2007 Honda Civic: What's It Like to Live With?

Introduction

As oil supplies tighten, gas prices rise and concerns about the environment intensify, public interest in alternative fuels is growing. Lots of interesting new automotive technology is in development, but little is actually on the market.

There's one big exception: the 2007 Honda Civic GX, which runs on compressed natural gas (CNG). The Civic GX is consistently considered the most environmentally friendly car available and has even received the EPA's Smartway Elite designation.

We have reviewed the Honda Civic in many of its different incarnations. But we've never had a vehicle in our long-term fleet that has been powered by natural gas. We're expecting that the real story here is not so much the car (we know we like the Civic) as the lifestyle that surrounds it. For example, where do we buy compressed natural gas? Is it cheaper than regular gasoline? How well does the Phill home refueling unit work in filling the GX's tank?

We'll answer all these questions and many more in our Long-Term Road Test Logbook.

What We Bought
There aren't any choices when you buy the Honda Civic GX. You can choose from five colors and two interior colors. That's about it. Even conveniences like a remote trunk release aren't included in this bare-bones car.

Features aren't what it's about. What it's about is low emissions (PZEV or partial-zero-emissions vehicle), low fuel costs and access to the carpool lanes. An unexpected advantage is that oil changes are stretched to 10,000-mile intervals, since natural gas is less corrosive and leaves more engine oil on the cylinder walls. Similarly, engine components remain cleaner in the long term because natural gas creates fewer carbon deposits.

The GX comes standard with a five-speed automatic transmission (which some editors have already mistaken for a buzzy continuously variable transmission). Its power plant is a 1.8-liter, four-cylinder internal combustion engine that produces 113 horsepower and offers 109 pound-feet of torque at 4,300 rpm — obviously, this car isn't built for speed. Another compromise lies in its limited fuel capacity of just 8 gallons. Even with an EPA rating of 28 mpg city/39 mpg highway, the GX's driving range is just over 200 miles (and our testing so far has shown that the range is highly variable). Moreover, the high-pressure fuel tank forces a reduction in trunk capacity.

Since the GX is not exactly at the top of everyone's shopping list, there aren't a lot of Honda dealerships that carry it. We contacted Miller Honda of Culver City and we were assisted by Fleet Manager Sarah Lovett. We bought the car for our True Market Value (TMV^®) price of $24,432, which included the $595 destination fee. Lovett handled the delivery of the vehicle and provided us with a folder full of information about how to get the Phill and where to find fueling stations around the Los Angeles area. In addition, she set a record for efficiency in preparing and explaining all the sales contracts.

Why We Bought It
The GX seems a natural way to get serious about alternative fuel vehicles. Additionally, we plan to install a Phill home refueling unit in our Edmunds parking structure (if the superintendent allows it) or, if not, in an editor's garage. The Phill delivers CNG at a lower price than buying it from a local pump.

The GX has been available for a number of years and yet it has remained largely below the radar. Those who know about it sing its praises as a commuter car, and this made us curious to see how it stacks up against other environmental choices, such as gas-sipping hybrids. Recently, the California carpool stickers and federal tax rebates for the Toyota Prius have expired, which has left the GX as a standout choice because it's still eligible for these perks. We've applied for carpool stickers and are anticipating several thousand dollars in federal tax credits.

Perhaps our biggest question about the GX regards access to fueling stations. One editor took a previous GX test car to Northern California and located only one station between the metro areas of Los Angeles and San Francisco. Does this rule out long trips in this car? Or will careful and creative planning give it a broader range and use? Stay tuned and we'll fill you in.

How Far Are You Willing To Go?
The GX is really a one-of-a-kind car. From the get-go, it's obvious there will be compromises. It is even likely to be controversial. The real question that is likely to emerge is: How far are you willing to go to save the environment? Is there much in the way of inconvenience and expense? And just as important, will driving a car like this really make a difference?

Current Odometer: 1,780
Best Fuel Economy: 34.7 mpg
Worst Fuel Economy: 24.1 mpg
Average Fuel Economy (over the life of the vehicle): 26.8 mpg

Edmunds purchased this vehicle for the purposes of evaluation.

Top 10 Things I Learned

I had the long-term Civic GX for the past week, or at least its keys. I got to see how it performed in a variety of driving conditions, taking it on different errands — daily commute, trip to Universal City for a press event, taking me to an excellent Editors concert at the Wiltern, and an airport venture that included four days parked while I was in Toronto. Here are some of the things I learned over this period of time.

1) It took too long to fill up the NG equivalent of 3.477 gallons of gasoline. If you don't have a Phill unit, you'd get sick of visiting the natural gas station.

2) I've now watched the NG station video three times. I really need to remember the pass number, but at least I now know not to smoke around a gas pump. So that's why I kept exploding.

3) The Civic GX doesn't do steep hills. I had it floored going up the very steep Hotel Drive in Universal City, but the Civic just couldn't crack 21. It was like going up the opening hill of a roller coaster without the clackety-clack.

4) The trunk can only hold two standard-sized roller bags. That's it. (see photo above)

5) Don't buy a car in Canada. The American and Canadian dollars are now even, but car prices sure aren't. A review of a VW Passat 3.6 Wagon in the Toronto Star listed an as-tested price of $52,820 — before tax. That car is too expensive here (fully loaded around $40K), but Jiminy Christmas.

6) Speaking of expensive, the Civic GX is the most expensive Civic model, yet has fewer standard features than an LX (no aux jack for instance).

7) The Civic GX isn't sold in Canada. That's a good thing, it would probably cost $38,000. You'd also need a pack of huskies to get it up a snowy hill.

8) After standing for four hours in a cramped Wiltern Theatre, you'll find that the Civic GX has the world's most comfortable seats.

9) If you hold up your digital camera and/or cell phone during a sizeable portion of a rock concert, you're both a tool and an idiot. Congratulations, you've just watched a concert going on right in front of you through a 2-inch screen. Your friends really don't care, the photo quality will be lousy, and the video will sound like Marlee Matlin was operating the sound board.

