mathowie's Forum Comments

Showing comments 1-30 of 136 by mathowie.

Gallons per 100 miles

Yeah, not a bad idea. I've read that paper about gallons/10,000 miles to further make the differences clear on lower MPG cars. We'll see if we can fit in these other kinds of metrics.
posted by mathowie January 4 at 2:24 PM

Facebook Connect

Ha! We were just talking seriously about adding this to fuelly as a new project today. Yeah, I agree that updates to facebook would be cool and I am guessing we could have this feature in a week or so, depending on how difficult the facebook platform is to work with.
posted by mathowie December 30 at 4:25 PM

Vegetable oil fuel type

The engine designations are technical in nature, not describing what you put in (we don't have "ethanol" as an engine type). Diesel is the fuel type on engines that can take SVO, and they can take Biodiesel of numerous formulations, but they can also take diesel so we call them diesels.

We will likely eventually let you put indicators on fuel ups that you bought a certain type of fuel, if you want to track things like MPG with biodiesel, SVO, and regular stuff.
posted by mathowie December 24 at 8:52 AM

Extended fuel mileage plots?

They must have changed it recently. When it launched it was definite set at 10,000 uses per day per google developer key.
posted by mathowie December 21 at 12:52 PM

Gas Prices down along with Mileage?

Well, it's also winter, so I'm seeing a reduction as the temps dip below freezing (and spinning wheels in snow for fun doesn't help either).
posted by mathowie December 19 at 8:31 PM

Extended fuel mileage plots?

Google chart only allows 10,000 uses per day. We get about that many pageviews daily, so I think it'd be out.
posted by mathowie December 16 at 8:43 PM

Global Fuel Price Tracking?

The problem is with currency conversion really. We let people store their fuel prices in local currencies, but we'd have to do real-time conversion for it to make sense. Also, we currently only track locations down to the country, and not by state/zip, etc. Services like gas buddy are more in tune with following gas prices very precisely.
posted by mathowie December 16 at 12:15 PM

..are my Tips THAT bad (lol)..

Yeah, I noticed a bunch of tips you've submitted over the past couple months and I haven't really approved them. There are a few reasons for this:

- The best tips are short and to the point and pass a smell test for believability. Yours kind of wander and I didn't trust about half the advice you offered and wanted to avoid people saying they were bad tips or wanting to respond.

- Formatting matters. I honestly have a hard time following you because you don't follow normal punctuation conventions -- you don't capitalize sentences and leave all sorts of weird periods, greater than/less than symbols, and other symbols in your writing. I get that maybe you're younger than me and this mimics how you talk but it's hard to read and understand what you're trying to say.

- In general, we only publish about 1/3 to 1/2 of the tips submitted, so it's not like everyone offering up advice is getting them posted.

(and you could have emailed us admins by using the contact link in the footer if you didn't want this explained in public)
posted by mathowie December 11 at 3:48 PM

Fuelly for Maintenance?

any recommendations in the meantime?

In the meantime, I'd say use notes and we'll eventually have scheduled reminders that you can set.
posted by mathowie December 2, 2008 at 10:17 PM

At the moment, we just have the open notes option (Add a Note page) where you can enter in the odometer reading and a short note. We may add categories for maintenance and then send out reminders on a schedule of your choosing.
posted by mathowie December 1, 2008 at 5:43 PM

100,000 fuel-ups!

Yeah, I was watching for that milestone (we hit 10,000 users early in the week as well). Now that we have more data about more cars, we'll be able to do a lot more things with it, so stay tuned.
posted by mathowie November 28, 2008 at 8:25 AM

Avg. Time Between Fill-ups

Yeah, not a bad idea. We're working on some annual estimate data for costs and fuel use and could certainly toss time between fuel ups in there.
posted by mathowie November 17, 2008 at 4:08 PM

Gallons per Mile?

If you notice on everyone's data, there is in fact a L/100km figure there, even if you have units set to US.

We'd prefer to stick with standards used by most people rather than introduce new metrics that don't make much sense to people.
posted by mathowie November 12, 2008 at 12:33 PM

Performance mods for economy

I have a TDI jetta VWJunky, what sort of mods would I get if I kept a light foot? Is it mostly just air filter and ECU changes?
posted by mathowie October 31, 2008 at 2:59 PM

US/Imperial mpg figures

We've held off on doing imperial gallons because fuel is no longer sold in those units (and hasn't been for some time, correct?). Our UK testers early on said that everyone has converted to L when filling up and 100km/L was the figure most often used around economy, just like the rest of the world, so we went with that.
posted by mathowie October 30, 2008 at 7:39 AM

Simple math

Whoa, I've never run into that before. Is this for very large gas tanks in a truck or something?

