What is wet hosing?

In wet hosing, the fuel goes from the truck's tank, through its pump, meter and hose, into the machine's own tank. Nobody drives the equipment to a fuel station, and there's no storage tank on site to fill and draw from.

The truck is usually a fuel truck or a tank wagon with a metered hose reel, and the person on the hose is called a fueler, fuel tech or wet hose driver depending on the company. Many fuelers work nights or between shifts, so the equipment is full when the crew needs it.

Wet hosing comes up wherever a lot of equipment burns fuel on the same site for weeks at a time and can't easily leave:

• Frac pads. Pumps, blenders, generators and light towers that run all shift and get topped off on a loop. See frac and rig fueling.
• Drilling rigs. Generators, boilers, heaters and light plants on a daily rotation.
• Construction and pipeline jobs. Excavators, dozers and generators spread along a site or a right-of-way.
• Fleet yards. Trucks filled overnight where they park, ready for the morning.

A bulk delivery drops a load into a storage tank on site. It's one stop, one meter reading and one ticket. What happens to the fuel after that is up to whoever pumps from the tank.

Wet hosing is the opposite. A single shift can mean dozens of fills, each into a different unit. On a busy location several contractors run equipment side by side, so the fills on one sheet often belong to different customers. The same unit can be filled five or six times in a night.

That's why wet hosing is mostly a record-keeping problem once the fuel is in the tank. Every fill has to be written down at the machine, with the right unit and the right customer, or the month-end bill won't add up.

For each fill, the fueler needs:

• Unit number. Exactly as it's painted on the machine.
• Location or pad. The name the office uses on invoices, spelled the same way every time.
• Contractor or customer. Who pays for these gallons. The bill is built on this column.
• Fuel type. ULSD, Dyed Diesel, DEF, Gasoline and Jet A. It matters when they bill at different rates.
• Gallons. From the meter, to the decimal it shows.
• Time. Optional, but it settles questions about shift change later.

Once per shift, write down the truck, the fueler, the date, day or night, and how much fuel was on the truck at the start. With the starting load, the fueler can tell how much should be left and catch a missed line before the shift ends.

On paper, that's a log sheet with a row per fill. Our free fuel delivery log template has those columns, as a PDF or an Excel file.

• The same unit written three ways. P-12, P12 and Pump 12 look like three machines when someone totals them.
• A contractor spelled differently each night. Totals per customer come out short until someone cleans up the names.
• Sheets that never make it to the office. A log left in a truck is a night of fuel nobody bills.
• Typing it all up again. Someone in the office reads the handwriting and retypes every line.
• A disputed number already on the invoice. If a customer questions a fill, it has to be credited back later.

Fuel Relay is a fuel log for wet hose crews. The fueler logs each fill on an Android phone: unit, location, contractor and gallons, typed or spoken one field at a time. The app suggests the units, places and contractors that fueler has logged before, so the fifth fill of the same pump takes a few taps and is spelled the same way.

Every fill saves on the phone with no signal and sends itself when the phone finds coverage. The app keeps the fuel left on the truck by subtracting each fill from the starting load.

In the office, each shift log shows up in the dashboard to review or send back with a note. Pick a date range and the dashboard totals the gallons per contractor across every fueler and truck, ready to export as a PDF, CSV or Excel file. If your customers want fuel charged to AFE numbers, the office can code each fill to an AFE. And if you want the invoice made too, see fuel delivery invoices.

The full picture is on the oilfield fuel delivery software page, and the price per fueler is on pricing.