How do I add a fuel-up via SMS?
If you're in the United States, United Kingdom, or Canada you can send fuel-up data via SMS.
It does require a bit of setup first, here's what you need to do:
1.) Set your primary vehicle and your mobile number in your profile.
Make sure you're logged into Fuelly and then go here to edit your profile. Look for the "Primary Vehicle" option and select the vehicle you want to fuel-up via SMS. Then at the bottom of the page under "SMS Preferences", set your ten-digit mobile phone number.
2.) Learn the text message format.
To fuel-up via SMS you need to format your text message in a special way. The basic format is: Miles Price Gallons (MPG). So if you drove 300 miles, paid $2.00/gallon, and put in 10 gallons the text should be: 300 2.00 10
. Each item should be separated by a space. If you're using odometer tracking, swap out odometer for miles. If you're tracking with liters or kilometers, you can think of the format as [distance] [price/volume] [fuel volume]. (Though that's not as catchy as MPG.)
Notes
Anything extra after the first three numbers will be added as the note for that fuel-up. So if you text 300 2.00 10 chevron off the freeway
the last bit of text, "chevron off the freeway" will be the note for that fuel-up.
Partial Fuel-ups
If you want to mark your fuel-up as partial, add a "p" to your fuel volume without a space. So 100 2.00 5p [notes]
will tell Fuelly that this is a partial fuel-up.
Multiple Vehicles
If you want to add a fuel-up to more than one vehicle at Fuelly, you'll need to set a SMS shortcut letter in your vehicle preferences for each vehicle and add that letter to the beginning of your message. For example, you could set the letter "p" to represent your Prius and "c" to represent your Civic. When you want to fuel-up the Prius you would send p [miles] [price] [gallons]
. And for the Civic you would send c [miles] [price] [gallons]
. Without a letter, the fuel-up will be applied to your primary vehicle.
City/Highway Percentage
To add a city percentage to your fuel-up, add a "c" followed directly by the percentage before your notes. If your tank included 75% city driving, you'd add "c75". So 100 2.00 5 c75 [notes]
will tell Fuelly to set this fuel-up to 75% city driving. Note that all city percentages will be rounded to the nearest 5. So if you tell Fuelly "c21" it will be rounded to 20%, "c24" will be rounded to 25%, and "c29" will be rounded to 30%.
3.) Send your fuel-up text message to 503-512-9929 (US).
Fuelly will send back your MPG for that tank, your average MPG for the vehicle, and a link to your vehicle profile page at Fuelly. If the fuel-up didn't work for some reason, we'll let you know that too.
This service is only available to our members in the US, UK, and Canada and your text message rates will apply.
We don't currently have plans to offer SMS fuel-ups outside of these countries. You might check with your carrier to see if calling any of these numbers is prohibitively expensive in your country.
New (Mar 27, 2012): We added numbers for Canada and the UK:
Canada: 604-757-2674
UK: 020 3322 2674