Unfortunately, the way most web sites take data is in the format of numbers, and throwing a plus sign in there can break a lot of things. If we can think of an easy way to do this, we'll think about adding it, but sticking with a calculator for now is probably be the way to go.
posted by mathowie October 27, 2008 at 8:31 PM

Add Eagle Talon as an automobile make and model please!

There's a screenshot of this in action on the FAQ.
posted by mathowie October 26, 2008 at 6:49 PM

On the Add a Car page, just select "Other" in makes and models and you'll get a blank form element where you can enter in any optional data.
posted by mathowie October 26, 2008 at 6:48 PM

couple of usability suggestions for "add a fuel up"

Not a bad idea on the first one, I agree that I follow the same path when filling up at the pump (I'm assuming you are talking about m.fuelly.com).

On the second point, it's likely that you entered a partial fill-up? Check out the previous answer to see why.
posted by mathowie October 23, 2008 at 7:20 PM

Site navigation problem

Yeah, it's a little too subtle. In the upper right, in that top blue bar, there's a little envelope icon, but that's really small.

I'll add a "Your Mail" to the left side nav.
posted by mathowie October 23, 2008 at 7:19 AM

suggestion: running averages of data?

1. Yeah, a running average would be nice. We have some pretty limited graphing toolkits currently, so I'll have to look at what is possible at the moment.

2. We don't do the date since people on roadtrips can have more than one fill up on a single day (it happened often and was reported as a bug), so we had to instead change it to every fuel up gets a spot on the graph.

3. We're hesitant to include price in too many metrics because it's not something you have tons of control over. We're trying to highlight the things you can change with behavior -- using a lighter foot will save you money and you'll get farther, but with the fluctuations in fuel prices, we don't want to highlight too many things based on price because the price is almost completely out of driver's control.

If you saved $50 this month, it's not because you changed driving habits for the better, it's because gas is 40 cents less per gallon, etc. and there's no way to predict that going forward.
posted by mathowie October 22, 2008 at 7:17 AM

Sort by Number of Fuel Ups

My thought is to just to not include anyone who hasn't logged into the site for the past two or three months.

I don't think someone's data isn't any less trustworthy or useful if they haven't used the site recently and we don't want to create a situation where we are forcing people to revisit or use or login to the site just to stay visible. People are free to come and go as they please, and the stuff they leave around here is still quite useful to everyone else in building averages.

Maybe I'm missing something obvious: why do you think last login date would make an important consideration for filtering?
posted by mathowie October 21, 2008 at 2:06 PM

Odometer reading on recent fuel ups

Unfortunately, there's not enough room in the table to show it on the recent spot. We might redo it in the future though.
posted by mathowie October 21, 2008 at 1:42 PM

Option for km/L

I'm pretty sure we're going to stick with L/100km, since that's a worldwide standard much in the same way mpg is to Americans. While it might be interesting to know what km/L is (you can get it from a quick google conversion) for the sake of curiosity, that figure isn't in common use anywhere, so it's not going to be very useful.
posted by mathowie October 21, 2008 at 9:01 AM

Scangauge II

Yeah, I got one a couple months ago and have been enjoying using it. I've been meaning to write up a review of it with some of my data, maybe I'll finally get that done this week and post it.
posted by mathowie October 19, 2008 at 8:20 PM

Hydrogen or H2O Systems

They say 100% satisfaction guaranteed on their site. Have you tried asking for a full 100% refund?

I'd be interested in how hard it is to get your money back for a phony product like this.
posted by mathowie October 6, 2008 at 9:37 PM

Track Everything

Yes, we're working on this now and have covered it in the past.
posted by mathowie September 30, 2008 at 10:44 AM

Monthly fuel expense

That's not a bad idea. We've been reluctant to do much with pricing since we currently just support US dollars (we're working on other currencies), and also because fuel prices are very much up and down right now it's tough to link driving habits with costs.

At the beginning of the summer, I was paying well over $4/gallon of fuel, but now it's over 50 cents cheaper, but my fuel economy could be worse and I'd still be saving money due to the changing gas prices.
posted by mathowie September 29, 2008 at 6:57 PM

Dual Tank

It shouldn't make any difference, as long as you fill them up every time you fill up.
posted by mathowie September 22, 2008 at 4:28 PM

How do invite ?

We have a FAQ item about this. Basically, ask them to join the site and send them your userpage, so they can add you as a friend by clicking the link.
posted by mathowie September 20, 2008 at 4:48 PM