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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
So, what to do? How do you know where to get 100% pure gas?<\/p>\n
Pure-Gas.org<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n (Just add this to the list of ways government intervention in markets is a real PITA.)<\/p>\n 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<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n SCORE!<\/p>\n Here are the basics:<\/p>\n My quick test reveals that not all stations are showing on my mobile maps app, though. I suspect<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n\n