Tech with a twist of lime! & FLHybrid Club.

Extremely quick update today, I left home at 06:45 Eastern so that I could make my meeting on time.  First, I drove right off the map (it is time to get My Prius' maps updated) when I realized the road I wanted to take had changed paths slightly.  I turned around and got back on the right track, when a black Prius crossed me, we traveled together for about a mile when they left me as they ran a red light they thought they'd make before it changed.  I found out that my company will be getting a fleet of Prius next year!  Round trip, I used half an indicated tank, and got an ok 51.5 MPG over more than 375 miles.  The reason for the poor mileage was mostly excessive speed, the set of interstates I used have steep hills and I let people push me well over the speed limit today, it had very little to do with the unfamiliar terrain, speeding hurts mileage but doing it into an unfavorable wind will destroy any progress made toward great fuel economy.

Now I need to get some rest, tomorrow I have to get to work early.  Thanks for reading I will see you tomorrow, good night.

Kacey Green

Some other reasons worth discussing here against taking the company car follow.  First, I'm new to the area and the Prius knows its way better than I do, even with it having maps that are three years out of date.  I have not had them updated yet; old maps are better than no maps as long as one uses some common sense and does not blindly follow the computer's instructions. Fun fact some of the Prius geeks loaded their navigation DVDs on their computers and found the voice files are stored in a folder called Jill, so that is what we call the computer lady, Jill.  Another reason is my car can more readily play stuff I want to listen to through the sound system.  Next is my Prius is more comfortable than a Malibu, and lastly, I still have vivid memories of my little adventure.

Kacey Green
GRLT.com
"Tech with a twist of lime!"
Express yourself by posting a comment below.

I am enjoying my only day off in a week.  Let's talk about calculating your miles per gallon (MPG) over a tank of gas. The way the Prius calculates MPG is simple; the vehicle has four cylinders, it feeds the four cylinders the same amount of fuel, Prius multiply their consumption as measured in cylinder one by four to get total consumption.  1*4=4  4*amount of fuel used=total fuel consumed    consumption/miles traveled= miles traveled for each unit of fuel consumed.  Now for the part that works on every car.  We don't usually have fuel flow meters that we can read, so we have to gauge how much fuel the car has used since last fill up.  Most people will not run their tanks dry to avoid stressing the car and to avoid being stranded in inconvenient situations.

If we cannot measure as the car consumes the fuel and we aren't able to measure a perfect tank how do we know how to gauge our progress without relying on what the car says?  We know something the car does not (usually) know, we know how much fuel we put in.  For example, if we put in 2 gallons of fuel to bring the car to full, then drove 50 miles and filled up again, this time the vehicle took 2.5 gallons to get to full, we used 2.5 gallons!  50 miles/2.5 gallons= 20 miles per gallon.  There are only two minor inconveniences with this method of calculation.  You have to wait until you have used some fuel and refilled, and it is less accurate on single tanks for the Prius.  The reason for the loss of accuracy is, the North American Prius all have flexible fuel tanks and hold different amounts of fuel under different environmental variables.  Therefore, for the Prius this method only gives a rough estimate and the car gives a better and instant rough estimate.  However, this method combined over all the tank fills in question, will tell you the car's exact mileage for the series of fills in question.  If you pumped 80 gallons into the car and traveled 5000 miles for the tanks you are tracking, you achieved an average of 62.5 MPG!

Kacey Green
GRLT.com
"Tech with a twist of lime!"
Express yourself by posting a comment.

Today I took my neighbor on a quick test drive of my Prius, and with a few simple pointers, she achieved an average of 82 MPG for the whole six-mile trip.  I thought this was cool and could serve as inspiration to those just starting out on a quest to achieve better MPGs.

I plan to get back to our longer posts this weekend, but I wanted to do an experiment.  I received a few complaints about the post lengths here, and tried short posts for a week, and the traffic was up at first, but now it seems to be at a plateau.  The new plan is to create a mixture of short and long posts; there will be far fewer posts without an obvious subject (excluding picture posts and status updates).

Kacey

After I complained to T-Mobile about the horrible service their roaming partner SunCom is providing me one of their smartphone customers, I mysteriously switched to AT&T for about one week, and it was awesome, AT&T service with T-mobile billing and features, that's the kind of service I like.  Unfortunately all good things end, so did my time on a competent roaming provider, I woke up one morning to find myself back on the SunCom crapfeast.  I checked to see if I got any email on accounts that only the phone has access to and was greeted with an unfortunately familiar message, "the remote party has ended the connection."

The solution:
To get my phone to stop freaking out I have to hold the power button until it asks about shutting down, or press the reset button.  After the phone finishes a two-minute boot up, and a one and a half minute reconnection to the so-called provider, I have my data connection back until SunCom flakes again.

Rant continued after the jump