10) Despite being slower than maple syrup, the GX is still a Civic and it's pretty fun to drive around town.

Draining it Dry, Almost.

They told me when I joined the Edmunds team that I would probably be the designated driver for the long-term 2007 Honda Civic GX because I was the "green" guy and because, frankly, nobody wanted to put up with the hassles of finding the natural gas pumps the car requires and worrying about running out of fuel and being left high and dry.

A look at our fuel log over the almost six months the GX has been in the fleet bears that out. Only eight members of the staff have driven it, and most of them only once.

The average distance traveled between fill-ups of compressed natural gas has been well under 150 miles and only once has anyone had to put more than the equivalent of 6.5 gallons of fuel into the 8-gallon tank that's supposed to be good for an average of 224 miles.

Well, we pushed the limits the other day, watching the little light bars on the fuel gauge — about 0.4 gallons-equivalent per bar — blink out until they all were gone and the bright amber "low fuel" light was all that was aglow on that side of the instrument panel.

The occasion was a round-trip drive to La Jolla from the city of Orange in Orange County — near D-land for those not familiar with the geography.

Most of it was done at speeds of 65-85 mph on the San Diego Freeway. The top end of that range certainly isn't best for fuel effiicency, but if you travel at less than 80 on the stretch between the San Onofre nuclear power station and the city of Oceanside you are liable to be run over by everyone else — makes you think everyone's trying to get as far from the power plant as quickly as possible.

Anyhow, at the end of the trip, with that fuel warning light burning away, we pulled in to a CNG station near home and pumped in 6.345 gallons. Paid $16.81 for it, or $2.649 a gallon on a day regular gasoline was going for about $3.30.

The trip odometer read 210.4 miles — the first time it's topped 200 — and our fuel economy for the trip came out to 33.16 miles per gallon. The GX is EPA rated at 24 mpg in the city, 35 on the highway and 28 for the combined cycle.

A friend from Northern Califonria who's been driving a GX for several years says CNG stations abound up there, so for our next distance run we're thinking a spring trek to the Russian River wine country just below Mendocino. That'll let us test the fuel supply infrastructure, push the mileage a bit and see how much old vine Zinfandel we can squeeze into the GX's truncated trunk.

And if we run out of fuel before we run into a CNG station, we'll also be able to report on the eficiency of the Northern California AAA tow service.

The Phill Is Coming!

It's like a second Christmas.

Mike, or Dr. Drain, as his business card identifies him, showed up at noon Thursday to rough-in the mounts and run the gas line for the Phill natural gas fueling unit we're installing in my garage.

If you drive a Civic GX, the home unit would seem to be a reasonable thing to lust after.

Without it, you stop every 175-200 miles to fill up, and natural gas stations aren't quite as plentiful as the regular kind.

For me, with a 116-mile round trip commute, that 's meant a stop every other day at least.

There happen to be five natural gas pump locations on my route — Southern Caliofrnia along the 405 Freeway corridor from Santa Monica to Orange County apparently is a pretty gassy place — but using them requires detours off the freeway and delays my arrivals at home or office.

With the Phill, I'll be able to hook up the hose when I pull into the garage at night and, presuming it works as advertised, Viola!, I'll have a topped-up tank every morning when I leave for work.

And I'll be saving money — gas from a Phill home unit is billed at the residential rate and, last time I checked, that worked out to about $2.00 for the equivalent of a gallon. At the retail stations in my neighborhoods, compressed natural gas runs from $2.40 to $2.65 a gallon these days.

We started ordering the Phill from its Canadian manufacturer, FuelMaker Corp., back in November. (I'm using the plural because getting the Phill has been a joint effort , with Edmunds paying for it and me providing the location and doing all the ordering and scheduling to get it installed.)

After telling them by phone that we wanted one, they sent us to a website to download a form we filled out and faxed to the local natural gas utility, which had to certify that we had the proper type of gas service at the hous. That took about a week.

Then we had to contact Dr. Drain — the only installer FuelMaker has authorized in our part of Southern California — and set up an appointment for him to come scope out the garage. We also sent him a bunch of photos of the inside of the garage to help him give us his installation estimate ($1,800).

After he notified FuelMaker that he was good to go, customer service agent Patricia Mwita nicely asked us to send the full price of the Phill unit in advance — less a $2,000 discount we got because we're installing it in an area in which the local auir quality agency gives two grand grants to Phill purchasers. The total rounds out to $2,200.

Add the installation fee and we'll be at $4,000, but there's a also a $1,000 federal income tax credit (which Edmunds gets, darnit!) which brings the out-of-pocket back down to around $3,000.

At a roughly 60-cents per gallon-equivalent difference between the price of home-brew and retail CNG, it will take 4,615 gallons to break even with the Phill. That's 129,000 miles at the 28 miles per gallon we've been averaging, so we'll probably not have the thing amortized when time comes to sell the longerm Civic GX.

But there's a market for used Phills, which often are sold along with the car they've been filling. So we may break even.

And if I were paying for it out of my own pocket, there'd be another rationale for the expense: the extra 10 minutes the home fill will give me for a little more sleep in the mornings, or to savor a glass of wine and a little conversation with my wife in the evenings.

Plus, I have to clean out the garage, 'cause all the junk – kayak, ladder, bike rack, dart board etc. – takes up wall space the Phill will need.  A clean garage will make my wife happy and that, as the commercial says, is priceless.

But back to business.

Patricia says FuelMaker is assembling our Phill right now and will ship it to Dr. Drain in early February. He says he can install it within a few days.

We’ll keep you posted.

Boredom As Bliss; Phill Update

A landmark, of sorts.

The odo passed 10K on the way home Friday (it is difficult to get a decent picture of a lighted digital odometer while stopped, in the dark, in the carpool lane – but as the traffic was cooperating, I tried!).

