pb's Forum Comments
Showing comments 211-240 of 1312 by pb.
Where is BMW 123d ?
Yeah, it had been added but not approved by an administrator yet. Sometimes they fall through the cracks and you can just send us a note to ask why something hasn't been approved. It's there now.
posted by pb November 28, 2011 at 7:43 AM
Combine vehicles for Stats ..
No this doesn't exist. It's an interesting idea, something we'll think about. We don't really have a place for something like that so it would require some retooling of the site. It might be interesting to see those kinds of stats.
posted by pb November 28, 2011 at 7:40 AM
Lost three fills!
Sorry you ran into a problem with the site. For some reason or another, you visited a non-public version of Fuelly at new.fuelly.com and entered your fuel-ups there. We're currently using that domain for testing new servers and accidentally left it open to the public for a while.
Then you visited www.fuelly.com and your fuel-ups weren't there. We sincerely apologize for the misunderstanding. My guess is that you had new.fuelly.com bookmarked for some reason. We have used that domain in the past for testing, so it's possible you bookmarked it then.
No data was lost. Your data was safe and sound at our testing server. But we shouldn't have had that open to the public in the first place. Please check your bookmarks and update if that's the case, and we'll make sure this doesn't happen again.
posted by pb November 26, 2011 at 6:41 AM
Why is the "main" avg L/100KM wrong?
Oh, I see now. The total litres is off. I didn't catch that when I was looking at it.
You marked your first fuel-up as missed for some reason. (Maybe you initially had odometer tracking on?) There's no reason to do that. You only need to mark it as missed if you're using odometer tracking and you missed a reading in a series of readings.
If you remove that from for your first fuel-up you should be set.
posted by pb November 25, 2011 at 9:14 PM
I'd say give it some time. You've only added two fuel-ups. We don't even show vehicles in public browsing until they have three fuel-ups. Your numbers are either going to be very high or very low until you have a half-dozen fuel-ups or so.
As for how the number was calculated: you've driven a total 879.02 km. You've put in a total of 36.4 litres. Plug those numbers into an independent online calculator like this one and you get 4.1 L/100km. Your average will even out once you have more fuel-ups.
posted by pb November 25, 2011 at 6:05 PM
Incorrect currency
Thanks for the heads up—didn't know. We'll get that changed soon.
posted by pb November 24, 2011 at 2:14 PM
Partial Fuel Up - Calc Improvement suggestion
Keep in mind that all fills, including partials are included in your overall average. So we're talking about the individual MPG averages that you see when you add a fuel-up.
The problem is that Fuelly calculates that MPG average using the difference from full. So if you start including partials in that calculation, your tank size is changing. Imagine adding five or six partials in a row, there's no way to get a sense of the size of the tank. Without that difference from full, there's no way to calculate an individual MPG for a particular fuel-up.
I completely understand the frustration of filling up once or twice and not seeing any new numbers. That's frustrating. But we'd rather have that frustration than provide misleading numbers.
Here's the FAQ we have about this with more info: Why do I have to fill the tank all the way up every time I buy fuel?
posted by pb November 23, 2011 at 4:17 PM
H4 or L4
Here's the relevant FAQ: What do the engine type abbreviations such as L4 and V6 mean?
In your case you chose H4 when you created the vehicle. Not sure why offhand, maybe someone else had chosen that before you by mistake. Pretty sure the Vectra has a standard 4-cylinder engine.
Keep in mind that people can choose to say their car has any type of engine in our system and they don't always get it right.
posted by pb November 23, 2011 at 12:46 PM
Problems with fill ups per month
Just took a closer look at the dashboard trend lines and we were including fuel-ups with 0 mpg there. The zero points weren't mapped, but they were throwing things off a bit. The trend lines should look a little better now.
posted by pb November 21, 2011 at 2:26 PM
ok, keep in mind that for this statistic a month is 30 days. So I'll show you how we calculated this for your car.
Your first fuel-up was on Oct. 10th. Your last fuel-up was on Nov 21st. That's 42 days. You've filled up six times. So we ask: is 42 closer to 1 month or 2 months? It's closer to 1 month, so you're averaging six fuel-ups per rough month (30 days).
Now, you only have six fuel-ups to work with. So as you add more fuel-ups, this method of calculation will make more sense. If you're dealing with years of data, a few days of rounding here and there won't mean very much. But I understand the confusion when you're looking at a limited set like this. You say, "I've filled up three times in October and three times in November, that's three per month." And you're right. But as you take the long view, a month makes more sense as a span of time.
Maybe the difference you're seeing between the dashboard and vehicle stat page is our use of a running average on the dashboard and total average on vehicle pages.
posted by pb November 21, 2011 at 1:37 PM
Viewing in km/L
Yeah, L/100km isn't going anywhere. It is used quite a bit. And yeah, we realized that 'metric' and 'metric 2' were a little too mysterious.
Glad it's working so far!
posted by pb November 21, 2011 at 8:25 AM
MPG not calculating
Before Fuelly can calculate MPG for individual fuel-ups, it needs a full tank to work from. Fuelly calculates an individual fuel-up MPG by using the difference from full. Your first fuel-up was marked as a partial, so Fuelly can't calculate an MPG for that fuel-up or the next one. The fuel-up you just added was full, so on your next full fuel-up you'll get an MPG calculation. Here's more info: Why do I have to fill the tank all the way up every time I buy fuel?
And here are some other scenarios where you might not get a calculated MPG for a particular fuel-up: Why doesn't my fuel-up have a calculated MPG (L/100km)?
posted by pb November 18, 2011 at 1:22 PM
MG ZS
Here's the relevant FAQ: Why isn't my car listed in the Browse Vehicles section of the site?
