Every heating owner knows winter is busy. The question that matters for planning is how much busier, month by month, and whether your crew and phones can handle it. Statistics Canada's monthly natural gas distribution table (25-10-0059-01) gives a public answer for each gas province. This guide turns that table into a monthly demand index, sets it against crew capacity, and shows where the gaps fall, with worked numbers you can redo for your own company.
Why gas deliveries are a good demand proxy
Residential gas deliveries rise and fall with heating load. In a cold month, furnaces and boilers run longer, more homes need heat, and failures happen when equipment works hardest. The table reports deliveries to residential customers by province and month, in cubic metres, along with the number of residential customers.
It isn't perfect. It ignores homes heated by electricity, oil or wood, and it measures fuel burned, not calls made. But in gas-heated provinces it gives a clean, public shape of the year. Statistics Canada now lists the table as inactive with data through December 2025, so we use 2025 as our reference year.
Step 1: build a monthly demand index
Take your province's twelve monthly residential delivery figures for one year. Add them up, then divide each month by the total. The result is each month's share of the year's heating load. That is our calculation from the published figures; here it is for Ontario and Alberta in 2025.
| Month | Ontario share | Alberta share |
|---|---|---|
| January | 18.4% | 16.6% |
| February | 15.2% | 17.1% |
| March | 12.0% | 13.3% |
| April | 8.0% | 9.4% |
| May | 4.4% | 5.3% |
| June | 2.1% | 3.1% |
| July | 3.0% | 2.4% |
| August | 2.3% | 2.2% |
| September | 2.5% | 2.2% |
| October | 4.7% | 4.4% |
| November | 11.0% | 8.8% |
| December | 16.4% | 15.2% |
Two things stand out. Ontario's year peaks in January, while Alberta's 2025 peak came in February. And in both, the five months from November to March carry about seven-tenths of the year: 72.9% in Ontario and 71.0% in Alberta by our calculation.
Step 2: convert the index into an expected-demand curve
Now turn shares into something you can staff for. Divide each month's share by one-twelfth (8.33%). A month at 8.33% has an index of 1.0, an average month. Ontario's January, at 18.4%, has an index of about 2.2. Its June, at 2.1%, has an index of about 0.25.
Heating demand isn't the same as your workload, so don't use the index raw. Planned replacements, maintenance and cooling work spread across the year more evenly than no-heat calls do. A practical approach is to split your work into two parts:
- Weather-driven work (no-heat calls, emergency replacements): follows the index closely.
- Plannable work (planned replacements, maintenance, new installs, heat pump conversions): can be scheduled, so it shouldn't follow the index.
Your own records tell you the split. Many owners find that a large part of winter volume is weather-driven, but measure it rather than guess.
Step 3: set the curve against crew hours
Here is a worked example with illustrative numbers. Replace them with yours.
A company has five installers at 140 available hours each per month, so 700 hours. Last year it did 900 hours a month of weather-driven work on average across the year, plus whatever planned work it could fit. Weather-driven work follows the Ontario index:
- January: 900 × 2.2 = about 1,980 hours of weather-driven demand. Capacity is 700. The company can't meet it, and every planned install booked for January makes it worse.
- April: 900 × 0.96 = about 860 hours. Still over capacity, though closer.
- July: 900 × 0.36 = about 325 hours. That leaves roughly 375 hours free for planned work.
The shape is the lesson, not the exact numbers. Winter demand exceeds capacity by a wide margin, so the owner's real choices are about what to do with spare summer and shoulder hours, and how to avoid losing customers in winter.
Step 4: decide what to do in each part of the year
Once the gaps are visible, the plan writes itself in broad strokes.
Peak (index above about 1.5). Protect the phones. Add after-hours answering, keep paid search focused on emergency terms you can actually serve, and avoid booking plannable installs that crowd out no-heat calls.
Shoulders (index between about 0.5 and 1.5). Sell planned replacements and maintenance agreements. These months are where marketing spend usually works hardest, because you can serve what it brings in.
Trough (index below about 0.5). Fill spare hours with heat pump installs, cooling work, maintenance visits and pre-season tune-ups. Run training and hiring now, so new installers are ready before November.
Our capacity planning service turns these broad strokes into a dated calendar.
Step 5: watch the year-to-year swing
The shape is stable; the size isn't. By our calculation from the same table, Ontario's residential deliveries were about 7,278 million cubic metres in 2024 and about 8,310 million in 2025, roughly 14% more, while customer numbers grew under 1%. Most of that difference is weather.
That matters for planning in two ways. First, don't set staffing from a single mild winter. Second, build triggers rather than fixed dates: for example, "when weekly no-heat calls pass [number], switch on after-hours answering and raise the emergency ad budget to [amount]". Your own call log sets the numbers.
Step 6: compare provinces before you expand
If you are thinking about a second location, the index gives a quick comparison of seasonal pressure. By our calculation for 2025, the share of residential gas delivered from November to March was 77.9% in Manitoba, 74.7% in Saskatchewan, 72.9% in Ontario, 71.0% in Alberta and 68.1% in British Columbia. The ratio of the peak month to the quietest month ranged from about 13.4 in Manitoba to about 6.3 in BC.
A higher concentration means a harsher peak relative to the rest of the year. A Manitoba branch needs more flexible winter capacity than a coastal BC branch of the same size. Our provincial pages carry these figures alongside the heating mix.
Common mistakes
- Staffing for the average month. Average months barely exist in a heating business.
- Cutting marketing in the trough. Summer is when plannable work is cheapest to sell and easiest to serve.
- Treating the index as a forecast. It describes a typical shape. Cold snaps, warm spells and program changes move individual weeks.
- Ignoring electric and heat pump work. In provinces with little gas, or for companies with a large heat pump base, your own records must lead.
- Hiring in the peak. New installers trained in January learn under the worst conditions.
Doing it yourself
You can do the whole exercise in a spreadsheet in about an hour. Download your province's residential deliveries for the latest full year from the table, compute monthly shares and the index, and set them beside your own monthly hours and calls. Put the results on your KPI scorecard and revisit them at each quarterly review.
If you would rather we do it, the capacity plan is quoted in writing. We are a marketing and consulting service, not a contractor, and dispatch decisions stay with you. Call, text or email to talk it through.
Frequently asked questions
Why use gas deliveries instead of weather data?
Gas deliveries already combine the weather with how homes respond to it, in a single monthly number per province. Weather data is useful too, but it needs more work to turn into a demand signal.
Is the gas table still updated?
Statistics Canada now lists Table 25-10-0059-01 as inactive, with data through December 2025. It still gives a recent, complete picture of the seasonal shape, which changes slowly.
Does this work for heat pump and electric companies?
Partly. The shape of the cold season is similar, but heat pump companies also see summer cooling demand. In electric provinces, rely more on your own monthly call records.
How precise is this method?
It is a planning estimate, not a forecast. It tells you the shape of the year and the rough size of the peak; your own records and triggers handle the surprises.