On the Petrol Prices Melbourne page up until now, I've only published the current gate price (think wholesale price). This is to keep people aware of the gate price so when the retail price (pump price) gets close to the gate price, it's time to keep an eye on petrol prices. From now on when I notice the petrol price hike starts, I'll post the price petrol is hiking to and the date I noticed the petrol price hike start.
There's a couple of other things I'd like to share this month. The 7 Eleven fuel app has been updated so now only runs on Android mobiles with Android version 8 or above. Since my mobile runs Android version 7, I can no longer use or install that 7 Eleven fuel app. I can't justify updating my mobile as the cost of a new mobile would be a number of years petrol saving. The 7 Eleven fuel app is a good app to lock in the low price for another week. If you need to top up weekly this will give you a saving 12-13 times of year, which could add up to around a $200 saving (more if your household have multiple cars). For me that saving is less as I only top up every 2-3 weeks. With COVID-19 I can probably last from one price hike cycle to the next. In addition, with Woolworths' and Coles' discount vouchers, the price is nearly always cheaper at Coles Express or Woolworths Petrol than 7 Eleven.
The second change is Woolworths have updated their petrol app and all I can say is I don't like it at all. In fact I feel it's a waste of time. It's much harder to see the price of petrol around me and really, the PetrolSpy app can now do anything the Woolworths Petrol app can do plus a lot more.
The way I now use the PetrolSpy app is to help me see how the prices around me are looking. I open the app which is set on my currently location. I zoom out twice using the minus for the zoom. That gives me overview of a reasonably large area around me. Then I press what looks like the menu hamburger which shows me a list of petrol station prices starting with the lowest price first. To see how far the price hike has progressed I quickly scroll until the prices end (you'll see petrol stations with no prices). Then by scrolling back through the petrol stations with the hiked price, I can get an idea of what proportion of petrol stations have increased their price. As you scroll back further you'll see a big jump/drop to the current low price. As petrol stations all increase their prices the big jump/drop will go and prices will then all be around the new price. There will be a few cheaper priced petrol stations for a short while. Then as the petrol price cycle continues you'll see the price range will increase and that's where you can save perhaps 10 cent a litre by shopping around. As the petrol price cycle continues finally most of the petrol stations will have dropped their prices to the bottom (somewhere near the gate price) and we're ready for a new price hike to occur.
One other site I find useful to give an overview of how far the current price hike has progressed is the Motormouth site when used on a notebook computer. When I open Motormouth on the notebook and zoom out a couple of times I can see the proportion of red dots to green dots and that gives me a rough idea of how far the current price hike has progressed.
In summary, I no longer use the 7 Eleven fuel app, deleted the new Woolworths Petrol app and really only use the PetrolSpy app as required to check local prices and get an idea of prices further away. PetrolSpy often has poor data, but for 7 Eleven and Woolworths Petrol prices, these are usually good (can be a bit slow updating) as I feel this data is provided by the retailers and not by end users. For other petrol retailers the data can be missing, but if it's there, I'm cautious with trusting the data as often when I've tried to check out a cheap petrol price shown on PetrolSpy, the petrol station isn't that price at all.
That's about all for this post. Because the petrol price hike information will be on the Petrol Prices Melbourne site I'll only write blog posts if something I feel may interest others.
Kelvin Eldridge
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