I've put most of those miles on our 2007 Honda Civic GX, a point driven home Friday morning when managing editor Donna DeRosa asked me whether I got bored driving the GX all the time.

What can I say?

It is a bit boring, but hey, it's a basic Civic, a slightly underpowered basic Civic, and most of my driving is on Southern California freeways during Southern California rush hours. Driving a Ferrari is boring when stop-go-stop-go-slow down-stop-go-stop-stop-go-slow-go is the pattern and top speed rarely rises above 40 miles an hour.

Still, it is a Civic, so it starts whenever you ask it; goes where you point it, is comfortable, has a radio (audio system is too proud a term to describe the two-speaker AM/FM/CD setup), turns corners without tipping over and stops promptly when required.

Add to that a single-occupant carpool lane permit and better-than-average CO2 emissions because of the lower carbon content of its compressed natural gas fuel, and the Civic GX becomes a blissful commuter car.

Every once in a while there's even is a soupçon of excitement: wondering how much farther you can drive once the fuel gauge hits empty (haven't run out yet); getting the recall notice that says the CNG tank could take off like a rocket if we lit a big fire in the back seat (we still haven't taken it in for the fix — a new seal of some sort); visiting Honda dealership at 7,000 miles for the first scheduled oil change (the first time its been to a dealership since we picked it up at the end of June; and getting the Phill.

Actually, we don't actually have the Phill — the natural gas compressor and pump unit that will let us fill the GX overnight in our garage. But we got word Friday that FuelMaker Corp., the Canadian company that, well, makes it, finally has shipped our Phill to the installer.

It's supposed to arrive around the end of this week, and we're hoping we can get it installed, inspected and approved by the 15th.

In preparation, we updated the fuel log this morning and can report that at 10,083 miles, we're averaging 28.43 miles a gallon. That's unchanged from the then lifetime average of 28.4 mpg posted at 5,234 miles back in November.

Fueling's a Treasure Hunt on Weekend Trip

Took the Civic GX €“just named greenest vehicle sold in the U.S. on a 611-mile weekend trip. It takes a little planning when your fuel isn't the easiest to find, but all went well.

Part of the reason for taking the GX, usually just a commuter car, was to see if we could stand sitting in it for hours on end. Part was to see how difficult it would be to find the compressed natural gas it needs once we got out of the greater Los Angeles area.

Neither proved problematic, although figuring out the fueling logistics is a bit like planning a treasure hunt. And when you get to some of the stops, you find that CNG pumps aren't often in spots you really want to hang around in after dark.

Before departing, we plugged our starting point and destination into the mapping function of the federal Energy Department's alternative fuels site.

 Following the instructions provided a nice map that located 30 compressed natural gas stations on two possible routes from Southern California up to the central coast resort town of Cambria, about 6 miles south of Hearst Castle.

Each station was indicated by an interactive red triangle that, when moused and clicked, opened to give precise details including the station's hours, the types of credit cards accepted, driving directions and whether the station was open to the public€“ many aren't.

After picking out five that would suit our needs, I printed out the specifics and for extra insurance loaded the addresses into our portable GPS navigation system.

The whole exercise took about 20 minutes and left me feeling assured that we'd not run out of fuel in the middle of nowhere.

To be doubly sure, I earmarked stations that were about 100 miles or a little less than half a tank apart.

The first fill was supposed to be at a local station near home, but it was out of order (the DOE info has phone numbers and advises calling in advance to make sure the stations are open and functioning, but that takes all the fun out of it).

We had started out with a nearly full tank, so we just headed up the freeway and stopped at the CNG trough near Edmunds' office in Santa Monica for our initial fill, and began calculating mileage and fuel consumption from that point.

We stopped again in Santa Barbara, where the pump is located just off the freeway in an industrial area near the city's maintenance yard€“ dark and deserted territory late at night.

The third and final fill on the way to Cambria was in the city of San Luis Obispo, at a well-lighted site that also had about 20 diesel and gas pumps used by city buses and work trucks.

Although the sign on the CNG pump there said it accepted Visa cards, it wouldn't take the one I've been using for the past six months at other natural gas pumps. I had to drag out a backup, which was also a Visa card, and listen to the two-minute training video again before I could get a new ID code and start pumping.

We reversed the gas stops on the way home, but omitted the Santa Monica stop as we took a different route down from Santa Barbara. Still, the GX fuel gauge registered only half-empty at the end of that final 161.8-mile leg. That was good for best-of-trip average fuel economy of 40.02 miles per gallon.

Fuel wise, we pumped in a total of 18.33 gallons, for average fuel economy of 33.3 miles per gallon. Not bad for a trip that included a lot of high speed driving, about half of it uphill travel through California's coastal mountains. On the commute treadmill, the GX has been averaging 28.5 miles per gallon, so the trip helps show how hard the daily stop-and-go grind is on fuel economy.

The car ran fine, held all the luggage for a two-day trip (not to mention my big bag of electronics€“ camera, laptop, electrical adapters etc.) and remained comfortable even after five hours behind the wheel.

We wasted a lot of fuel, though, flooring it on many of the uphill sections of our route to keep up with traffic€“ the drawback of the somewhat anemic1.8-liter, four-cylinder CNG engine is that it provides 18.5% less horsepower and 14.8% less torque than the comparable gasoline engine.

Trials and Tribulations

The Civic GX works fine, but there are some frustrations when you're driving a car that requires specially trained repair people and special fueling equipment that comes from a sole source.

Mostly it boils down to time spent waiting.

Two cases in point are the ongoing saga of our Phill home natural gas fueling unit, and a recent recall to install a thermal insulator between the fuel tank and the back seat.

We ordered, and paid for, the Phill just before the end of the year and were told by the Canadian manufacturer, FuelMaker Corp., that holiday season delays meant it would be a few weeks before work would start on the unit. We waited.

On Jan. 31 we got an e-mail letting us know that the Phill finally was being shipped to the only installer in our area, a Southern California plumbing company called Dr. Drain.

We waited.

