Heating season is a calendar, not a meeting. The first cold week is when a customer notices the gauge, the regulator, and the path to the tank. The Propane Education & Research Council tells that customer to get the system looked at by a qualified professional. See PERC's article Getting Your Propane System Inspected.
The customer-facing advice is clear. The office problem is different. Who walked the tank. What they saw. Whether the photo is still on a phone that went through the wash.
We built TankSpotter so that walk has a dated record. If you run the trucks, this page is for you.
What PERC is actually saying
PERC's inspection article is written for the household. It tells the customer to expect a qualified person to look at the system, not to improvise with a flashlight and a guess. PERC also publishes a Gas Check inspection handbook for marketers. Gas Check is a voluntary set of guidelines for documenting a residential or small commercial vapor system. It is not a license. It is not a substitute for the file your insurer or fire marshal asks to see.
That split matters this week. The customer heard "get it inspected." Your crew already walks tanks all fall. The gap is the record of the walk, not the pep talk.
A training transcript answers a different question. It shows a person sat through a course. It does not show they stood at this tank, on this date, and looked at this regulator. Do not put the tank walk in the training drawer and call it done.
What the fall walk actually is
A fall walk is the visual pass before the load comes on: tank condition, regulator location, snow and equipment access, vents, and anything that will be a problem once the grass is gone and the plow is out. Your shop already has a way you do that. The question is whether a second person can reconstruct it in March.
If the only copy lives in a driver's camera roll, you will feel it the first time someone asks who signed the sheet. If the only copy is a paper checklist in the glove box, you will feel it when that truck is in the shop.
PERC's winter-prep materials for marketers also remind customers to keep tanks, regulators, and access paths clear, and to know how to shut the supply valve. That is customer work. Your work is to show you were there, you looked, and you wrote it down.
What a record that holds looks like
A file that holds up has four parts you can find without a scavenger hunt.
1. The tank, identified. Serial, location, customer. Not "the green one on the hill." 2. The walk. Date, name, and what was looked at. A photo beats a memory. 3. The follow-up. If something was wrong, what you did, or who you handed it to. 4. A place the office can open without calling the driver who has the day off.
That is inspection paperwork. It sits next to service tickets. It does not sit in the training LMS.
TankSpotter is a Field Worker OS. The Safety side is the inspection and photo trail. The Training side is a different pillar. Keep them next to each other. Do not mash them into one folder named "compliance" and hope an auditor picks the right PDF.
What to do Monday morning
You do not need a new policy to start.
1. Pull last fall's tank-walk stack. Pick five accounts at random. Can you name who walked each tank and on what date. 2. Ask a dispatcher who did not do the walks to find those five in whatever system you use. Time it. 3. Read PERC's inspection article and the Gas Check handbook description. Mark what your crew already captures and what only lives in someone's head. 4. Write one owner for the fall walk file. If two people both think the other one owns it, nobody does.
If those five accounts take more than a few minutes, you already know the work.
Keep the walk on the phone that did the work
TankSpotter is a subscription for propane operators who want the walk, the photo, the GPS, and the timestamp in one place the office can open. The driver records the tank while they are there. The office does not retype it on Monday from a text thread.
We do not inspect your tanks for you. We do not stand in for a qualified technician. Your people still do the walk. The product is the record.
Want to see the inspection trail next to the rest of the day's work. Request a TankSpotter demo.
This page is general information for propane operators in the United States. It is not legal advice. Confirm your state's rules, your insurer's list, and the current PERC materials before you treat any example here as your requirement. Safety guidance on inspections is PERC's, at propane.com.