pb's Forum Comments

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Thanks for letting us know, should be all set now.
posted by pb March 19 at 10:10 AM

Missing total purchase price from one fillup?

You should be set hufman, sorry about the glitch.
posted by pb March 17 at 4:28 PM

SMS fuelup went to wrong car

phydeaux, that's something we'd like to do eventually. But right now we're keeping the system as simple as possible. We don't want to add another option, because that's one more thing you can potentially get wrong in an already fairly complex system.

We're going to keep what we have running for a while and make sure things are solid before we move to another version. But multiple vehicles via SMS is on our long-range to-do list.
posted by pb March 16 at 8:52 PM

Missing total purchase price from one fillup?

hufman, thanks for the bug report. We'll get that fixed up tomorrow.

DTMAce, thanks for the help, but I think you missed the problem here. hufman was talking about the fuel-up total, not the mileage for that tank.
posted by pb March 16 at 8:47 PM

Suggestion: Save/Re-use Notes

Notes are completely free-form so people use them for all kinds of things. We're probably not likely to build saved notes into the site, but you might be able to come up with a system to make it easier. Maybe you could visit your profile page before each fuel-up, copy the text, go to the fuel-up page and then paste into the notes field.
posted by pb March 16 at 8:45 PM

Notes

You can go here to see them and once you add a fuel-up they'll show up on your vehicle profile. That's something we need to fix.
posted by pb March 14 at 4:19 PM

SMS fuelup went to wrong car

Yeah, you ran into a bug in the system with retired vehicles. I set your current active car to your primary car, and I'll look into that bug. Thanks for the heads up.
posted by pb March 10 at 9:15 AM

Mileage/KM Missing from 1 Fill Up.

I'd start here, and look at your odometer readings. Remove any that are duplicates.
posted by pb March 9 at 12:12 PM

Looks like you have some problems with your data. On October 6th, your odometer reading was 277267. On September 6th, your odometer reading was 277267--exactly the same. So Fuelly isn't sure what to do with that information. It can't calculate a difference in miles, because according to the data you didn't go anywhere.

So if you clean up some of those duplicate readings things should sort themselves out.
posted by pb March 9 at 12:09 PM

Fuel type selection

How about then using those tags to get comparative fuel economy between different octane rating and Fuel types?

Because of the lag that DTMAce mentioned, I'm not sure that we could auto-calculate differences based on tags. This might be something you could try in Excel after an export, though. Getting into differences in octane is just a bit more niche than we're going for with the site. I think I've seen some hypermiler sites that do track this level of detail so it might be worth looking around at alternatives.
posted by pb March 5 at 9:22 AM

Potential Savings Per Fuel-up

Well, it's not as easy as just turning it on. We have code set up for changes in MPG, and not for changes in L/100km. That's why we only show it if you're viewing the site in MPG. Definitely something we can consider putting together though, thanks for the suggestion.

If you switch the site to "US" briefly, you can see what changes in MPG look like.
posted by pb February 28 at 2:55 PM

Import broken?

Looks like the fuel-ups imported ok, but I see some duplicates that you might need to remove.

The six fuel-ups you added were dated between 4/24/2008 and 5/24/2008. So you just need to view your entire fuel-up log and go to that point in time. You'll find a link that says "View All Fuel-ups" on your vehicle profile page. Click that, and you'll get here. You'll see all of your latest fuel-ups there, and at the bottom of the page you can go back in time. As I write this you have four pages of fuel-ups, and to get back to 2008 fuel-ups you need to click on page 4, here. Scroll to the bottom of the page and you'll see the fuel-ups you imported.

The important thing to keep in mind is that we show fuel-ups in the order of the date of the fuel-up, not the date it was added.
posted by pb February 26 at 3:13 PM

Ranking Cars

This frequently comes up, we even have a FAQ about it: Why don't you list everything in order of best fuel economy?

We don't want to provide any incentive for putting in false data so we don't have leader boards. And we don't yet have enough participation to make averages tamper-proof, except perhaps in the case of the Jetta where we have high participation numbers.

I think we might be able to do top 10 lists someday if we have enough people reporting, but I don't think we're there yet.
posted by pb February 22 at 3:00 PM

car not showing up on browse vehicles?

Yep, you need to have at least three fuel-ups before your vehicle appears in the public sections of the site. We've found that average MPG is all over the map until there are a good number of fuel-ups. You can click "show all" on public pages to show even cars that don't have three fuel-ups.

There's a little more at the FAQ: Why isn't my car listed in the Browse Vehicles section of the site?
posted by pb February 19 at 3:32 PM

First fill in a new car

When I got my new car I just waited for the first fuel-up where I had all of the details I could enter. I can see how you'd want to be able to say that you've tracked every single tank from the beginning--but that initial tank isn't going to affect your average over the life of the car.
posted by pb February 18 at 8:57 AM

Fuelly banner on signature

I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with those sites. You might contact the admins there and ask them what's required to use an image in a signature.
posted by pb February 17 at 7:28 PM

Add Groups?

