AP: Prices Up, Gas Consumption Down
In The Press…
Our Press Release from yesterday has wound up in some very interesting places, including some of the major energy related blogs like GreenCarCongress.com. Here’s a sample:
- GreenCarCongress.com
- Eco-Portal.com
- MarketWatch
- CNBC
- Yahoo Finance - Canada
- FOX19 - Cincinnati
- The Auto Channel
We sent this press release out with the help of PRNewswire using eReleases, a Maryland based PR company that helps small businesses like ours get their press releases distributed on a national level.
If you enjoy FuelClinic and would like to help grow our free website, please recommend it to your friends, post a note about it to your favorite social websites, or follow any of the links above and leave a comment if available.
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#1 Best Fuel Saving Tip Ever - “Simmer Down Now!”
It seems I’m always getting asked “Doc, what’s the best way to improve my fuel mileage?” - and the simple answer is the same as it always way: Simmer Down Now!
Source: http://www.progressive.com/auto-tech/hypermiling.aspx
Clearly, hypermilers are getting great results with their efforts, says energy-efficiency expert Brian Duddy, senior program manager at the Golisano Institute for Sustainability at Rochester Institute of Technology. Ultimately, it comes down to these fundamentals of driving: Go easy. Slow down. “The biggest way to save on fuel is reducing your speed,” he says. “Many experts, including those from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, have demonstrated that, for most vehicles, optimal fuel economy decreases rapidly at speeds over 60 mph. With gas at over $4 a gallon, for every 5 mph you drive over 60, you’re paying an additional 30 cents per gallon for gas.”
Notice a nice link to my favorite website at the bottom of that article? :)
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From Zero to a Million Miles - Drivers Use Website to Help Save Fuel
ORLANDO, FL, Aug. 28, 2008 – With all eyes on gas prices and fuel mileage ratings, cost conscious consumers are taking control of their own “miles per gallon” by tracking their real-world fuel consumption while learning more efficient driving habits.
Since its public debut in May 2008, FuelClinic.com has assisted drivers from all over the world to understand their fuel consumption and help find real methods to reduce it. Today the FuelClinic team celebrates a significant milestone as members of the website have logged over one million miles of fuel economy records.
“People join the website for a variety of reasons” says Michael Bragg, creator of FuelClinic. “Most want to track their actual fuel usage and spending, some want to reduce their ‘carbon footprint’, and then there is a growing group of small business owners who are using the site to help manage their fleet fuel costs.”
With their fuel pump receipts and odometer readings, members are able to enter their information into the website. FuelClinic then creates a variety of metrics, charts and graphs that illustrate spending habits and fuel costs at a glance. Members can easily compare the different vehicles in their account.
“I think the idea for this site is really wonderful. It is one of those things that seems so obvious to do it is surprising no one had before. I guess things had to reach a point where people were just really paying attention to mileage” said Jonathan from Chicago, who has been using FuelClinic to track his mileage for just over a month.
This million mile mark is just the beginning according to Mr. Bragg, who created the website based on software he had written to track his own fuel consumption. “I’m constantly working on new ways to expose trends in the data, finding ways to make the user interface smoother, and growing the selection of reports available” said Mr. Bragg.
FuelClinic.com is available to everyone on the Internet at www.fuelclinic.com. Visitors can “test-drive” the website before deciding to sign-up. Creating an account is free, and allows anyone to track up to three vehicles. For a limited time, small businesses can create a free account, and request additional vehicles as needed by emailing feedback@fuelclinic.com.
If you’d like more information about this topic, or to schedule an interview, please contact Rachel Gaffney at rachel.gaffney@fuelclinic.com or via phone 407-637-5782.
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Fuelishness! Feed
- Oil prices climbed for a third day Wednesday as fears deepened that Tropical Storm Gustav could enter the Gulf of Mexico as a powerful hurricane and disrupt oil and natural gas production.
- A divided Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors voted Tuesday in support of offshore drilling, after an impassioned daylong hearing in which this year’s record gas prices trumped the memory of a disastrous oil spill.
- Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo said the department is considering programs that would cut down on fuel usage, including purchasing flex-fuel vehicles in the future and having officers share vehicles.
- Swift Enterprises. The company, which is based in Indiana, has developed a renewable jet fuel made from landfill waste, sorghum, algae, woodchips, and other feedstocks.
- Scientists are looking into Helium-3, which is found in abundance on the moon, as an alternative fuel. Helium-3 is non-radioactive fuel source. It is a cleaner and safer energy source compared to other nuclear fuels. Though Helium-3 has been found on earth, there isn’t much of it. Moon rocks however, brought back to earth have provided evidence of good amounts of Helium-3 on the moon.
