Fuel Economics
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With 4.0 now being able to monitor fuel tank levels. I would be really nice for saillogger to be able to use this data along with a trip's length and time to calculate avg fuel consumption. Also, with saillogger being able to track engine hours it could calculate avg gallons per hour. Tangentially, it would also be nice to show avg RPMs for a given trip.
For each trip being able to see Avg RPM, total fuel consumption, avg gallons/liters per hour, and avg gallons/liters per mile/kilometer would be extremely beneficial and can be calculated with data saillogger is already ingesting.
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Hi JeremyJed, I either installed a Yanmar engine interface that sends engine data to the NMEA2000 bus. When you say that Saillogger can track engine travel hours, is that your wish or does Saillogger already do it? For now, I've only been able to see the engine RPM in the logs, within the additional data (min/max), but I'd like a report that shows how many hours I've been under engine and how many under sail. Regarding fuel consumption calculated by observing the fuel level at the beginning and end of a trip, I doubt it would be precise or indicative. First, because tank level sensors are rheostats that aren't exactly linear, so they only provide an indicative measurement. The other problem is that the readings taken at the beginning and end of a trip could be affected by the boat's rolling. It's much better to take the engine data regarding instantaneous fuel consumption and record it in a database to understand the overall value for a trip, in my opinion.
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Hi @JeremyJed and @Andrea, Saillogger can track engine hours by adding them manually to your monitoring data, and they will be part of your trackpoints. This way you can see the engine hours at the beginning and end of the trip by clicking on those trackpoints.
However, this can certainly be improved. We always aim to provide the best UX, and it is important for Saillogger that things “just” work. We are working on making this an integral part of the log that works automatically (for example, Saillogger can detect when you are sailing or motoring, handle multi-engine scenarios, and give meaningful stats). Creating the right experience is a bit involved, and we did not have a good test bed for this until recently. We finally installed sensors on our twin Yanmars (running the N2K cables was the hardest part), and this is now at the top of our list of new features. It needs proper thought and testing since it is an important feature.
Automatically tying it to fuel consumption is more complex. The math is simple, but there are many scenarios that must be accounted for in order for it to work well. For example, fuel sensors are not always precise, logic must account for multiple tanks, transfers between tanks, additional equipment like generators drawing fuel, or swells causing fluctuating readings. We aim to provide a great UX, so this will likely not be part of the initial version. A better approach may be to rate the engines’ consumption and associate it with conditions like those above. This aligns with @Andrea’s note. It is possible but not a trivial implementation.
Taking a step back, and to summarize, you can already monitor engine hours and tank levels, and we will improve the experience as soon as we can run experiments on our test bed. Fully automated stats that provide smart insights into fuel consumption will likely take longer, until we can convince ourselves that the data is really good.
Thank you for your interest and for such an insightful discussion!
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@admin Thanks for the reply, I'm sure it will be great when this is available. Right now, how can I determine how much of a trip was under engine? I connected the RPM data from SK and I see it for every trip, but I don't have a sum of the engine usage time between the times when I was sailing and the times when I was under engine. Is there a way to do it now?
Furthermore, also as a test bench, I tried to connect the SK Fuel Rate data which is expressed in m3/h but I did not find a type of representation given that could read it, I have speed volume etc but not a ratio such as volume/time -
@admin said in Fuel Economics:
Hi @JeremyJed and @Andrea, Saillogger can track engine hours by adding them manually to your monitoring data, and they will be part of your trackpoints. This way you can see the engine hours at the beginning and end of the trip by clicking on those trackpoints.
However, this can certainly be improved. We always aim to provide the best UX, and it is important for Saillogger that things “just” work. We are working on making this an integral part of the log that works automatically (for example, Saillogger can detect when you are sailing or motoring, handle multi-engine scenarios, and give meaningful stats). Creating the right experience is a bit involved, and we did not have a good test bed for this until recently. We finally installed sensors on our twin Yanmars (running the N2K cables was the hardest part), and this is now at the top of our list of new features. It needs proper thought and testing since it is an important feature.
Automatically tying it to fuel consumption is more complex. The math is simple, but there are many scenarios that must be accounted for in order for it to work well. For example, fuel sensors are not always precise, logic must account for multiple tanks, transfers between tanks, additional equipment like generators drawing fuel, or swells causing fluctuating readings. We aim to provide a great UX, so this will likely not be part of the initial version. A better approach may be to rate the engines’ consumption and associate it with conditions like those above. This aligns with @Andrea’s note. It is possible but not a trivial implementation.
Taking a step back, and to summarize, you can already monitor engine hours and tank levels, and we will improve the experience as soon as we can run experiments on our test bed. Fully automated stats that provide smart insights into fuel consumption will likely take longer, until we can convince ourselves that the data is really good.
Thank you for your interest and for such an insightful discussion!
I understand the logic behind wanting a robust user experience to account for all different dynamics. Me be personally, as a trawler cruiser, I'm really only interested in the averages per trip. Tank reading at engine start divided by gps miles and hours to give gallons per hour and gallons per mile - along with RPM to also show average RPMs for the trip.
As a software engineer myself, I'll just look to build a light weight service myself to track basic fuel economics.
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@Andrea you should be able to use
/vessels/<RegExp>/propulsion/<RegExp>/runTimewhich is the total running time for engine in seconds. This will show up as something likepropulsion.0.runTimein your Signal K. You can add this to your custom monitoring and look at the delta between the last tracepoint and the first one. Not the ideal UX but it will be automatically logged for you. -
@admin I don't remember seeing this pgn among those that my Yanmar to N2K interface provides me but I'll check, however I saw the data of the engine hours expressed in seconds, I could record that and make the delta between the first reading and the last reading and then multiply it by 3600 and obtain the hours, what do you think?