Thanks for the suggestion. We don't have groups in our immediate plans but we'll give it some thought.
posted by pb February 17 at 10:20 AM

Privacy

oh yeah, no harm in asking at all. There are different sharing comfort-levels, and we don't expect Fuelly to be right for everyone.
posted by pb February 16 at 9:28 PM

No we don't have any options for blocking your data from specific people. Everything you enter into Fuelly (except your email address) is public, even to non-members, so be sure you're comfortable with anyone seeing it. Keep in mind that you're not required to associated your Fuelly identity with your real life identity. But if you're still not comfortable with the data you're sharing here you'll probably want to switch to a private mileage tracker.
posted by pb February 16 at 6:28 AM

Incorrectly calculated MPG

On February 8th you entered a fuel-up with an odometer reading of 538. Fuelly is trying to put your fuel-ups in order by odometer reading, and it's calculating the MPG accordingly. If you edit your fuel-up for February 8th to include to correct odometer reading--I'm guessing you meant 10538--everything should sort itself out.
posted by pb February 9 at 10:55 AM

iphone experience

No, we don't have an iPhone app in the plans because we wouldn't get much more than we have now with Fuelly Mobile beyond offline fuel-ups.
posted by pb February 8 at 3:28 PM

Suggestion: BlackBerry/other smartphone App

Sorry, no Android app in the works. The mobile site works on an Android, though.
posted by pb February 8 at 3:26 PM

iphone experience

Thanks for the feedback and suggestions. I didn't realize the charts weren't working on the iPhone. I just updated the site so iPhone users will get PNG charts instead of Flash charts on vehicle profile pages, so you should see them now.

We still haven't decided what to do with location based data. We thought it would be interesting to put together a list of gas stations with the location data, or a map of who was fuelling where, but we haven't found the time to build anything with the data yet. It's a good time to revisit that. I'll talk with mathowie about whether we should just turn that off or not. I understand the annoyance (I need to click that too), so maybe we could add a profile preference to completely remove the prompt at least.

A tag cloud would be a nice addition. I'm not sure it should go on vehicle profile pages, but we should find some place for it.
posted by pb February 5 at 12:17 PM

Request for more detailed avg mpg graph

The software we use for graphing isn't the most advanced in the world, so we're a bit limited in what we can do. I can see why a line graph would be good, but I think the bar graph works better for monthly totals—it's probably just a personal preference. As you add more months of fuel-ups the bars do get skinnier. Check out my prius to see an example. They are comically large if you just have three months worth of data, but they work.
posted by pb February 2 at 8:13 PM

initial fill up

walkera, just go to your car profile page and look for the "Edit This Car" link. Then change from tripometer to odometer tracking and save. Then go back and edit your existing two fuel-ups, entering the odometer reading for each fuel-up.
posted by pb February 2 at 1:13 PM

Potential Fuel Savings Optimistic

Looks like a temporary glitch. I re-saved your last fuel-up and all is well again. Looks like the system didn't calculate a total for your latest fuel-up even though you had a price/gallon included.
posted by pb February 1 at 8:47 AM

Provision for fuel system cleaners

heh, what sort of source do you need Lekolite?
posted by pb January 31 at 9:53 AM

What are these engine options?

True. The issue exists because we trust our users to enter accurate information. We do try to limit the choices to those engines in the system that make sense. But we also give users the ability to choose any engine we have available with some extra clicks. Anyone can choose "other" from the list of available options, which gives them the choice of entering any engine in the system for their vehicle. 2 and 3 cylinder engines do exist, so we can't remove them altogether.

So a few folks with Jettas probably were poking around with the system and entered what they thought was correct--or maybe they were just messing around. It's all part of the trade-offs we live with. We've traded flexibility for potential inaccuracy.

By far we have more Jettas than any other vehicle in the system, so you're also going to find the most errors there because of sheer volume.
posted by pb January 31 at 7:23 AM

Provision for fuel system cleaners

This is what the notes feature is for. You can click "Add a note" on the left and put in your odometer reading at the time you added it, and any details about the additive. If you add it during a fuel-up, you could note it there in the notes too.

Notes are set up to handle any extra info that could affect your fuel economy.
posted by pb January 30 at 10:18 PM

What are these engine options?

Well, first of all, Fuelly relies on members for all of the data. If someone tells us they have Jetta with an L2 engine, that's great. We don't do any sort of checking. And once someone chooses a particular engine, it's then available for all members that follow.

When you see an L that generally means inline, or the cylinders in a straight line. As opposed to a V, which means that cylinders are in a V-shape.

Just figure that the number corresponds to the number of cylinders. Our system uses the notation L4 and L5 for Inline-four and Straight-five. Once you get higher than five cylinders, you're probably dealing with a V6 or V8.

If you see an H, that means it's a hybrid engine. And there are some other odd engines in there honestly I'm not sure what they mean. We started Fuelly with an existing database of models and engines, and we're following the notation we were handed. Honestly we're not car guys, so we're lucky we can tell an inline-four from a V6. I know I couldn't before I helped create this website.

Just think of the engine type as a rough guide here because it's up to users to pick the right one, and it's confusing.
posted by pb January 30 at 10:10 PM