dealers

June 8, 2026

If you deliver propane or heating oil, you already know what a run-out costs: a special trip, a leak test and relight, an irritated customer, and sometimes the account itself. The obvious fix is remote tank monitoring — put a sensor on every tank and watch levels from the office. The catch is the price tag, and it's exactly why most dealers only monitor a slice of their book and fly blind on the rest. There's a second way to get most of the same protection without hardware on every tank.

What remote tank telemetry actually costs

Cellular and Wi-Fi tank monitors read the tank automatically and report the level back to you. They work, and for the right tanks they're worth every penny. But the cost stacks up per tank:

For a few hundred high-value, commercial, or hard-to-reach tanks, that math pays for itself fast — one avoided emergency run on a remote account can cover the monitor. For a book of a thousand residential will-call customers, putting a $150 monitor on every tank is a five- or six-figure capital project. So most dealers monitor their top accounts and guess on the long tail — and the long tail is where most surprise run-outs actually happen.

The software alternative: let the customer be the sensor

The other approach flips the model. Instead of hardware reading the tank, the customer reports their own level — they walk past the gauge anyway — and software does the rest: reminds them to check, learns how fast they actually burn, factors in their local weather, and flags who's getting low so you can schedule a fill before it's an emergency.

It costs almost nothing per customer, which means you can cover your entire book, not just the top of it.

An honest comparison

Neither approach is strictly better — they trade off:

Be straight about the trade: telemetry's strength is it needs zero customer action — its weakness is you'll never afford it on every tank. Customer-reported's weakness is it needs the customer to log a reading now and then — its strength is it's cheap enough to run across your whole book, including the residential accounts where you currently have no visibility at all.

Why a reading isn't the point — the forecast is

A tank reading on its own is just a snapshot. What actually prevents a run-out is the prediction: knowing this customer will hit 20% in nine days, not that they're at 45% today. That's where a usage forecast earns its keep — and why weather matters. The same tank that lasts six weeks in October can empty in three during a hard freeze. A forecast that watches local degree-days shifts the reorder date when the cold does, so you're scheduling fills off where the tank will be, not where it was last time someone looked.

So which should you use?

For most dealers it isn't either/or. The pattern that works:

• Telemetry on the tanks that justify the hardware — commercial accounts, remote or access-difficult tanks, and anyone whose run-out is genuinely expensive or dangerous.
• Customer-reported tracking with a forecast on the residential long tail — the hundreds of will-call accounts you can't cost-justify a monitor for, but where a $1/month software seat turns "we had no idea" into "we filled them on Tuesday."

The win isn't replacing telemetry. It's getting eyes on the 80% of your book that has none today — without a capital project.

What this looks like with Top Off Time

Top Off Time is the customer-reported side of that picture. Your customers get a dead-simple way to log their tank level and a forecast that tells them — and you — when they're getting low. You see who's approaching a refill, with no hardware to buy, install, or maintain. It's a per-customer software seat, not a per-tank capital expense, so you can finally cover the accounts you've never been able to watch.