Crude oil prices that have been sliced in half since hitting a record high in July are leaving consumers almost as woozy as the sharp climb that took place this spring.

For most, it’s a good kind of woozy. But it does have some residential and commercial customers reconsidering fixed-priced contracts they signed this summer.

Cathy Fanjoy, the business manager for SAD 17, locked in most of the district’s oil supply at $3.88 a gallon in July and the rest at $3.67 in August, when prices started to drop.

“It was a good deal at the time we locked in, and nobody could have predicted what would happen,” said Fanjoy, who handles business matters for the district, which includes the towns of Harrison, Hebron, Norway, Otisfield, Oxford, South Paris, Waterford and West Paris.

Prices for home heating oil in Maine peaked at $4.72 a gallon in July, according to the State Planning Office, the time of year when many homeowners committed themselves to deals for the following winter with their oil companies. Since then, heating oil prices have followed the sharp drop in crude oil prices that more than halved prices from nearly $150 a barrel to about $70 a barrel.

The latest Governor’s Office of Energy Independence and Security survey, released Thursday, found a statewide average price of $3.62 a gallon. The Web site maineoil.com said the average price in the Portland area was substantially lower: $2.82 a gallon on Friday.

The roller-coaster ride is exactly the kind of trajectory that many consumers sought to avoid by locking into fixed- or capped-price programs in July, although the thinking at the time was that people were getting on at the bottom of the ride, rather than the high point.

Jeremy Stein, who lives on Portland’s West End, said he locked in this summer at a fixed price of $4.49 a gallon and then tried to switch to a capped-price plan when oil prices started dropping.

Initially, he said, his oil company said no.

“I pitched myself as a good customer,” Stein said, and the company relented because the deadline for signing up for a capped plan had just barely passed.

David Loughran, a spokesman for the Maine attorney general, said his office has had some calls from consumers anxious to see if they can get out of fixed-price contracts that obligate them to pay a set price. When those contracts were signed in July, prices around $4.50 a gallon didn’t seem unreasonable, given that crude oil prices had been on a steady climb for months and showed no signs of abating.

Loughran said that as long as oil dealers don’t engage in any deceptive practices, a contract is a contract.

“There’s nothing to guarantee that the price you got back in July isn’t going to be a deal come February,” Loughran said.

Jamie Py, executive director of the Maine Oil Dealers Association, said dealers don’t like having unhappy customers, but they are required by law to buy an option on the oil that a customer will need when the customer signs a fixed- or capped-price contract.

“Some dealers tried to steer people away from a fixed price,” Py said, because they didn’t think the record prices would hold. “If you were fixed when we were at $147 a barrel, most people didn’t think it would stay at that price, and you’d have an unhappy customer.”

Many of those who didn’t choose fixed-price contracts opted, instead, for cap plans, which set a ceiling on what the customer would pay.

Mark Norton of New Gloucester is happy with his oil price deal, which calls for him to pay no more than $4.60 a gallon. He bought into a capped-price plan that allows him to pay less if the cash price is lower when his oil is delivered.

Norton noted that his potential top price is higher than it might have been, based on prevailing prices when he signed the deal with his oil company, because it allows him to take advantage of lower prices at the time of delivery. He said the protection against sharp price hikes is worth it.

“Who knows? In another 60 or 90 days, it could be right back up,” he said.

Py said cap prices carry a higher potential price per gallon because dealers not only buy an oil option to make sure they can get the supply, but also buy the right to sell oil at a set price to hedge against falling prices. That option costs dealers about 40 cents a gallon these days, Py said, but allows them to pass lower prices on to customers.

John Peters, president of Downeast Energy, said about half of his customers are on some sort of set-price plan. About two-thirds of those have capped prices, he said, and about a third went for fixed prices.

“We set our prices when crude oil was hitting an all-time record,” he said. “People were looking for some predictability.”

Many of those who opted for fixed prices decided to avoid the 30- to 40-cent-per-gallon surcharge for capped prices, he said, and “we’re hearing from them now.”

Downeast has already bought the options for the oil for those customers and can’t get out of its contracts, he said.

Peters said the company didn’t try to advise customers toward one plan or the other, but he would point out that he went for the capped-price plan for his home oil.

Peters said he thought prices might drop as quickly as they rose, but “I was wrong: Prices ran down a heck of a lot faster than it ran up.”

There’s no way to tell where prices are headed, as Fanjoy at SAD 17 found out the hard way.

Fanjoy said the school district didn’t have a fixed price last winter and “we were making (budget) cuts all year to keep oil in the tanks.”

Now, Fanjoy said, she’s looking at locking into a price for the budget year that starts July 1, 2009.

“I don’t think we’ll see it this low again,” she said, but “we don’t have a crystal ball.”