Category: Tech

As you know, my wife and I drive older cars. About a year ago, I had to have several hundred dollars of work done on mine to fix a seriously bad misfire problem. Rough idle is one thing, running rough at 70mph is an entirely different matter.

As it turned out, the ethanol blends I’d been using had gummed up my fuel injectors (among other things) to the point where they had to be replaced. I had heard of this happening to cars that were older than my 1999 Jeep, but I was a bit surprised it happened to me. There are other benefits to running pure gas, such as better fuel economy, increased horsepower, and it makes Al Gore cry.

So, what to do? How do you know where to get 100% pure gas?

Pure-Gas.org has a crowdsourced list of gas stations that claim to have pure gasoline. Again, it’s crowdsourced, so it’s not a complete list. Sometimes gas stations switch to E10 or E15 blends, at which point you should update the list to remove them. I’ve been using that site for a while now to locate gas stations, especially while traveling. In fact, when I went to the LuckyGunner Blog Shoot I pre-planned a gas stop based on this list.

(Just add this to the list of ways government intervention in markets is a real PITA.)

Anyway, one of the features of that site is they provide a KML file for all the pure gas stations in the country. I wanted to make a web app that would plot your GPS position and this KML file so I could more easily find stations if I’m on the road. I spent about an hour whipping something up, and then found these instructions on how to, in a roundabout way, import the KML file to your mobile Google Maps application. Huge bonus for Android users: You can pick a station on the map and get voice navigation.

SCORE!

Here are the basics:

1. Log in to maps.google.com with your Google account.
2. Click on “My Places”
3. Click “Create Map” (big red button)
4. Click “Import” (link, above the title and the the right of the Done button)
5. In the “Or enter the url of map data on the web” box, put http://pure-gas.org/temp/pure-gas.kml
6. Hit Upload (you may have to hit enter first to get the Upload button to activate)
7. Now, on your Android device, open the Google Maps application
8. Click the Layers button
9. Click “My Maps”
10. Select the map you created

My quick test reveals that not all stations are showing on my mobile maps app, though. I suspect there is a limit to the number of markers the mobile app can handle, so it just loads the nearest five hundred or whatever. I’m heading back to Atlanta in a few weeks, so I’ll be able to test it then.

I also don’t know if this method will update your map with any changes to the KML file. I’ll have to check that out, too.

If you don’t care about navigation, or that’s a wee bit too much work for you, I’ve got the location-aware version of the pure-gas.org map here. The work was done under the Creative Commons license.