interfacebus

Engineering Web Site

2008-07-24T17:25:00.001-04:00

I started interfacebus.net more than a year ago. You can see from the attached graphic that visits continue to increase, but the site does not even receive 300 hits a month. Yes the site only has maybe a dozen pages, what 10 hits per day.

I really don't track things that well to tell why the increase usage started in March, as long as the trend continues who cares. I did note that MS Live provides a way to add meta-tags to the pages. I added a meta-tag description to each of the web pages and meta tag key words to many of the pages yesterday. Adding the metatags may help to increase the site visits next month, but that is yet to be seen. Google brings in the most traffic and does read the meta tag description on pages [per its Webmaster Tools reports I get]. Not really sure if Google cares what the meta key words are or if there present.

The latest new page added to the site was the Cable Terms page ~ still in the works. Most pages on the site relate to electrical engineering, with a few that relate to html coding.

Related posts on interfacebus.net:
Apr 28, Get more visitors.
Apr 15, Usage Stats.
Hmm I find I started this site Apr 23 2006; two years and only 300 hits a month.

Annual US Wind Power Capacity

2008-07-18T13:30:00.002-04:00

Here is a chart showing Annual Wind Capacity for the US [United States], note the large increase in the last few years. So what is T. Boone Pickens [blog link] talking about, there seems to be a lot of wind power activity.

Related; Wind Power Capacity per state map. Hmm somebody just made a comment that this is only 1%, I'm sure he's right ~ but still a large increase in using wind power. The numbers are going up, and that's what counts

Wind Resources in the US

2008-07-17T01:10:00.000-04:00

The attached map of the United States shows the available wind resources in the US. The map colors indicate the amount of wind power available, with blue indicating the highest wind speeds. The color red indicates the next highest wind speed, followed by purple, pink, and orange. Map credit; US Department of Energy.

Compare this map with the one that shows Wind Power Capacity. The two maps seem to track, as the states with the highest wind speed also have the most wind generation plants.

The Pickens Plan, Wind Power

2008-07-16T18:10:00.001-04:00

I joined the Pickens Plan today. A grass roots movement started by T. Boone Pickens to promote wind power to try and reduce oil imports.

The idea is to support and promote wind power to produce electricity, freeing up natural gas currently used by power plants so the gas could be used for cars. Vehicles using natural gas would not require petroleum, which is all imported.

A Space Coast FL group was started on their site; engineering for wind.

Previous posts;
Are we really running out of oil?
Why we import oil.
Peak Oil and the end of gas [US Wind generation / capacity map]
Why Gas costs so much [National Petroleum Reserve map]

Googlebot Crawl Stats

2008-07-04T16:50:00.001-04:00

Here is the latest graph showing Googlebot activity in the last 90 days crawling interfacebus.com. It appear that the web site was off-line back in April and the spider stopped coming by for a few days. At most the site was off-line for less than a half day.

The same page that provides this data also shows a bar chart of pages with page rank 'PR'. There are four columns; High, Medium, Low, and Not yet assigned. I can't really tell if I have any pages ranked as high (above PR 5), as I can only see a sliver of color. Medium (PR 5) may contain a few pages, at least the index page. Most pages show as low (below PR5). What I don't see is any pages listed as 'not yet assigned', which has always showed many pages in the past. So Google has ranked all or most of the new pages that have been added to the web site ~ and that tells me I have stopped adding pages at the same rate I had been.

47" Flat Panel HDTV

2008-06-20T19:26:00.001-04:00

Purchased a new High Definition Television [HDTV] a few weeks back. A Westinghouse 1080p HDTV; TX-47F430S.

I just got around to connecting my Alienware PC to it, Wow. Makes the two monitors in front of me look like toys. Has a lot of input connectors, I like that.... It does not seem to want to do Picture-in-Picture, 'PIP' yet. Maybe the VGA connection does not count as a video input.

The year old 27" HDTV I was using went bad. I just gave that away when it got stuck one one channel, I figured the remote went south. Turns out most of the sets had the same problem.

