Leaving for Florida with an oil-heated house up here
The sentence in your homeowners policy
The standard homeowners form excludes damage from frozen plumbing unless you used reasonable care to do one of two things: maintain heat in the building, or shut off the water and drain the pipes and appliances. The Massachusetts Division of Insurance put it more bluntly in January 2026: most policies cover a burst pipe "only if the home was properly heated and not left unoccupied."
If a pipe splits in February, your delivery tickets and the automatic delivery arrangement are what show you used reasonable care to keep the heat on.
Call your agent before you go and ask how your policy treats a house that sits unoccupied for the season. The Insurance Information Institute says most policies have a clause that limits or excludes coverage after 30 to 60 days. Policies differ on what counts, so ask about yours.
Why will-call does not work from Florida
Will-call means you read the gauge and you phone in the order. The gauge is in the basement in Weymouth and you are in Lake Worth. A plan that depends on you remembering to call, or on a neighbor remembering to look, tends to fail in the coldest week, when the oil goes fastest.
Switch to automatic delivery for the months you are away. The dealer schedules it from degree days, which is a running measure of how cold it has been, and from how fast your house has burned oil in the past.
Tell the dealer three things
Tell them the dates you are gone. Tell them where the thermostat will be set. A house held at 55 burns less than it did last winter at 68, and a driver who finds the tank fuller than expected should know that is why and not go looking for a problem. And tell them who has a key.
The dealer on this line fills before you leave and delivers automatically while you are away. Ask whether they will hold a key or do a no-heat check, and what that costs.
Before you lock the door
Have the burner cleaned. A burner that quits is as likely as an empty tank to leave the house cold, and a cleaning in the fall is cheaper than a no-heat call in January with nobody home to make it.
Fill the tank the week you leave, not a month before.
Set the thermostat at 55 or higher. Travelers and the Red Cross both use that number. The thermostat hangs on an inside wall, and the pipes that freeze are in outside walls and over the garage, where it runs colder.
Ask the technician who cleans the burner whether the water main can be shut off while you are away. With forced hot air it usually can, and then a frozen pipe can only leak what was already in it. Steam boilers and some hot-water boilers need the supply left on.
Arrange for the driveway and the path to the fill pipe to be plowed. A driver who cannot reach the fill pipe skips the stop.
Someone has to be able to get in
Leave a key with a neighbor or a relative in town and give that person's name and number to the dealer. If the heat fails, somebody has to open the door for the technician.
A way to find out sooner helps. A Wi-Fi thermostat can send a low-temperature alert to your phone. A tank monitor reads the oil level and texts you when it drops to a quarter.
If you already left
It can all be done by phone. Someone local lets the technician in to look at the tank and the burner, and the fill and the automatic schedule are set up from there. If your old company told you by text that it will not deliver this year, read what a refusal means first, then call.