It was supposed to take five to seven working days to get the unit from FuelMaker to the good doctor. That should have had the Pill arriving by Feb. 12, so installation was tentatively set for Feb. 15. Dr. Drain told us on Feb. 19 that the thing had just landed at his shop.

We're still waiting, with Feb. 26 the new tentative installation date. 

As for the recall, well, we got the notice back on Dec. 17, nicely worded so as not to scare us, but basically cautioning that if we had a big fire in the rear seating area of the GX, the heat could cause the fuel tank to make like a rocket.

We couldn't do anything right away, though, because Honda told us that the part needed to fix things wasn't available yet.

We waited.

A letter arrived in mid January telling us the fix-it part was now available. (Good thing no one tried to have a backseat barbecue in the interim).

Mike Magrath, Edmunds' vehicle testing assistant, called a local Honda dealer to order the part.

Then we waited.

About two weeks later, the dealer's parts department called to say the part had arrived. So Magrath called the service department to schedule an appointment and was told that, sorry, that dealership wasn't authorized to work on the GX fuel system, which required specially trained service personnel.

No explanation was offered as to why they didn't tell us that when we ordered the part, Magrath says, adding that he encountered the same disconnect between parts and service (yes, we can order the part, no, we can't install it) at another area dealership before being told there was only one in all of the sprawling Los Angeles-Orange County area authorized to do the repair.

We finally got the fix done on Feb.8 and are happy to report that a) the work was done quickly and, so far as we know, properly, and b) the fuel tank is still attached to the car.

CNG Comes Home

Phinally.

The Phill has been installed.

After waiting almost two months from the time we placed the order for the home fueling device at the end of December, I pumped the first made-at-home CNG into our long-term 2007 Civic GX on Friday evening, after the electrician did his thing and hooked the machine up to a 240-volt circuit.

Dr. Drain, aka Michael Fossler,  the only Phill installer in my area of  Southern California, had delivered, unpacked and hung the nifty little natural gas compressor/pump unit on the garage wall on Thursday.

Took about 3 hours to do the job, which involved boring a 6-inch hole through the wall for an external vent; hooking up the gas intake and exhaust plumbing (there's an exhaust line that lets natural gas spew to the outside in case of a breakdown) and a gas leak sensor and alarm and checking things out to make sure it all works.

I'll probably get in trouble, but I couldn't resist trying things out even before the system has been inspected by the city (that's supposed to happen this week). But honest, your honor, I only used it a little bit, and only once.

One thing with the home unit is that there's no gauge or readout to tell you how much gas it is delivering to the vehicle, and it is not metered separately from regular household natural gas consumption, so there's no really accurate way right now to continue tracking the GX's fuel economy.

We're trying to work out a system with Honda engineers for making accurate estimates of gasoline gallon-equivalents pumped as the retail CNG pumps do by assigning values to each of the 20 little bars that track fuel usage on the car's instrument panel.

Soon as we get a good system going we'll lay it out right here.

Meantime, I can report that the car had 82.3 miles on the trip odometer when I started the Phill at 4:35 pm Friday and that eight of the fuel gauge bars had disappeared. Today I'm also down eight bars, but with 109.5 mileson the trip meter.

It took almost 9 hours to top up the tank (the Phill pumps for a while, stops to cool itself down and run a drying cycle to purge any water vapor that came in from the home gas line, then repeats the cycle until the tank is full.

It's slow FuelMaker Co., the manufacturer, says it takes about 12 hours to fill an empty GX tank pumping the equivalent of about 7.5 gallons, but ambient temperature, the state of the car's fuel tank when you start and a few other things can affect the fueling time.

The slow pace is supposed to help it give a better fill than a retail pump.

The Phill fills until its sensors read that the tank has reached full pressurization of 3,600 pounds per square inch.

That slow trickle at full pressure puts more fuel into the tank than do retail pumps that are listed at 3,600 psi but often only pump to around 3,200 pounds because the gas in the underground storage tanks isn't up to maximum pressure. I've noticed more than once that at least one of the bars on the fuel gauge isn't lit up after I've stopped to top off the tank and the readout on the pump says the car's tank is full.

Now I'm in the process of emptying the tank as much as possible to see if filling with the Phill gives me any more distance on my daily commute route than does filling at a retail pump.

Stay tuned.

Figuring Fuel Economy With Phill

A full tank is 20 lighted bars on fuel gauge. Each represents 0.368 gallon.

The city inspector has signed off on it, so our Phill home natural gas pump is officially up and operating. For the 1,395 miles the Civic GX has traveled since at-home refueling began, average fuel economy has jumped by a little more than 3 miles per gallon – an extra 21 miles per tank as best I can figure it.

Warning: What follows is a lengthy discourse on how we are computing fuel economy with a system that doesn't tell us how many gallons are being pumped into the tank.

For those who don't care about the how, the net result is that we're now averaging 29.38 miles per gallon in our compressed natural gas Civic GX after 13,562 miles, up from a little over 28 mpg at 10,000 miles. The boost comes mainly from the average of 32.34 mpg we're recorded over the 1,395 miles that we've been using the Phill.

If you do care, or are hoping to catch me in an error (not hard to do), feel free to read on 'til your eyes glaze over.

Physics explains the jump, but I'm not a physicist, so the best that I can do is pass on the explanation I received from Eric Rosenberg, assistant manager of American Honda's alternative fuels unit:

The Phill pushes more compressed natural gas into the car's tank than does a rapid-fill pump at a retail station; so even though the fuel gauge reads full with either type of fill-up, there's more fuel, so more miles per gallon, in a tank filled by the Phill.

It's all about heat and pressure.

The Phill reads the pressure in the tank and fills until it hits 3,600 pounds per square inch. Because it is a very slow fill, averaging the equivalent of just 0.4 gallons an hour, the Phill doesn't cause much of a heat build-up in the tank.

