Heating oil, propane and service plans in three provinces
Heat pumps commissioned in 2025
3,140
All by in-house crews
No-heat calls answered within four hours
93%
Winter 2025–26, across 16 depots
At the board table
Hearthward Fuel Fund
Volunteer director
Finance and grants
Heating is a promise kept on the worst night of the year. I would rather turn down work we cannot do well than explain to a cold household why our plan assumed an average winter. That means listening to drivers and technicians before the season starts, and telling the board plainly what reliability costs.
A heating company that is selling less fuel still owes every customer a warm house on the coldest night, so I plan the operation around that night rather than around the average winter.
I am chief operating officer of Brannockmere Home Energy, a family-owned heating company based in Truro, Nova Scotia. We deliver heating oil and propane to about 74,000 customer accounts in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, and we install and service the furnaces, boilers and heat pumps in many of those homes. Revenue in 2025 was C$486 million, much of it fuel whose price follows wholesale markets. I lead about 760 drivers, technicians, installers, dispatchers and depot staff through six direct reports, and I report to our chief executive, Neil Brannockmere.
Our business is changing underneath its trucks. Since 2019 the fuel we deliver has fallen by about 18 per cent, mostly because customers have added heat pumps with federal and provincial rebate support. Many keep their oil furnace as a backup. That leaves us with homes that buy very little fuel for most of the winter and then need it urgently when a deep freeze cuts the output of an older heat pump. Delivery schedules, depot locations and service crews all have to be planned for that pattern, not for the one we knew.
I came to this work through engineering rather than sales. I started at a marine fuel terminal, spent eleven years in propane safety and regional operations, and ran installation and service for a heating contractor before joining Brannockmere in 2017. Each of the three decisions on this site gave something up: heat-pump sales we declined, capital moved from a depot project to tank monitors, and part of a saving that would have slowed winter response in two rural areas.
Installations held to what we could commission
In autumn 2022 our sales team was booking about 610 heat-pump jobs a month against in-house commissioning capacity of roughly 260. We capped intake at 300 a month. Ninety-day callbacks fell from 11.2 per cent to 4.1 per cent, and we lost about 1,700 jobs to other installers.
Monitors on the tanks that ran dry
After 286 automatic-delivery customers ran out of oil in the February 2023 freeze, we fitted remote monitors to 9,000 hybrid and priority accounts for C$2.4 million. In the comparable cold period of January 2025, run-outs fell to 37.
Three depots closed, two kept
A 2025 review proposed closing five of nineteen depots to save C$2.1 million a year. We closed three, turned two rural depots into smaller crew bases and saved C$1.3 million, while answering 93 per cent of winter no-heat calls within four hours.
Current focus
I am rebuilding our winter plan around the hybrid home: how much fuel it needs in a cold snap, which crews and trucks we hold back for those days, and how our heat-pump service work can carry the overhead that fuel volume used to carry.
Conversations I welcome
I am open to a first commercial board appointment with a Canadian utility, co-operative or energy distributor, joining a safety or risk committee, with about twenty-two days a year available once my chief executive and our board have agreed the arrangement.
The leadership record
Trusted with consequential decisions.
Formation
Bachelor of engineering, mechanicalArdmorrow University · 1997
Governance programme for not-for-profit directorsArdmorrow University · 2020
Vivienne brought the depot proposal to us with the saving and the four-hour standard on the same page. She did not ask the board to take her side; she asked us to decide which promise we were prepared to change.
I am open to a first commercial board appointment with a Canadian utility, co-operative or energy distributor, joining a safety or risk committee, with about twenty-two days a year available once my chief executive and our board have agreed the arrangement.