diff --git a/CHANGELOG.md b/CHANGELOG.md
index 63ce3d35c..ee96aaa62 100644
--- a/CHANGELOG.md
+++ b/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -37,6 +37,7 @@ should now look like:
 - [#1384](https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf/pull/1384): Fix datarace in apache input plugin.
 - [#1399](https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf/issues/1399): Add `read_repairs` statistics to riak plugin.
 - [#1405](https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf/issues/1405): Fix memory/connection leak in prometheus input plugin.
+- [#1378](https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf/issues/1378): Trim BOM from config file for Windows support.
 
 ## v1.0 beta 2 [2016-06-21]
 
diff --git a/internal/config/config.go b/internal/config/config.go
index 99db2e30d..b1be77d29 100644
--- a/internal/config/config.go
+++ b/internal/config/config.go
@@ -539,6 +539,13 @@ func (c *Config) LoadConfig(path string) error {
 	return nil
 }
 
+// trimBOM trims the Byte-Order-Marks from the beginning of the file.
+// this is for Windows compatability only.
+// see https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf/issues/1378
+func trimBOM(fileBytes []byte) []byte {
+	return bytes.Trim(fileBytes, "\xef\xbb\xbf")
+}
+
 // parseFile loads a TOML configuration from a provided path and
 // returns the AST produced from the TOML parser. When loading the file, it
 // will find environment variables and replace them.
@@ -547,6 +554,8 @@ func parseFile(fpath string) (*ast.Table, error) {
 	if err != nil {
 		return nil, err
 	}
+	// ugh windows why
+	contents = trimBOM(contents)
 
 	env_vars := envVarRe.FindAll(contents, -1)
 	for _, env_var := range env_vars {