Retail pumps, however, shove the gas in at a rate of close to 2 gallons per minute, which causes a heat build-up which causes the internal tank pressure to rise which fools the pump into thinking the tank is full when it isn't. Additionally, the retail pumps merely pump til the fuel tank pressure is equal to the pressure in the pump's storage tank, and that's often well below 3,600 pounds

I've put 1,395 miles on the GX since the first fill-up with the Phill, and under a system co-developed with Honda's Rosenberg, figure that it's pumped the equivalent of 43.138 gallons, for a fuel economy average of 32.34 miles per gallon.

We averaged 29.05 mpg for the first 12,173 miles we put on the car and had been seeing fuel economy increase a little with each tank.

The denser Phill fill explains the fuel economy increase, although, as Rosenberg admits, there's no easy way to get a really accurate read on gallon-equivalents delivered by the home pump.

Some gas utilities provide a separate meter for it, but here in Southern California, the Phill unit is hooked into the home meter, so it's hard to figure out exactly how many therms went into the car versus the hot water heater, clothes dryer, stove-top, gas fireplace and whole-house heating system. Best you can get is a pretty good estimate by comparing several years of gas bills on a month-to-month basis, and I've not received a new bill since I started using the home system.

Using the Civic's fuel gauge isn't any more accurate.

It has 20 bars that all light up when the tank is full, and then disappear one by one as the compressed natural gas in the tank is depleted. But with the Phill, at least with our Phill, the system shuts off and registers full when 19 of the bars are lighted.

Rosenberg says that he's received a mix of reports from GX users, with many others also reporting that their cars' tanks appear to be full when that penultimate 19th bar lights up and that they never see the20th bar.

Amber light and no bars means you're into reserve of about one-half gallon.

We know that the GX's tank holds the equivalent of 8 gallons but that only about 7.5 gallons are usable. "Approximately" half a gallon always remains because by the time you get down to it, the pressure in the tank is too low to deliver it, Rosenberg says.

What's more, an undetermined amount of useable CNG – somewhere between 0.25 and 0.75 gallon – remains in reserve when the last bar disappears. I've driven 20 miles with a blank gauge, but the mileage depends on a slew of variables including ambient temperature and the vehicle's acceleration and braking pattern.

So the system we've come up with is a pretty straightforward averaging.

Because we've determined that our tank is full at 19 bars on the fuel gauge, with perhaps a gallon equally divided between the useable and unusable reserves, we've divided the remaining 7 gallons by 19 and assigned a value of 0.368 gallons to each bar. If nine bars have been depleted since the last fill-up and all 19 are lighted again when the Phill says the tank has been refilled, we multiply 0.368 by 9 and come up with a value of 3.312 gallons.

If the tank is run deep into that last half-gallon or so of reserve, we add it in and use 0.385 gallons per bar to calculate that fill-up.

This isn't exact — the Phill fills by reading tank pressure and the pressure is higher when the tank is half full than when it is empty. That means that the last bars of a fill up contain a little less CNG than did the first ones. It all averages out in the tank, but means that by assigning a static value to each bar we get a reading that's slightly off when the tank is refilled before it is completely empty.

But, as Rosenberg says, "that's the best you can do." Not even the alt fuels team at Honda, which has a vested interest in knowing as much about the GX, the Phill and CNG refueling as possible, has come up with a better method.

So until someone out there develops a gas flow meter that can be attached to the Phill's nozzle and gives an accurate gallons-equivalent reading, this is what we'll be doing.

I have emptied the tank as much as possible on two occasions since the first Phill fill (a Phill-up?) on February 28, logging 228.2 miles on the first tank and diving deep into the reserve, and 203.7 on the second., traveling only about a mile after the last bar on the fuel gauge disappeared.

The rest of the time, I "plug in" the Phill's nozzle and turn it on when I park the car each evening, usually refilling somewhere between 8 and 11 bars overnight. It can take 19 hours to refill an empty tank, and form 9 to 12 hours to do half a tank. The last half fills more slowly than the first half because the pressure in the tank builds as it fills, and the flow of gas from the pump nozzle slows as it meets resistance.

If you can possibly want to know anything else about the Phill and how it works, the manual is available on-line and you are welcome to it.

If you've got a better way to compute mileage, or find a significant error in our methodology, we want to hear from you, so shoot me an e-mail.

Long Time Between Oil Changes

When I bought the 2007 Honda Civic GX for the long term fleet last year I remembered hearing that one of the advantages of this car, besides low pollution and low fuel costs, was that you could go a long time between oil changes. The Honda brochure said that the natural gas it runs on is less corrosive than gasoline so the oil remains uncontaminated longer. And, since it has a maintenance minder, it just tells you when you need service.

When I got into the car I noticed the little wrench light icon and a "B1" in the odometer window. Looking in the manual, I saw that this called for an oil and filter change, a tire rotation, check fluids and various inspections. I emailed my local Honda service department to ask if they could work on the GX and what this would cost. They replied that the B1 service was $104 but that they also recommended two other filter changes that would run $165 so the total would be $269.95. There was nothing in the manual about these other filter changes so I decided to skip it for now.

As consumer advice editor, I'm going to be beefing up our "how to" section, so I decided to tackle this modest mechanical task myself and call it research. I was also inspired by reading Dan Edmunds' excellent post about performing a similar service on the 2008 Scion xB. I used to really enjoy working on cars so I cheerfully headed to the dealership for supplies. I purchased a Honda oil filter, four quarts of 5W-20 oil and a special wrench for removing the filter. Total after tax was $31.89 (oil from an auto parts store would have been much cheaper but I didn't want to make two stops).

The only tricky part was getting access to the filter and oil pan drain plug. The clearance is low and there wasn't room to simply silde under there. I had to jack up the car, put it on a jack stand and remove the filter and drain plug, then lower the car to make sure it drained properly. That was a hassle, but I had to rotate the tires too, so it wasn't wasted motion. I also did the inspections and checked all the fluids. The old oil I put into containers provided by the City of Long Beach to be picked up along with my recycling stuff.

