Cheaper LPG!

[wildebus]

Or is it?
If someone posts the price they paid for Refillable Gas, there is often a reply saying "well, I paid xx pence" or "should have gone to ...."

So ... I decided to do a little spreadsheet to see is it actually cheaper going out your way to fill at a cheaper pump

Now the question is "could I have saved money by using a cheaper LPG Station?" This calculator will tell you. Just put in your own numbers for:

• MPG
• Price of Diesel per Litre
• Amount of LPG you will put in.
  Now this bit is critical... If you are just topping up a half-full tank, it will be a very different result to refilling from empty. In my case, my only LPG tank - an 11Kg Gaslow was empty, so I put in 17.5 Litres, which is as much as I ever could fill up in one go, so the potential benefit of travelling further afield for a lower price would never be better.

Then in the LPG Filling Stations, you have three boxes to fill in:

• Price per litre at your local/current LPG filling place (include the full price including VAT)
• Distance to an alternative you may go to as it is cheaper (include the drive back if out the way )
• Price per litre of a cheaper place to fill up

You then are told:

The Maximum cost that Cheaper station by distance must be to make it worthwhile to make that extra drive when considering the extra Diesel used.
and
The Maximum distance that Cheaper station by price must be to make it worthwhile (and this might include a round trip - so 6 miles up a road out your way to go there means a 12 mile round trip)


I used the values of my own Motorhome in the example below - so Economy a sad 24.5MPG; a Gaslow 11KG bottle refilled from empty (17.5L) and the price I paid for LPG yesterday en-route back home - 93.6p/litre




Checking on myLPG.eu, the cheapest LPG place within 60 miles is the Kirkcaldy Asda at 79.p/Litre. Using my calculator, I find that entering that price in the "Cheaper Station by Price" field, that would have to be within 8.5 miles to make it worthwhile to detour! It is actually over 45 miles away (so 90 Miles round trip if making a special journey just there!)

If anyone is interested, they can download the calculator from my website from the link below: Not going to make any promises there is not a mistake in it but all all seems right to me Saved it on Excel 2003 Format so I think that means it should also work in Google Docs or Open Office?

Download Calculator here: LPG Calculator

 

[gasgas]

That's very useful widebus. A couple of months ago I bought an Autosleeper with underslung gas tank which I don't regard as good as a two bottle cupboard where you can have one regular bottle plus a Gaslow or Gasit refillable. Then you could run down the refillable and run on the regular bottle until you find a LPG station. My new-to-me camper has a gauge on the dashboard showing how full the LPG tank is and I have read they aren't very accurate. So when it got down to one led, in red, I didn't panic. I thought I'll just wait till the flame gets a bit low then I'll look around. It won't suddenly go from full blast to zero, there will be a time when the hob flame graduallly reduces. That's when you know it is really just about empty. After three days of using gas with the gauge on the red dot I found a filling station and put 15 litres in. It is a 20 litre tank, and as you cannot fill them more than 80% full I was quite pleased I had bought nearly all that I could have from empty. This was in France where lpg seems to be just over €1 per litre, i.e about £1, about the same as here. Diesel there is more expensive, just, than it is here but I saw AdBlu at a filling station at 50 cents a litre which is flipping cheap compared to the £2 a litre we are supposed to pay. They're all 'avin' a laff, ripping us off. However, in 2000 miles my AdBlu gauge hasn't moved which either means it's faulty or I'm not using any!

 

[wildebus]

I have no gauge on mine, which is a pain. But a RELIABLE gauge is so pricy, I will just go without! I actually ran out on my driveway about a week after being away on a trip. The Gas heater failed to relight.
My second bottle is a Calor one which I keep as a backup and think that is a handy option, but as empty on the driveway didn't matter running out so just waited until next going out.

 

[RichardHelen262]

That's very useful widebus. A couple of months ago I bought an Autosleeper with underslung gas tank which I don't regard as good as a two bottle cupboard where you can have one regular bottle plus a Gaslow or Gasit refillable. Then you could run down the refillable and run on the regular bottle until you find a LPG station. My new-to-me camper has a gauge on the dashboard showing how full the LPG tank is and I have read they aren't very accurate. So when it got down to one led, in red, I didn't panic. I thought I'll just wait till the flame gets a bit low then I'll look around. It won't suddenly go from full blast to zero, there will be a time when the hob flame graduallly reduces. That's when you know it is really just about empty. After three days of using gas with the gauge on the red dot I found a filling station and put 15 litres in. It is a 20 litre tank, and as you cannot fill them more than 80% full I was quite pleased I had bought nearly all that I could have from empty. This was in France where lpg seems to be just over €1 per litre, i.e about £1, about the same as here. Diesel there is more expensive, just, than it is here but I saw AdBlu at a filling station at 50 cents a litre which is flipping cheap compared to the £2 a litre we are supposed to pay. They're all 'avin' a laff, ripping us off. However, in 2000 miles my AdBlu gauge hasn't moved which either means it's faulty or I'm not using any!