The 47" is a bit large for my office, but not so big. I'm currently using a Velocity Micro as the main PC

Link checking and SEO stuff

2008-06-19T21:30:00.001-04:00

Hmm, I've been hand checking some pages and have found some bad links on the web site. Maybe I rely to much on Xenu to check the links on the site.

I see some old re-directs that have been fixed, just to clear the redundant listings. But what I'm more concerned about are the dozen pages found that point to the isp, indicating that the web site is gone. I assume that the Xenu robot does not detect those changes ...... That's not good. Still a few bad links out of 5,000 isn't that bad.

Open Source Office Applications

2008-06-18T19:31:00.001-04:00

To my surprise I found a few free office type applications today (web based). Server side applications are fine, assuming we don't lose the internet connection. This link provides a listing of office tools, both local and server side.

Here are the addresses to these new application;
http://www.spresent.com/
http://product.thinkfree.com/
http://www.zoho.com/

The 'zoho' seems to show the most promise, I'll down-load or sign in now....... I'm in!

Referring Sites

2008-06-13T07:08:00.001-04:00

Data for 2008 show 71,266 visitors from other pages that point to interfacebus.com. About 400 to 500 people are referred to the interfacebus web site each day.

However only 39 visits from seralphy and 131 visits from interfacebus.net. Both of these sites are still growing they only get a few hundred hits a month.

Is there a Browser War?

2008-06-11T20:33:00.001-04:00

It looks like it just may be a matter of time before the war is over or comes to a draw. The data from the web site indicates that Firefox only inches ahead and only in sub-percentages. Seems a small increase in Firefox usage.

After a 1,000,000 visits Firefox still gets the same 28% of users. What is that a few thousand new users over the last few months? I started a new poll, left of screen for Browser usage.....

Btw I use both IE and Firefox, so my usage is 50/50. Both Browsers are set up to open multi-windows on start-up. The previous topic was "The Browser Battle Update", from 4/9/08.

Page Rank & Listing of Manufacturers

2008-06-08T16:59:00.001-04:00

One of the sections of the site is a listing of Manufacturers in alphabetic order, instead of by topic. The alphabetic listing of Manufacturers spans 94 pages. The section received 1,255 pageviews in the last 30 days, and 8,205 page views this year. The alphabetic index page, which also happens to be letter 'A' receives most of the hits, and the rest are spread over the alphabet.

The section help people find companies when they might not be sure of the name, and it indicates who may have purchased the company if it changed hands. It's a lot of work keeping all the links active and valid, but it does seem to serve a purpose.

Any way, several months ago I broke up many of the pages to make them smaller, reducing the number of links per page. The new pages started with a zero page rank, which is normal, but they still have not recovered. Worse still, I checked one page today and the content didn't even show up during a search ~ meaning the page was not even indexed by Google.

Pages with a zero page rank:
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Amd'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Asq'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Be'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Bl'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Br'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Cm'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Con'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Cp'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Dem'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Ec'. html code updated,links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'El'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Em'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Fm'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'G'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Gen'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Gl'. links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Go'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Hb'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Hj'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Il'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'In'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Int'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Intel'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Jd'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Ke'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Ki'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'L'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Mo'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Nik'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Oo'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'P'. html code updated, links checked ~ One bad link..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Po'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Ram'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Ren'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Sen'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Sig'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Sk'. html code updated, links checked ~ One bad link..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Sp'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Tb'. html code updated, links checked ~ One bad link..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Th'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Us'.
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'V'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Ve'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Vi'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Vm'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Wi'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..
Engineering Manufacturers starting with 'Z'. html code updated, links checked ~ no issues..

Wow, 47 pages with a Google page Rank issue ~ that's not good. But what is the problem with the pages?

I did notice that the entire section declares xhtml 'strict' coding, so I updated a few to 'transitional' coding today. The pages will validate declaring 'transitional' coding, but that can't be the issue or they would all have a zero page rank.

Any non '.com' web site link has a "rel = nofollow" in the link so even if the link were bad Goggle would ignore it. The 'rel=no follow' must be on 20% of the links, making them save regardless.

I'm running Xenu tonight to check the site for bad links, but that program will not indicate if some other site has taken over an address ~ so I'll have to hand check each link to insure the page opens to the site listed. Xenu reports 8 bad links (0.13%), with 5937 good url's.

