The home heating oil industry has a long and proud history, and Fuel Oil News has been there supporting it since 1935. It is an industry that has faced many challenges during that time. In its 77th year, Fuel Oil News is doing more than just holding
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40 AUGUST 2016 | FUEL OIL NEWS | www.fueloilnews.com N ORA's Fuel Savings Analysis calculator has been a useful tool throughout the industry since 2008. A salesperson or technician can use the calculator to provide a homeowner with an estimate of the cost savings involved with upgrading to more efficient oil heat equipment. However, as time has moved on and technology progressed the old calculator had become a bit long in the tooth. With NORA's reauthorization, and PriMedia's technology development, a major upgrade is expected to become available to the industry in August. Guiding the project were John Huber, NORA; Dr. Tom Butcher: NORA / BNL; Roger Marran, Energy Kinetics; Kevin Steele, H.B. Steele & Son; Bob O'Brien, Technical Heating; and Don Farrell, OMA Oilheat Manufacturers Association. In some ways this is an evolutionary development, but with the potential for some revolutionary capabilities down the road. "NORA wasn't reauthorized during the time when we began looking at an updated FSA," said John Bruno, PriMedia's creative director. PriMedia is a multifaceted marketing and public relations firm well-established in the industry. "As soon as it became reau- thorized a lot of projects were revisited and the FSA was very high on the prior- ity list. It's a perfect storm in a positive way because oil prices are down. People are much less likely to switch fuels and if we can get them to realize even more efficiency through upgrades that's one of NORA's prime missions." He noted that the new reautho- rization sets aside less money for marketing efforts, and this helps fill that gap along with the recently cov- ered NORA rebate program (see the May, 2016, issue of FON). "When the original platform was created the common technology was the Windows-based desktop PC," said Bruno. "It was not set up to run on a Mac and mobile devices were not prev- alent at the time. So much has changed since then. The Mac platform exploded, and if you're a guy out in the field nine times out of 10 you are going to have a smart phone or a tablet that will be used for sales calls or even presentations. So it made a lot of sense that it should work on a mobile device." The old calculator is software- based, which runs on a host PC. The software is downloaded and installed and had to be upgraded regularly as new versions of Windows were released. FSA 2.0 is a web-based cloud application that is hosted on a server and accessed through a user's web browser. The browser might be located on a laptop or desktop sys- tem, on a Mac or PC or on a tablet or smart phone. Instead of needing to be platform-specific it just needs to be compatible with the various common browsers in the marketplace. One advantage of the cloud-based system is that as upgrades occur they only need to be made on the server- hosted software and not rolled out to the field where everyone would have to upgrade their personal installations. Even though FSA 2.0 is designed to function easily on mobile devices it's not an app, per se. It uses the existing web browser and configures its display FSA 2.0 BY KEITH REID A major upgrade to NORA's highly successful Fuel Savings Analysis Calculator