I too have an autosleeper with an underslung tank they mine was 25 litre tank so only held 20ltr I have now changed it to a 38 litre tank,
My last autosleeper had two refillable bottles that I fitted with a manual change over so I knew when one bottle was empty, which I found to be much more convenient than the tank, which has a very unreliable gauge,
It would seem that most of these gauges are still half full once they hit red

 

[HurricaneSmith]

I too have an autosleeper with an underslung tank they mine was 25 litre tank so only held 20ltr I have now changed it to a 38 litre tank,
My last autosleeper had two refillable bottles that I fitted with a manual change over so I knew when one bottle was empty, which I found to be much more convenient than the tank, which has a very unreliable gauge,
It would seem that most of these gauges are still half full once they hit red

When I bought my Autotrail 635SE I wasn't comfortable with the plasticy gauge stuck to the dashboard, and wanted to check the volume against the gauge fitted on the side of the GAS-IT 25 litre underslung tank. They were identical.

Every now and then I nip underneath to check for road damage and compare the values again. They remain identical, which is reassuring for me.

 

[El radge]

Nice academic exercise but surely cost of LPG per day is shitpence (approx) ?

 

[Pudsey Bear]

I don't go out of my way to fill up but I sort of keep an eye on what we've used after a fill up, and having only a single 6kg it's important when I went away on my own last month I used 3 hob rings for approx 20 minutes twice a day for 4 days + a kettle full of water each morning and the fire for two nights so next time I passed a LPG pump I filled up and I'd used 4.3l @£3.89,

 

[wildebus]

I don't go out of my way to fill up but I sort of keep an eye on what we've used after a fill up, and having only a single 6kg it's important when I went away on my own last month I used 3 hob rings for approx 20 minutes twice a day for 4 days + a kettle full of water each morning and the fire for two nights so next time I passed a LPG pump I filled up and I'd used 4.3l @£3.89,

A useful exercise also. Make a little note of what appliances you have used and that will help you project needs into the future. Always handy to help to decide if you might need to break camp for a refill or not.
As an aside, in my Stripey camper I ran a Chinese Diesel heater. For anyone not familiar with those type of heaters, they work with a fuel pump that sends a set squirt of fuel on each pulse of the pump. More pulse = more fuel.
I connected the pump power to an input on my Victron Venus GX, set that input to be a pulse meter and I was able to see precisely how much fuel my heater was using by having it count the Pulses and having entered how much fuel sent per pulse. For some annoying reason the Victron Cerbo GX has no ability to monitor Pulse pumps/motors


And for those of you who have no interest in this kind of thing, there are plenty of other things on the internet to waste your time on, so don't let me keep you

 

[Pudsey Bear]

I get this when trying to save the file David

 

[Pudsey Bear]

A useful exercise also. Make a little note of what appliances you have used and that will help you project needs into the future. Always handy to help to decide if you might need to break camp for a refill or not.
As an aside, in my Stripey camper I ran a Chinese Diesel heater. For anyone not familiar with those type of heaters, they work with a fuel pump that sends a set squirt of fuel on each pulse of the pump. More pulse = more fuel.
I connected the pump power to an input on my Victron Venus GX, set that input to be a pulse meter and I was able to see precisely how much fuel my heater was using by having it count the Pulses and having entered how much fuel sent per pulse. For some annoying reason the Victron Cerbo GX has no ability to monitor Pulse pumps/motors


And for those of you who have no interest in this kind of thing, there are plenty of other things on the internet to waste your time on, so don't let me keep you

I do have it connected via POL fitting so I can connect up my Calor 6kg as normal if it does run out, I have run this setup before and it is a cheap way of running two cylinders so long as you rarely use the Calor.

 

[wildebus]

I get this when trying to save the file David

View attachment 70506

Strange. I run Malwarebytes on my computers as well and I get nothing at all flagged up (which is just what I would expect, of course!).