I'm puzzled about whether this is the first or the second oil change. At 14,411 miles, that would be an awfully long time. But there were no records in the maintenance book or posts about an earlier oil change. I'll check further and report any findings.

It took an hour and a half to do all the work which doesn't break any records. And with the expensive dealership oil and the special wrench I didn't save a lot of money — this time. Next time around it will be faster and I'll trim the costs down even further. Still, the best part of it was actually working my own work on a car. There's precious little chance to do that these days.

Fuel Economy Up, Costs Down

Hey, Hey! We Won't Pay! Home fuel unit has CNG cost down to $2.04 a gallon. After just over 16,000 miles — hard plastic , intruding hand brake, pitifully poor acceleration and boring exterior notwithstanding — the Civic GX is humming along quite nicely, and economically, thank you.

For sheer driving pleasure it's way down the queue, but as a daily commuter on Southern California's [insert colorful adjective of your choice here] freeways, it ranks way up at the top of my list of cars I want to keep using.

Except for two scheduled oil changes at 7,000 mile intervals, a recall to install a safety gasket and a round of tire adjustment when we discovered during Edmunds.com's Earth Day tire pressure project that inflation was high by about 2 pounds, or 6 percent, per tire, we've had no problems, although one might be developing.

We'll be making a service appointment because several of us have noticed a very slight and intermittent shiver or shudder when the car is idling. It's unpredictable, but most assuredly there. Feels like it might be caused by a clogged fuel injector nozzle.

It's not so significant that we're thinking of an immediate check up, but we'll be asking the service guys at the dealership to look at it during our next scheduled oil change, in about 5,000 miles.

Aside from that, things couldn't be better, especially since the home fueling unit was installed in my garage. That has ended the daily detour to find a retail CNG station and has lowered the GX's fuel bills considerably.

Regular gasoline is selling for $3.839 a gallon in my part of Southern California and CNG at the admittedly pricey Clean Energy pump near the office is going for $2.849. But $2.036 per gallon is what fuel from the natural gas pump in the garage cost during the past month.

That's a 46.8 percent savings over the cost of fuel for a conventional gasoline-burning Civic LX and is 28.5 percent cheaper than fuel from the Clean Energy outlet.

The per gallon cost for the GX for April also is down considerably from $2.53 per gallon we computed for March, largely because the April bill from the Southern California Gas Co. included a discount the utility offers households that have a home CNG fueling unit.

It cut the average price of natural gas to $1.11 per therm (that's equal to 0.784 gallon-equivalent when the gas is compressed and pumped into the car via the Phill fueling unit.

Add the Phill's share of the monthly meter fee from the gas company (about $4.50 in April) and a few bucks for electricity to run the pump (based on our five-year averaging method it was $7.29 for April) and you'll get a total of $53.93 for the CNG equivalent of 26.496 gallons of fuel.

The per-gallon price will bounce around a bit each month because of minor adjustments based on total household usage of both natural gas and electricity, but I'm expecting it to stick close to the $2 per gallon mark and will let you know if it gets off that mark by more than a dime on either side.

Meantime, fuel economy continues creeping up, thanks in large part to the increased density of fill we're getting with the home fueling unit. (A denser fill means more energy per gallon, thus better mileage.)

Overall average since we put the Civic GX into our longterm fleet last June is now is 29.96 mpg, up from 29.38 mpg the last time we figured it 2,385 miles ago and a 5 percent, or 1.5 mpg improvement, from the 28.4 miles per gallon average we recorded over the first 5,234 miles we drove the car.

Better yet, in the month since we computed the first home fueling bill, the Civic GX has averaged 31.16 mpg.

A Different Kind of Fill-Up

Everytime I open the trunklet on the Civic GX, I bleed a little for Honda.

Gasoline prices are driving sales of this nifty compressed natural gas commuter car now, but for most of its life it has been relegated to the commercial and government fleet market because it has not been perceived as a very useful everyday vehicle for the consumer.

That's in large part because CNG isn't a fuel that's readily available in all states, making the Civic GX a car in which you wouldn't want to essay a cross-country trip.

But it's also because the trunk is so small, much of what had been a spacious cavity in the conventional Civic being occupied by the tanks for the GX's pressurized fuel.

Still, I've been driving it for quite a few thousand miles now and have found that for most daily uses you can think to put a car to, it does just fine.

When my wife and I go shopping on weekends – even, sometimes, to the local big box discounter where everything comes king-sized or larger – we find that the GX trunk, at 14 inches deep, 20 inches tall and 55 inches long, is more spacious than it looks.

We crammed a week's worth of groceries and sundries into the trunk this past weekend – eight bags, a case of water and a case of diet cola – and still could have jammed in something long and flat along the top, if we'd purchased something long and flat (a whole halibut maybe?).

And that doesn't even count the back seat, which remained empty this trip but on occasion has held things like a six-million pack of paper towels, a flat of poppies(the decorative kind) and a 50-pound bag of planting mix when the trunk was otherwise occupied.

Brakes Wear, Shifter Compromises Fuel Economy

The Civic GX's odo says it has traveled 25,611 miles, and the last posting about the car on this blog was at 19,683!

Apologies. It is hard to regularly find something new and exciting to write about when you drive the same car day after day. At least it is when the car is a 2007 Honda Civic GX. Barring a natural gas incident (the car, not the driver) , the GX is wonderful but unexciting basic transportation. Period.

This posting is occasioned by three things: The GX's first brake job, a mileage and fuel-cost update and a Honda transmission idiosyncrasy that we've discovered.

We got the brake job — $183.85 for front pads and rotor resurfacing, after we noticed a slight noise — not grinding, but not right, either — when braking hard at freeway speeds.

Turned out the rotors weren't warped, but were glazed and discolored from excessive heat - the result of all the braking we do in our 100-mile-plus round trip commute in rush-hour traffic.

