I've Made Charts And Graphs That Should Finally Make It Clear

Judy T is right about me lik­ing charts and graphs. (Again from XKCD​.com.)

There’s just some­thing cool about numer­i­cal analy­sis (Wow, nerd over­load!) and using that info to bet­ter your­self. Plus hav­ing infor­ma­tion pre­sented graph­i­cally is just more intu­itively under­stood and eas­ier to com­pare than in writ­ten form.

Any­way, I’ve joined another “chart site.” It’s Gas​Tracker​.net, and it helps you track your gas expen­di­tures and mileage.

Aver­age MPG: 33.948
Cur­rent MPG Trend:+1.68
Over­all MPG Trend: +1.68
On aver­age, you usu­ally fill up 1.2 times a week. (About every 6 days).
You will prob­a­bly need to fill up again on/​around: Fri­day, Mar 6^th 2009

Aver­age PPG: $2.26
Cur­rent PPG Trend: $-0.15
Over­all PPG Trend: $-0.15
Aver­age Cost Per Fill Up $21.35
Total $$$ Spent on Gas since First Fill Up $42.71
Esti­mated Annual Fuel Cost (365 day period) $1465.12
Esti­mated Monthly Fuel Cost (30 day period) $120.42
Esti­mated Weekly Fuel Cost (7 day period) $28.1
Esti­mated Daily Fuel Cost $4.01
You are spend­ing about $0.17 PER HOUR on gas for this vehi­cle (24 hours a day)!

Admit­tedly, the actual charts and graphs on the site aren’t too impres­sive. With each car you track, there is a line graph for MPG and one for PPG (that’s Price Per Gal­lon). They are sim­ple JPGraphs and lack any ana­lyt­i­cal infor­ma­tion; they just present the raw data you put in. (Every time you fill up, you enter the num­ber of gal­lons you got, the price per gal­lon, and the num­ber of miles dri­ven since your last fill-​up.)

I just needed a good sys­tem to track the data over time, though, and I fig­ured this would do the trick. The site does have some analy­sis in tables below the two graphs. A sta­tis­tic I would like to see that I had to do on my own is price per mile. It isn’t auto­mat­i­cally avail­able, but I can fig­ure it fom each Fill-​Up Report as well as with my MPG and PPG trends. (I’m aver­ag­ing a lit­tle over $0.06/mile.)

As for bet­ter­ing myself through this, I don’t know how applic­a­ble the infor­ma­tion is. It’s not exact enough to help me con­sciously affect my mileage. The site is more of a “Oh, neat” after­thought to see how I’m doing.

Any­one else inter­ested in track­ing their gas habits? Or know of another charts and graphs web­site or sys­tem I would be inter­ested in?

Tags: Dinhternet