I hand checked a few pages, see the text above, but I don't see any issues. I don't mind so much about losing the page rank, but I would like to have the data searchable. I could be missing a number of visitors because the page are in Google's supplemental listing.

New Sitemap Up-loaded

2008-06-07T17:14:00.001-04:00

Using the GsiteCrawler program two separate XML site maps were generated, one for interfacebus.com and one for serialphy.com. Google reports 109 urls (pages) uploaded for serialphy and 1673 urls for interfacebus.

Looks like more than 50 new pages have been added over the last 3 months, sense the last sitemap generation. However the site's HTML site map was updated as new pages were added.

Google Analytics reports 985,815 visits, with 1,880,906 page views. Both of those numbers are down from the same time last year, by 15,000 visits (it was off-line yesterday).....

GsiteCrawler is free like half a dozen other programs that generate xml sitemaps.

Digital Video Connector Identification

2008-06-06T18:27:00.000-04:00

I got an email a few hours ago from some one trying to identify a connector on the back of a PC card. The video connector appeared to be DVI connector, but had 35 pins instead of 29 pins.

For the first few minutes I was wondering what the connector was, but after a few clicks on the web site I replied to the e-mail with an answer. I found two other connector styles with the correct amount of pins, and that looked just like a DVI plug:
Enhanced Video Connector, EVC.
Plug and Display, P & D. released in 1996

I think both these interfaces are dated, but many obsolete interfaces are still in production, ISA cards for example. Any way there are newer video interfaces out there to replace even the DVI bus; HDMI, and UDI to name two.

USB 3.0 Specification

2008-06-04T18:45:00.000-04:00

Looks like the new USB standard is due out soon. Other than the transfer rate (4.8 Gbit/s, 600 MB/s) and some data about the new connectors I have not found any other data on the specification yet.

USB 3.0 products are not due out until at least 2009, so you still have awhile.

Web Page Code Optimizing and SEO stuff

2008-05-24T18:28:00.002-04:00

No new page addresses in the last few days, so I'm enhancing some of the existing pages.

Google came out with some enhanced script for their Analytics software, so I've been updating that code on the web pages. The code is a tad larger than their old code but it does more (I think). Google Analytics is used to track site visitors and provides a lot of data.

While updating that code, I also update the java script code that displaces the ads on each page. The new java scrip is only half as big as the previous code. So I save several hundreds of bytes per page with each new up-load [first post on topic; Page Optimization].

SEO Up-dates:
Images ~ I've also added several new graphic files in the last few days, mostly on the new pages, and this is why; Hits from Image Referrals.
Links ~ I'm up-dating the link text for page to page links (the underlined blue text), to insure that it's descriptive. Don't link to a new page with 'more info', use a descriptive link.
Bounce Rate ~ Trying to decrease the bounce rate as a page gets updated. When the page has a high Bounce Rate [click away to another web site], I spend the extra time to insure all possible page to page links are there, and keeping people on the site.
Back-Links ~ Increase the external links that point to the main Engineering web site [this links counts]. Note that the links associates the term 'Engineering' and 'web' to interfacebus.com. There are two ways to go here; always associate a single term with your site/page, or associate the page with a different term each time [with in a topic].
Meta-Tags ~ Back in 12/14/07 Google Sitemaps indicated that 208 pages on the site had Meta Tags that were considered short [need more descriptive text]. The current report only indicates 70 pages with a short meta description. It may be less than that, because you can't determine the date of the report or which pages were last checked.

Promote your site on the DMOZ data Base

2008-05-16T20:46:00.000-04:00

I requested that serialphy be included into the DMOZ Directory [Open Directory Project]. Years ago it was really important to be listed in DMOZ, which is what Google built its directory from. These days it hard to even find a link to the Google directory, it's all about just using the search bar now.

But because the DMOZ directory is free to down load, any one can build there own web directory. Which means that your site listing could end up in a number of different search directories. So, I still recommend getting your site listed in the Open Directory. Not really sure how much directory are used any longer.....

interfacebus.com has been listed in DMOZ for years now, and serialphy should be large enough to be included, but I won't know for a number of weeks. At only a dozen pages, interfacebus.net would not be included so I have never even tried to get it listed.