The service advisor at our local Honda dealership told us we were actually doing pretty good: that the range for a first front-end brake job was 5,000 to 25,000 miles, with an awful lot of people coming it at under 15k. The composition of the Civic's brake pads, he said, can make 'em wear out pretty fast.

On the fuel economy front, we're still averaging around 33 miles per gallon-equivalent, not bad for a car that's EPA-rated at 28 mpg and is usually driven in the worst of all conditions for decent fuel economy - Southern California freeways during morning and evening rush hours.

It should be even higher.

One thing I should have written about a while ago but have been too embarrassed to tackle is my inability to drive the car in the proper gear.

I'm constantly finding myself roaring down the freeway in 3rd instead of in the far more fuel-efficient "drive," which gives you 4th and 5th gears to play with.

Actually, I'm told (by guys at Honda, no less) this can be a problem with many Hondas with automatic transmissions .

The console-mounted shifter is all the way forward in "Park" and as you pull it back through "Reverse" and "Neutral" you'd think the logical stopping point would be in "D."

But Honda's engineers, for reasons known only to them, designed the shifter mechanism so that it easily pulls right through the "drive" position and locks into "D3," which locks out 4th and 5th gears.

If you shift by feel, which I do all too often, you can easily end up winding it out in 3rd, which I do and which gulps fuel .

Fortunately, with a Phil natural gas pump in the garage, our fuel costs are well below market rates - even with gasoline and natural gas prices at the retail pumps down around the $2 per gallon mark now.

We've been averaging about $2.10 a gallon all along, even when retail pump prices were nearly $3.25 for natural gas and over $4 for gasoline.

Cold Nights = More MPG

What a difference a change in the weather can make!

I've been watching the GX's fuel economy pretty closely the past few months (while studiously avoiding writing about it, to the chagrin of several editors around here!) and can now report with the authority of numbers that although the daily drive hasn't changed, fuel efficiency has improved markedly as nighttime temperatures have dropped.

It all goes back to nature of the Civic GX's natural gas fuel - its molecules expand when warm and contract when cold. The tank, which holds the equivalent of 8 gallons, will contain more natural gas, by weight, when the fuel is pumped on a cold day (or night, which is when we fill up) than on a warm one.

Anyhow, the GX averaged 35.77 miles a gallon over the last 2,719 miles, from Dec. 17 through the most recent fill-up on Feb. 26, a period when nighttime temperatures (we fill up overnight) regularly fell below 45-degrees Fahrenheit.

That's almost 5 percent better than the 34.07 mpg average we recorded for the previous 3,347 miles, between Sept. 30 and Dec 16, when nighttime temperatures in our area were in the high 50s and low 60s.

Continuing our backward march through time, the GX averaged 31.68 miles a gallon for the 11,256 miles before that - Feb. 28, 2007, through Sept. 29, 2008, a period of even warmer nighttime temps .

We're not going back any further because Feb. 28, '07, was when we started using the Phill home natural gas fuel pump, which delivers a denser fill-up than the retail pumps we'd been using since the GX came into the Edmunds Inside Line long-term fleet on June 29, 2007.

(If you are curious, our average for that initial period, covering 12,255 miles, was a flat 29 mpg and our average since, for 17,240 miles, has been 32.79 mpg).

And to reiterate, almost all of the driving, save for two weekend mini-vacation drives, has been on Southern Caliofrnia freeways and most of that during the morning and evening rush-hours. We do get to use the carpool lanes, however, so there's been a bit less fuel-wasting, stop-and-go driving than if we were out there in the scrum every day with the rest of the mob.

Oh, and for the whole time we've been using the home fueling system, we've been averaging under $2.25 a gallon-equivalent for our natural gas and the electricity to compress and pump it, even when regular gasoline was up over $4 a gallon.

For the past few months, with gasoline in the $2.10-$2.40 range here, our CNG fuel at home has run well under $2 a gallon.

Less Compromised Than a Prius, Sort Of

My last experience in our 2007 Honda Civic GX was mostly on the freeway. Aside from the fact that it feels like the whole car is holding its breath as it accelerates, the CNG-fueled, 1.8-liter inline-four provides adequate motivation for commuting — and with none of the odd sensations you get in a hybrid with blended gasoline-engine and electric power sources.

The GX also rides pretty much like any other (non-Si) Civic, though I think it would be better if we got rid of the low-rolling-resistance P195/65R15 89H tires — perhaps that will be soon given our long-termer's mileage. Still, freeway travel in a Civic GX feels more secure and relaxing than it does in a second-generation Prius or our long-term Smart Fortwo, either of which is liable to wander all over the road. I can see why people use the GX for high-mileage commuting in greater LA.

But if I owned our natural-gas Honda, I'd mostly use it to run errands within 10-15 miles of my home. Like most fuel misers, it's most pleasant during low-speed stop-and-go driving, even if it this doesn't give it the opportunity to operate at maximum efficiency.

As someone commented on Mark's entry, the lack of a current vendor for the Phill home refueling unit makes a Civic GX purchase far less desirable today than it was two years ago. (Honda's sale of Fuel Maker's assets to Fuel Systems Solutions is now final, and FSS says it will restart Phill production but hasn't yet as far as we know.)

I rent a 1940s-era apartment, though, so I couldn't ever have a Phill anyway. I do have the random luck to live in the Republic of Santa Monica within a half-mile of a natural gas refueling station. So owning a Honda Civic GX could conceivably work for me. But I think I'd rather just get a Fit.

Seating Position Also Feels Natural

Driving our long-term 2007 Honda Civic GX reminds me how much I like the interior of the current-generation Honda Civic. I've never had a problem with the stacked digital speedo/analog tach combo. And no matter which trim level you end up with, the seats are roomy, well-shaped and instantly comfortable — as they should be in a car that retailed for $24,590 before tax credits.

Even nicer is the seating position itself. The seat is mounted low, but the cowl is also low, so I get in and feel enthusiastic about the drive I'll take — even if the car's 1.8-liter engine (113 hp at 6,300 rpm, 109 lb-ft at 4,300 rpm) and five-speed automatic aren't the most enthusiastic team.

