TURNER – Letting customers off the hook for their heating oil contracts and taking a $40,000 loss for the year wasn’t easy, but it made sense to Don Blanchard.

“This business is way more for us, way more of a way of life than just the bottom line,” said the owner of Blanchard Cash Fuel in Turner. “I’ve had a lot of customers call to ask about canceling their contract. We did the numbers and found out we could do it, so we did.”

The company has canceled all 125 contracts it had with homeowners and other heating oil customers from Lewiston-Auburn to the north, past Canton and Hartford, Blanchard said. Those customers had locked in their contracts last summer, when heating oil was at its highest price ever.

“Some were locked in at $4.69 or $4.74, and then the price started going down,” Blanchard said.

He said he had two contracts with oil suppliers to guarantee oil for his customers. Those suppliers allowed him to buy up all of the oil he’d contracted for in November, for a little more than $4 per gallon.

Blanchard was already taking a loss, reselling that oil for $3 per gallon just to get rid of it.

“But it’s all gone now, and the price is down to $1.88 per gallon,” he said. “The market right now is trending down.”

Canceling the contracts means Blanchard will take a $40,000 loss this year, he said. “But a lot of the people here are our neighbors. They were hurting already, and maybe this will help a little.”

Blanchard knows his decision isn’t popular with other oil dealers.

“I know they’re not happy with us,” he said. “In fairness to them, I don’t think many would be able to do the same thing.”

Jamie Py, president of the Maine Oil Dealers’ Association, said it was the first time he’s seen a dealer cancel contracts.

“He can do it because he doesn’t have that many customers,” Py said. “If he made many more, he’d be losing a lot more than $40,000. A larger oil dealer would be faced with millions of dollars lost.”