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Baby’s Got a New Pair of Shoes
The server upgrade that I mentioned previously is now complete. There are some remaining email problems related to the change in DNS, but they should straighten themselves out in less than a day.
You should notice a marked performance improvement when using the site. Now I can concentrate on improving functionality instead of running around pulling my hair out and trying to band-aid things back together. I’m happy to have the tech team at HostMySite.com backing me up on this - their customer support is top-notch.
Please let me know if you are having _any_ issues with the site after this upgrade.
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FuelClinic Server Upgrade Soon…
Apparently it’s about time to upgrade the hosting platform for FuelClinic. Response time is increasingly slower when under load, database connections are starting to slow, and the websites “uptime” statistics are slipping. I’ve been working with the hosting company to help mitigate these problems, but at some point it’s apparent that FuelClinic has grown out of it’s baby shoes. Plans are in motion to move to a system with better resources. Thanks for your patience.
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“State of the FuelClinic” - Update & Thank You!
Work continues on completing the first phase of FuelClinic. I’ve made good progress in the last two weeks, standardizing the core computational code, fixing some bug, strengthening security, and simplifying the wiring under the hood. There is still so much more to do…
But I wanted to take this chance to say Thank You!
Every day you add thousands of miles worth of real-world MPG data. We are approaching one million miles of mileage data collected. As a group, we’ve purchased over 38,000 US gallons of fuel - and spent over $140,000 USD in 4,400 fuel purchases in the last few months…
These are not record setting numbers, but are a strong sign that the website is a budding success. The usage trends continue to climb. Even though I have cut my advertising budget to a thin fraction of what I had running in the early summer, I continue to see a steady number of new users signing up every day - I’m thinking that these are from referrals from current users… website ”marketing” doesn’t get any better than that! Thank You to those who have referred your friends to this website!
And a very special Thank You to those users who take the time to send me feedback emails - concerning bugs, difficult to understand interfaces, or improvements to the site. I love fixing bugs, but can’t find them all myself. I really appreciate you taking the time to tell me about the ones you find.
Onward!
- Doc
PS: It’s not exactly easy to concentrate on coding when the Olympics are so good!
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NozzleRage
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Gallup Poll: U.S. Congress, Gouging Blamed Equally for Gas Prices
Source: Gallup Today’s extremely high gas prices are causing many Americans financial hardship. Some of the explanations offered for the surge in prices seem to make sense, including an increase in global demand for oil, a lack of energy conservation by American consumers, and even a failure to increase domestic oil supplies. Still, it is hard to argue that global supply and demand alone changed so significantly during the first half of this year as to justify prices at the pump of $4 a gallon.
Given this basic lack of face validity associated with the argument that free-market forces are the most important reason for record gas prices, many Americans are looking to other places in order to place blame. Not surprisingly, the oil companies and the international oil cartel (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) tend to top the consumers’ list. However, it appears that the high gas price situation has persisted for so long that many Americans now believe Congress and the Bush administration also deserve a large part of the blame simply because they haven’t acted to ameliorate the gas price situation.
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“$4-a-gallon gasoline has clearly killed demand”
A day after plunging as much as $5 a barrel in a dramatic sell-off, crude continued its downward trend Tuesday as traders sold oil contracts on the belief that prices are still too high in relation to demand and have further room to fall.
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Solar + Splitting H20 + Fuel Cell = unlimited 24/7 electrical power
Some exciting news out of MIT, as published in Science Magazine and reported around the world online in the last few days… years away from being a commercial product, but an exciting development for the future of solar energy.
Source: Guardian UK
Daniel Nocera, a chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has developed a catalyst made from cobalt and phosphorus that can split water at room temperature, a technique he describes in the journal Science. “I’m using cheap, Earth-abundant materials that you can mass-manufacture. As long as you can charge the surface, you can create the catalyst and it doesn’t get any cheaper than that.”
…At night, the hydrogen and oxygen could be recombined in a fuel cell to produce an electrical current to power a home or recharge an electric car. “So I’ve made your house a gas station and a power station. It’s all enabled because we can use light plus water to make a chemical fuel, which is hydrogen and oxygen.”
With Daniel Nocera’s and Matthew Kanan’s new catalyst, homeowners could use their solar panels during the day to power their home, while also using the energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen for storage. At night, the stored hydrogen and oxygen could be recombined using a fuel cell to generate power while the solar panels are inactive. Graphic / Patrick Gillooly, MIT
Source: Physorg.com
Requiring nothing but abundant, non-toxic natural materials, this discovery could unlock the most potent, carbon-free energy source of all: the sun. “This is the nirvana of what we’ve been talking about for years,” said MIT’s Daniel Nocera, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Energy at MIT and senior author of a paper describing the work in the July 31 issue of Science. “Solar power has always been a limited, far-off solution. Now we can seriously think about solar power as unlimited and soon.”
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