Ask the Fuel Expert

Ask drivers how much fuel is used in their truck or equipment and the typical answer goes something like: “About $200 a week” or, “Four of five fill ups a month” or worse yet, “What do I care? My company pays for the fuel.”

Fleet managers cringe when they hear those kinds of responses because that information is meaningless to anyone other than the person responsible for monitoring that kind of information.

How many kilometers or miles do you drive in a week? How many liters or gallons does it take to fill your fuel tank each time?

You’re flying blind if you don’t know what the actual numbers are on how many liters per 100 kilometers or miles per gallon your equipment actually uses.

It’s really not all that hard to measure your fuel-consumption yourself. Just in case you are wondering how to do it you yourself, divide the total liters filled up by the number of kilometers driven, and multiply the result by 100.

Still living in the Sixties? Then convert to miles-per-gallon by dividing the L/100-km figure into 282.5, which equals 49.9 mpg American. Then divide L/100 into 235.5, which is equal to 41.6 mpg US.

The biggest challenge is to achieve the same, repeatable level of “fullness” of your fuel tank at the start and finish of every test.

With 4Refuel’s Fuel Management On-line (FMO) you can sit back and relax knowing you can pull up a report of fuel consumption by piece of equipment at any time on your computer with just a click of your mouse.

Once you have a good idea of what your fuel consumption actually is, you have a benchmark from which to determine whether your equipment is obtaining the maximum number of kilometers per liter or miles per gallon possible.