Olive - our online bulk oil buying scheme

     Welcome to our online oil ordering system Olive

Order deadlines: to view the order deadlines for 2024 click here

Background to Olive

Northamptonshire ACRE's bulk oil buying scheme is managed by eSmartMetrics (trading as Olive) and aims to reduce the cost of your domestic heating oil.  By bringing communities in Northamptonshire together and making the most of the joint buying power, we can make savings and pass them directly to people like you whose fuel costs are high simply because you use oil fired central heating. We have been running our successful bulk oil buying scheme since October 2011. We set it up with the key aim of helping residents in villages who are off gas to get the best possible price for their heating oil in order to save them money, especially those in fuel poverty. During the time it has been going we have helped our members to save over £198,500 against the highest prices quoted and approximately £80,500 on the average, on over 1.7 million litres of oil.

Having a larger membership base means we are able to negotiate even better savings from the oil delivery companies for our orders. 

Service fee

Over the last year or so eSmartmetrics has seen the cost of processing oil orders increase and has been trying to find a fair and equitable way of addressing the problem. In common with other oil buying schemes, eSmartmetrics has decided the only way to solve the issue is to introduce a service fee per order of £1.99, which will come into effect from 1st August 2020. Any members who wish to buy through the Olive scheme after this date will need to pay the service fee at the time of order.

This has been a difficult decision for eSmartmetrics but is necessary to enable them to continue to secure extremely competitive prices for our members. eSmartmetrics will use the service fee to offset the increased costs of processing and managing the competitive tendering process. Please be aware that NACRE will not benefit from the service fee.

If you have any queries about the new fee, please contact [email protected] for further information.

 

Using Olive

To use the system you first need to register at: https://nacre.myolive.co.uk/registration/register.

Enter your details, an email and a password that must be 6 letters or longer and contain at least 1 uppercase letter and 1 number or symbol.

Once you are registered:

  • You need to record your payment method – either debit or credit card (there is a 2% charge for using credit cards unfortunately which goes to the card issuing company) or you can set up a direct debit payment.

  • You will see in the main menu an option showing all the oil ordering deadlines.

  • You can place your order for oil at any time and it will be picked up in the next deadline.

  • After midday on the deadline date, eSmartMetrics collate all the oil orders, negotiate with the oil suppliers for the best price, send you an automated email with the details of the price per litre and the total cost for your order.

  • After 24 hours if you haven’t cancelled the order they will take payment for your order automatically, place the full order with the suppliers and make the payment at the same time. This means you don’t need to pay the oil company directly anymore, which quite a few of our members used to find a hassle.

  • The oil is usually delivered approximately 10 working days later.

If you would like more details our FAQs will help. You can also download eSmartMetrics’ privacy policy and the terms and conditions for use of Olive.

If you would like to become a member of Northamptonshire ACRE's bulk oil buying system but would rather we continue to administer your account, please contact us on [email protected] or tel. 01604 765888.

Our oil buying scheme is open to all off gas residents, community buldings and businesses.

And if you would like to save even more money, why not check out our olive smart meter offer.