Blog Traffic

2008-05-15T18:28:00.000-04:00

A fair amount of traffic is still coming into view this blog. Of course I promote the blog out in the news groups, normally I'll leave the blog address as my sig.

Looks like the counter was off-line last Feb, zero hits. 80 page views is low compared to the hits reaching interfacebus.com, but I guess that's the best I can do.

Promote your site via News Groups

2008-05-12T19:44:00.001-04:00

How can I promote my web site:
Using the usenet newsgroups is a good way to promote your website. There are thousands of different types of newsgroups that cover just about any topic you could think of. So there will be many different groups you could contribute to, and get the word out about your web site.

There are a number of ways to read and write to the news groups. You could down load any number of newsgroup readers off the web; I use XNEWS. You could interact via your web browser using Google Groups, which I also use. Or you could access the news groups via Outlook Express which normally comes free on a new computer.

If you end up using Google Groups you will find additional discussion groups not found in usenet. Or, XNEWS will display usenet groups, while Google Groups will display usenet and groups hosted by Google. Starting your own group, under all most any topic, is easy using Google Groups. I just started one called; Serial Interface Buses, but have not yet advertised it yet.

So how do you promote your site; find a group and write a post. If you can't think of any thing to post, just sit back and answer some one's posting leaving your site name as your signature [the last line in your reply.

I've posted 447 messages since 2005, leaving the interfacebus site as my signature in a few cases and this blog address as my 'sig' in almost all cases. Most people will appreciate your reply, but not visit your site. Of the small percentage of people that do check out your site some may result in an even smaller segment that returns, but thats what you want.

Check Google Groups for "interfacebus.com" and you will find that the search returns 1,200 pages ~ that's not me. That number is from other people posting a link to my site, that's the power of promotion.

The down side to posting in either usenet and to a smaller extent Google Groups is that replies to your post my be completely negative [Flame]. A lot of people 'live' in these newsgroups and jump from group to group flaming posters. I get 'flamed' once a month or so for a posting, but I only track a posting for about a month.
Todays Flame;
Original post: Why does my site not have a ranking?
My Reply: Duplicate content, check for ...... ~ (he did not leave a url, which is common)
2nd person: How can you know that..
3rd person: Lets rename this spam.
4th person: No place for overt advertising (left to me because of my sig.)
-- I just answered this guys question, and I get all these replies to my post and not the guy looking for help.

In usenet you can block these bozo's so you never see the reply after the first one, but you can't with Google. How ever, using Google you can read all their previous posting. Very quickly you find (in most cases) that their replies carry no meaning.

Read this post from Nov. 2007 and you find me posting my site address [I do not recommend you doing this]. The first reply is a flamer, but three other readers come in to denounce the flame posting. Note the flame guy never responded, as he went off to anther group. sci.electronics.design. ~

Web Page Bounce Rate

2008-05-11T09:37:00.001-04:00

Should you care what your site's Bounce Rate is?

Bounce Rate is a figure that describes a visitors preference to leave your site or push into another page within the site. The Home page of interfacebus has a bounce rate of 33%, or 33% of the people that find that page click away [2008 figure]. However; a visitor may click onto another site run by interfacebus.com as shown in the attached graphic. For example the lower part of the graphic shows 5 bars that indicate the percentage of people that click on those links [which happen to be hidden under the bars].

The first bar presents people viewing the FAQ page, which happens to be local to the site [0%]. The sitemap used by interfacebus, indicated by the next bar, is located off site and would constitute a bounce [but 0% of visitors viewed it]. The next bar represents this blog, not a local page [5.1%]. The next bar is the blog representing new pages added to the web site [5.1%]. The final bar is a resume but is local.

In addition to those three possible external pages, a person may also use the search bar. The page returned from a search is external to this web site and would also be a bounce, even if they click on another local page returned by the search [5.1%].

So the index page has a 33% bounce rate, but 15% of people just go to another page hosted by this site resulting in an over bounce rate of 15%.