In this case, the last paragraph applies to you:
If you entered your vehicle by selecting 'Other' from the list of models, it might still need to be approved by an administrator for public browsing. Keep in mind that we don't approve all 'Other' models, so contact us if you have a question about a specific case.
So I just approved MG ZS on our side. It should show up soon on the site.
posted by pb November 14, 2011 at 4:27 PM
km/l measure
Yeah, we currently have avg km/L as a mini-stat. We're working on adding km/L to all features of the site.
posted by pb November 13, 2011 at 5:55 PM
Can't see my car in it's category
Nah, it's ok. One of the things we found is that cars with less than three fuel-ups have either very high or very low fuel economy numbers that aren't useful for comparisons. So we only show cars with three or more fuel-ups in public browsing by default. You found the 'show all' link that shows all cars even if they don't have any fuel-ups yet, so you can use that show every car in the system.
Here's more info: Why isn't my car listed in the Browse Vehicles section of the site?
posted by pb November 11, 2011 at 8:18 AM
View model averages?
No, we don't have anything like that on the motorcycle side. We might be getting to the point where there's enough tracking now to do it, though. We'll give it some thought.
posted by pb November 9, 2011 at 3:32 PM
One problem we have with motorcycles is there aren't as many being tracked as cars. So there are some differences between the two.
If we have enough data, we do show the graphs. Here's a model page with a graph of averages: Honda vfr800 interceptor.
We like the graphs better than a single number because it gives you a better feel for the range of fuel economy people are getting. And you can get a quick sense of the most common average by looking at the highest point on the graph.
Is that what you were looking for?
posted by pb November 9, 2011 at 2:53 PM
New feature - co2 emissions report
Yeah, we can think about this. Thanks for the link.
Honestly, this is the first request we've had related to co2 emissions. I'm not positive it's an important aspect to people yet. Maybe it is outside the US? When I get together with friends and family we always talk MPG, not emissions. But I do think it's something we could potentially help people think about.
posted by pb November 9, 2011 at 8:03 AM
km/l measure
I know it's a hassle to convert all the time, but I thought I'd mention it. Google is my favorite tool for converting between units. Here's how you'd convert 7 L/100km to km/L:
Google: 7 L/100km in km/L
That gives you the answer at the top of the page.
posted by pb November 6, 2011 at 6:08 PM
Sorry, yes, it is a major change to add a new unit for fuel economy to the site. We can't simply add it one place and not another. We'd need to add it across the board.
It's something we'd like to do someday, but it will require significant work under the hood to make it happen.
posted by pb November 6, 2011 at 5:29 PM
View All Notes
Yeah, as BDC said you can definitely do this with tags if you give your notes a unique tag. But I can see that it might be helpful to have a notes-only view. I think we can add this to the to-do list.
posted by pb November 1, 2011 at 8:11 PM
MiniStat Idea - Avg Miles / Day, Week, Month
Yeah I think that would be a great addition. We'll add it to our to do list.
posted by pb October 28, 2011 at 12:32 PM
Graph problems again!
People enter fuel-ups out of order all the time. They often start with the most recent and work their way back through their receipts. The entry date really shouldn't be used for any sort of sorting. I don't think that wouldn't solve it.
I know it's a slight hassle, but I think including the time will fix this.
posted by pb October 24, 2011 at 10:02 PM
Fuel-up time has been available for a long time, and yes it's already included in the the export. Not as a new field, but as part of the fuelup_date field.
posted by pb October 24, 2011 at 7:04 PM
ok, I think I found a way to address this going forward. From now on you can change the order of fuel-ups on the graph by giving fuel-ups on the same day a different fuel-up time. Normally when you add two fuel-ups on the same day the time is recorded as exactly the same. (Or, more precisely, the time isn't considered important.) If you go in and edit a fuel-up you have the option to set a time as well. If you set a later time for one of your same day fuel-ups, it will appear in the correct order on the graph.
I went ahead and set the time of your 2nd fuel-up on Oct 23rd '12:00 PM'. (You can change to to the correct time if you recorded it/remember it.) That should make your graph line up the way you want it too. It's an extra step for same-day fuel-ups but it will help make everything more accurate if you want to do it.
posted by pb October 24, 2011 at 1:28 PM
Average MPG higher than Best MPG?
Yep, what MMUK said. Overall average is calculated by using total distance driven and total fuel volume filled. So if you have many partial tanks it's possible to have an overall average that's greater than any single calculated MPG/L100km for an individual fuel-up.
This doesn't happen much once a vehicle has a dozen or so full fuel-ups.
posted by pb October 23, 2011 at 5:01 PM
Fuelly API
Looks like Google Fusion will accept a CSV file. You could try using a Fuelly export file.
posted by pb October 21, 2011 at 9:53 AM
phoebebright, you could ask people to upload an export of their fuelly data. All data is public here, so you could also take jcrawford27's approach and scrape the site. If you're using PHP you could even try his code.
posted by pb October 19, 2011 at 10:00 AM
5 Failed Logins requires captcha
If you fail five login attempts you'll need to fill in a captcha when you log in for 24 hours. It should reset after that.
We know it's a hassle to fill out a captcha, but we don't want anyone to be able to automate requesting login info. I know you're working on a site scraper so you are sending automated requests to Fuelly pretty regularly. For people using the site normally I don't think this is a problem.
posted by pb October 17, 2011 at 10:30 AM
Fuelly Requests
SolarBronco, check out Fuelly Mobile and adding fuel-ups via text message.
posted by pb October 17, 2011 at 8:28 AM