Idling fuel consumption calculator

Enter idle_rate as fuel units per hour and duration in hours or minutes; the engine converts minutes to hours when needed, multiplies the rate by that duration, and returns fuel_used. When you also send fuel_price, it multiplies that volume by the unit price and returns cost in the same currency. A negative rate or a negative duration is rejected with invalid_input because a physical idle burn cannot go backwards.

What idling fuel consumption means and what comes back

You supply idle_rate in fuel units per hour and duration in hours or minutes; the response echoes those inputs, reports duration_hours after any minute conversion, reports fuel_used, and, when fuel_price is present, reports cost. There is no traffic simulation and no live map feed: the engine either builds a finite non-negative volume inside the supported numeric range or rejects the input with invalid_input. Rejected cases include a missing idle_rate or duration field, a non-finite token, a magnitude above the documented ceiling, a negative rate, a negative duration, a negative pump price, and a duration_unit that is not hours or minutes.

How the two required inputs are read and how fuel used is computed

Optional leading plus signs and scientific notation on numeric strings are allowed when they parse as finite decimals; embedded spaces, hex prefixes, and non-numeric tokens are rejected with a message that names the field, so a bad cell does not become a wrong idle volume. After validation the engine applies the school identity: fuel used equals idle rate times duration in hours. That is why zero point eight liters per hour over half an hour is zero point four liters, and why one point two liters per hour over thirty minutes is zero point six liters after six-decimal rounding. A negative rate or negative duration is the specified error path: inventing a reverse burn would hide a data-entry mistake. The preferred fields are idle_rate for the engine burn in fuel units per hour and duration for the parked interval, but aliases such as rate, consumption_rate, idle_consumption, liters_per_hour, lph, hours, idle_hours, time, idle_time, and idle_duration are accepted so spreadsheets and typed forms can reuse the same contract without renaming columns. duration_unit selects hours or minutes and defaults to hours; minutes are divided by sixty before the multiply so a thirty-minute wait at one point two liters per hour is the same half-hour product as sending duration zero point five with the default unit. When fuel_price is omitted, cost is omitted from the payload so an optional field never appears as null. When fuel_price is present and non-negative, cost equals fuel used times that unit price, so zero point six liters at one point five per liter is zero point nine in the same currency. Pair the free browser run on this page with the priced API when you need the identical mathematical result inside an automated pipeline.

Where an idle-fuel check belongs in daily life and software

Expense products call the contract from scripts when a user logs idle minutes and a pump price and the app must show fuel_used and cost without shipping a traffic simulator. On this page the work runs entirely in your browser; through the API each successful lookup costs $0.002, failed validation is not charged, and nothing is stored after the response returns. That split — free interactive exploration and a priced, identical API — matches the rest of the tier-A catalog and lets you move from a dashboard demo to an automated pipeline without changing the mathematical result.