If you type "www.wildebus.com" directly into your browser what happens? it should divert to https://www.wildebus.com automatically with the SSL protection.
That message you are getting suggests it is giving a warning for the entire website, but not sure why you are getting that?
On my installation, that includes 'Browser Guard', I get no such warning for the site.




the link is https://www.wildebus.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/LPG-Calculator-Locked.xls , so include the https part as well.
up to you to decide, but that warning is false.

 

[Pudsey Bear]

Strange. I run Malwarebytes on my computers as well and I get nothing at all flagged up (which is just what I would expect, of course!).

If you type "www.wildebus.com" directly into your browser what happens? it should divert to https://www.wildebus.com automatically with the SSL protection.
That message you are getting suggests it is giving a warning for the entire website, but not sure why you are getting that?
On my installation, that includes 'Browser Guard', I get no such warning for the site.

View attachment 70510


the link is https://www.wildebus.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/LPG-Calculator-Locked.xls , so include the https part as well.
up to you to decide, but that warning is false.

I'm not bright enough to understand why I'm afraid David, but I have it now from the new link with no errors, I did go onto your site but I couldn't see the xls file.

 

[Pudsey Bear]

I think it'll work on Android too.

 

[TJBi]

No security warnings from McAfee or F-Secure Freedome
Interesting tool, but would be useful to be able to unlock it in order to modify the configuration slightly for non-mpg-based use. Yes, I could develop it from scratch, but when most of the hard work has been done by an expert...

 

[wildebus]

I have been meaning to play around with trying to write Android apps for a bit of fun (different strokes, different folks ) and this kind of simple function might be a good one to experiment with

 

[wildebus]

I'm not bright enough to understand why I'm afraid David, but I have it now from the new link with no errors, I did go onto your site but I couldn't see the xls file.

Good stuff. It is the same link, but without the 'description' bit making it more user friendly to read. maybe that was a factor?
I created an area for downloadable files but is not directly viewable and it is there. Just where I put various diagrams and instructions for people to download for stuff

Doesn't look as neat on LibreOffice might tart it up a bit for that

 

[El radge]

And for those of you who have no interest in this kind of thing, there are plenty of other things on the internet to waste your time on, so don't let me keep you

Not sure who this is directed at but I was curious about the subject .
Which was why I questioned if it was a worthwhile exercise given the low costs involved.

 

[wildebus]

Not sure who this is directed at but I was curious about the subject .
Which was why I questioned if it was a worthwhile exercise given the low costs involved.

The very first paragraph in the very first post ....
"If someone posts the price they paid for Refillable Gas, there is often a reply saying "well, I paid xx pence" or "should have gone to ....""

So some people think that it IS worth making detours to save a few pence per litre, so I decided to quantify that to see just how much of a detour is worthwhile.
I did it so you didn't have to waste time doing it


(PS. The answer, at least for MY setup, is it is very, very, unlikely that ANY detour for LPG is worth the saving).

The same decision process is applicable for finding a cheaper Diesel station as well of course. Typically Costco warehouses are the cheapest place to buy fuel, but how much do you save if you make a detour to fill there? With a much bigger diesel tank than an LPG one and sometimes a bigger gap in the per litre cost, the answer to that is less obvious. You could easily use the same Calculator for this if you want, just putting the diesel price and the tank fill size instead of LPG price and fill size.

 

[Pudsey Bear]

Not sure who this is directed at but I was curious about the subject .
Which was why I questioned if it was a worthwhile exercise given the low costs involved.

I used to write the odd spreadsheet, it's quite a good exercise for the grey matter, I even did a copy of the old paper version of Simplex accounts book, it still works perfectly too, the tax man accepted the print outs without question anyway.

I can send it to anyone who might find it useful.

 

[wildebus]

I used to write the odd spreadsheet, it's quite a good exercise for the grey matter, I even did a copy of the old paper version of Simplex accounts book, it still works perfectly too, the tax man accepted the print outs without question anyway.

I can send it to anyone who might find it useful.

Off-topic now, but in my last "employed" job, I wrote a spreadsheet with macros that would automatically combine 100+ other spreadsheets and also generate Powerpoint ready graphics of the results, complete with a button to press to copy each one to the clipboard for transfer.
It changed the collation work from a few days of a team managers effort to around 2 -3 hours of just watching the spreadsheet automatically work away on your laptop. Probably one of my most effective bits of coding

and as you say, good brain exercise. Bit like those painful Suduko puzzles you have hooked me onto!