Now the overall bounce rate for the web site is 70% [all pages combined]. Is that bad, I doubt it, seems people find the right page they're looking for on the first search or hit to the site. However going over each page would just be to time consuming.

Are we really running out of oil

2008-05-10T11:49:00.000-04:00

The short answer is yes, the US is running out of oil. Note the graph on proven oil reserves, and the its decline. We now have just as much oil that we had in the 1940, with just a few more cars on the highway. The spike around 1970 must be Prudhoe bay, but I did not verify that. Oil production at Prudhoe Bay has been declining since 1989 [peak oil]

Oil consumption increases 2% a year, so to break even you need to find at least 2% more oil each year. The graph indicates the reverse as proven oil reserves are decreasing as we consume it faster than we discover it. The previous post showed a chart of US production which is different that proven reserves [oil in the ground].

Related posts; Why we import oil, Peak oil, Why gas costs so much.

Why we Import Oil

2008-05-09T20:38:00.001-04:00

The US imports oil because we consume more oil than we can produce. The graphic shows US oil production from 1920 to 2008. Peak oil in the US was reached in 1973. Peak oil is the point of maximum oil production.

These days we produce the same amount of oil we were producing in 1946, regardless of how many wells we have in operation. The numbers are thousand barrels

Data source eia.doe.gov.

Other Posts on topic: Why gas costs so much, Peak oil and the end of gas,

Why does gas cost so much

2008-05-08T20:11:00.004-04:00

You may be surprised but a barrel of oil cost about the same all around the world, within a few dollars. When the cost goes up in the US for a barrel of oil, it goes up the same amount all over the world and it has zero to do with a US company. World Crude Oil Prices.

Now the cost of gas at the pump varies widely around the world, and there are really only two main reasons for that, taxes and subsidies.

TAXES: Take the US as the base line and you find we pay 19% of the price of gas in taxes, but in Europe the tax on gas is around 70%. Remember both Europe and the US pay about the same for a barrel of oil, but at the pump the price difference is massive. And it doesn’t matter if the oil is pumped from the North Sea or the Gulf of Mexico; cost at the well head is much lower than value in a barrel.

SUBSIDIES: Many oil producing Middle Eastern countries and other OPEC producing countries subsidize their oil. Even though the value of the oil is worth $100/barrel for example, oil rich countries sell their oil to their population at a much reduced rate ~ pennies on the dollar. There’s a very good reason why some countries can afford to reduce the cost of oil (or gas) to their populations.

The cost of oil is not set by the countries that produce the oil and it is not set by the US Oil companies (as much as you would like to think). The cost of a barrel of oil is set by three major international petroleum exchanges , [NYMEX, IPE, SIMEX]. So if it still cost $20 to produce a barrel of oil from the well, its then worth $100 [per NYMEX] once it gets placed into a 50 gallon barrel for sell. So if you happen to be a major oil producer and the oil companies are nationalized [run by the country], why not keep the cost down in your own country, as you still make 80% profit for any oil sold abroad.

The US did this as well back in the 80’s after the 1973 oil embargo, as they fixed the price that US drilled oil could sell for even as the world price was going up. Yes the Oil companies subsidized to cost of your oil for a decade.

Let’s review with some made up numbers;

The cost to drill oil in Texas is $20/barrel for example, $30 in the Alaska, $40 in the North Sea, or $10/barrel in Qatar. Numbers are fabricated to illustrate the cost of drilling in different environments. The value of oil is $100/barrel per SIMEX. So no matter the location of the drilled oil the petroleum company makes a good profit [for now]. The oil companies are not setting the price, and although OPEC did set the prices in the seventies they only set production rates now.

OPEC is divided into two camps, one camp would like the price kept high while the other would like a lower cost for oil [but neither set the price]. The countries that would like the higher price now need the revenue and have limited resources in the ground. The countries that want the price kept low have massive resources of oil and do not want the value of their oil in the ground to decrease. The US and other countries using E85 and switching to Hybrid cars would decimate the long term value of their oil reserves as consumption decreased over time.

One comment I heard the other day was that we could boycott a particular gas company and that would force the price of oil down. Unfortanitly that would only serve to put a few gas stations out of business. The oil companies could just sell their oil on the open market and run more imported oil through their refinery, so in the end the you boycott oil from Ecuador with out really knowing it.

