Are you able to contract for price in the summertime?

Not that it helps your wallet, but it might "warm" your heart a bit to know that given the heat value, with propane over $3/gal, you're actually getting more BTUs for the buck. (Since propane has about 2/3 the BTUs from a gallon compared to fuel oil.)

Off topic, but I'm reminded of a story... My uncle owned an auto parts business. After he retired, my cousin (his son) drove the business into the ground, figuritively, and people thought they could never sell the property because of pollution. With all the junked cars there everyone figured oil, antifreeze, etc, would have contaminated the ground and that was at a time where the PCA people were getting real sticky. Well, it turned out there was very little contamination - only took a skimming of the topsoil to clean it. Reason? :) My uncle had an oil burner to heat the office and shop. They burned the drain oil for heat. Gasoline was put into tanks and my cousins always had gas for their cars and they had gas to put into the cars they fixed up and sold. And he specialized in late model parts so nothing older than 5 years so there was a high turnover. The crusher came in often and the older stuff and the ones pretty much parted out were crushed and sold for scrap so the cars didn't really sit there all that long. Not sure what they did with antifreeze, wash fluid and stuff though. I was quite young in those days so there's a lot of things I don't remember or was told.

I "had" a contract to pay $2.49 a gallon through July 2008. The oil company sent me a letter saying, due to price increases, I could keep the contract and be billed for the difference at the end, July 31. Or bite the bullet now and agree to pay their current price. I chose the latter. And yesterday I paid $3.56 a gallon to fill up my car's gastank.