Really want cheaper gas prices at the pump, stop driving and reduce consumption.

Web Page Strength & Importance

2008-05-04T18:13:00.000-04:00

I came across backlinkwatch.com while searching the web. This site gives you all the links pointing to your site [back links]. Of course Google will do that as well, but this site provides two other pieces of data. First, the site indicates if the incoming link has an attached 'rel=nofollow' tag to the link, indicating that no page rank is passed with the link. Second the site shows the total number out going links on the page that contains your link. The more links on a page means that a smaller percentage of Page Rank [PR] is passed in each outbound link. The site found 5,158 backlinks for interfacebus.com. From the Back-link report I found tagurls.com which ... hmm, not really sure what it's telling me. But I found seomoz.org which gives an indication of page strength [SEO site]. interfacebus has a page strength of 6/10 per their report. Than cloudalicio.us was found which shows the number of tags [links?] occur over time on del.icio.us. Also checked out Technorati, guess they track blog activity.

Then I found this one http://www.usa.gov/webcontent/reqs_bestpractices/laws_regs/copyright.shtml.

Hmm, while interfacebus.com was rated 6 of 10, interfacebus.net was only rated at 1.5 of 10,

Referring Sites

2008-05-03T14:34:00.000-04:00

Like the posting from March 14 about Backlinks, here is another view. Referring sites bring a lot of traffic to interfacebus. The graphic is Referring sites by month, averaging over 10,000 visits per month [13,174 visits last month]. So every month the site gets an automatic 10,000 visits generating 20,000 page views per month.

Guess the previous post was more geared to incoming back-links from my own sites, while this shows all websites.

The bounce rate, or chance a person only visits one page is 68.04%. The average bounce rate seems ok, as the links are coming in to a specific page. The percentage of new visitors is 79.69%, meaning all those links keep bringing in new people, or people that have never used the site before. When New vs. Returning visitors is charted I find 24,000 returning visitors @ 4/1/06, and up to 49,000 @ 4/30/08. But because the site is always growing New visitors are also increasing from 100,000 to about 160,000 over the same time period.

Go Green, Save Gas, Increase Your Car's MPG

2008-05-01T20:06:00.001-04:00

Want to reduce your weekly Gas bill; slow down.

I saw an old 2006 report from Consumer Reports that indicated a Toyota got 5mpg [miles per gallion] better at 65mph [miles per hour] than at 75mph, and another 5mpg better when travailing at 55mph. Or, change your maximum speed from 75mph to 55mph and go 10 more miles on a gallon of gas [$3.80 for my car].

My vehicle runs about 19.9 miles per gallon, nominal combined city highway. This week I figured I would put those numbers to the test. I reduced my maximum speed to 75 mph highway, consistently via the cruise control. I won't say how fast I was going previously, but I was never passed. Anyway, travailing back and fourth to work this week; 22 miles highway / 8 miles city, I only saw the gas consumption number grow to 20.4 mpg. Half a mile per gallon isn't any good, my time is more important than that.

Than I realized that my computer was averaging the mpg over the last computer reset point, 3 hundred miles ago. I reset the cars computer and drove home using RT 1 instead of US95. The highway had some construction which pushed me to RT1. The maximum speed on US1 was 50mph, I kept it under 60, but there were street lights too.

I ended the trip home with a 25mpg reading. Less than what was reported by Consumer Reports, but the several lights on the trip hurt me.. Over the next several days I'll keep the speed at or under 75mph and stay on the highway. But remember I started at 19.9mpg, less than 17mpg if I punch it.

I drive a supercharged V8 Ford Mustang with a Roush supercharger, the chip was changed out and it requires premium gas to provide over 400 hp [horse power]. One trip home is not much of an experiment, so I'll go back to I95 and stay under 75mph over the next week. I'll post the changes in miles/gallon as I put more miles on the car and computer. Check to see if any comments were added to this posting [those are the updates]. Save money and slow down on the highway.....

Aerodynamic drag increases with the square of speed; The faster you go, the more energy it takes to sustain that speed [mpg]