Standard telescope adjustment makes it easy to position the 3/4-scale steering wheel where I want it. Although this isn't the leather-wrapped, three-spoke version I'm used to (Civic Si, Civic Hybrid, Fit, Insight), this vinyl, two-spoke wheel still feels right in my hands.

At $1.22 a Gallon, What's Not to Like?

It's been two months since I last drove our Honda Civic GX, and unlike most of my colleagues, I'm actually looking forward to getting back behind the wheel.

I've enjoyed the natural gas-fueled Civic ever since I started using it back in October of 2007 for most of my daily commuting between my home in Orange and Edmunds' offices in Santa Monica - not because it's a particularly exciting car to drive but because it is the ideal Southern California long-distance commuter car.

It comes with a single occupant car-pool lane sticker, which cuts about an hour a day from my 100 mile-plus round trip; it's saved hundreds of dollars on fuel and, with a Phill home fueling unit in my garage (thank you, boss!) I don't have to worry about where my next tank will come from.

And consider this: Fuel consumption has averaged 32.8 mpg over the last 19,000 miles, and the average cost of fillingl its tank from the home natural gas pump is a mere $1.22 per gasoline gallon-equivalent. That's for both the natural gas and the electricity to compress and pump it.

So even though it's sluggish off the line and pretty basic in the amenities department (power windows and locks, AC, base Honda stereo and that's it), it's been nice to have around - sort of like a longtime acquaintance who's always reliable but doesn't demand much attention from day to day.

I've not been driving it because of a pinched nerve in my back that's made sitting in the Civic's low-slung seat somewhere between awfully uncomfortable and incredibly painful for the 90 minutes I spend on the freeway most mornings and evenings on days I drive into Santa Monica.

What's even more painful though is the time it takes to commute on some of the nation's most crowded freeways without being able to legally jump into the carpool lane - and, of course, the amount of cash I have to fork over to fill the SUV I've been driving because its chair-height seats are easier on the back during a long commute.<

But I've managed recently to get the discomfort level down to a steadily bearable ache - you gotta love those steroids - so I'm climbing back aboard the Civic GX.

In the SUV I've been paying $3.13 a gallon for its required premium fuel and averaging 20.3 mpg on the commute. That's about $17.25 per round trip.

Compare that to the Civic GX's $4.01 per round trip and its easy to see why I'm happy to get back behind its wheel, and to heck with a little back pain.

Warren is absolutely correct in his recent post - having a Phill does make a huge difference. And Erin's right about the temporary unavailability of the Phill (although there are other - albeit larger and more expensive - natural gas pumps on the market).

But I don't agree with Mark's comment that the GX is only for people with a Phill and that for the rest it's a "pricey novelty" at best.

It certainly wouldn't work in Ohio, or Alabama, but there are places were natural gas fuel is readily available: the LA basin is one - there are 5 retail natural gas stations along the main freeway I use when commuting to the office instead of working at home (that's one every 11 miles on average).

There are 79 public stations within a 240-miles radius of the office - the approximate range of the GX, which packs 7.5 usable gallons-equivalent of CNG in its pressurized tank.

A GX can easily make the 385-mile trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco without pump anxiety (although going farther north or heading east toward the Sierra Nevada mountains wouldn't be a very good idea unless youve got a thing for tow trucks).

And in Oklahoma and Utah natural gas is not only abundant, it's incredibly cheap, often less that 75-cents a gallon-equivalent at retail pumps!

If you want to check natural gas availability for yourself, the federal Energy Department's got a nifty alternative fuel finder that'll not only show you where the stations are, it will map a trip for you so you can quickly see whether it can be done in a natural gas vehicle.

A number of people have been asking how we figure our fuel consumption and pricing with an unmetered unit like the Phill.

For the long version I'll refer you to the explanation posted shortly after we started using the home unit early last year.

The short version is that we use educated guesswork, checked by the occasion retail pump fill-up to see how close our estimates (a system worked out with Honda engineers) jibe with the metered tallies at retail pumps certified by the Department of Weights and Measures.

So far, we've been within a few hundredths of a gallon-equivalent, which makes us pretty secure in the fuel economy figures we're posting for the Civic GX.

So yes, it's a great commuter car; no, its not gonna serve many people as their primary vehicle; yes, the Phill is expensive and, right now, impossible to buy new; and no, the GX doesn't make sense everywhere and for everyone.

But it is incredibly convenient if you have a long commute and a handy fuel supply; it is helping Honda gather data that could someday lead to a purpose-built natural gas car; it does free you from the tyranny of escalating gasoline prices, and if (or when) we run short of petroleum, it could keep you rolling right past the long lines and/or rioters at the corner gasoline station.

It also is greener than any other internal combustion vehicle (save the few hydrogen-burning BMW test cars) in the country.

And it makes my commute so much easier !

The Two Extremes

Say what you want about the Honda Civic, but there's no denying the vehicle's range. You want a cheap A to B sedan? No problem. An inexpensive, fun, little coupe? Got it. A Hybrid? Sure. One that runs on Natural Gas? Okay. A hot rod? Yup.

Basically there's a Civic for everybody and everything. And so I thought it would be fun to compare the track test numbers of the Civic's two extremes, our long-term Civic GX, which drinks (or is it inhales?) compressed natural gas and the Civic Si, which is known for eating American musclecars.

Both are front-wheel drive and powered by four-cylinders and both cost about $25,000, but the GX is powered by a 113 hp 1.8-liter engine while the Si is packing a 197 hp 2.0-liter. Oh, and the GX uses a 5-speed automatic transmission. The Si of course get six-speed manual.

Honda Civic GX

0-60 mph: 12.6 sec.

1/4 mile: 18.9 sec. @ 72.9 mph

60-0 mph Braking: 135 ft.

700 ft. Slalom: 62.8 mph

200 ft. Skid Pad: .75g

Honda Civic Si

0-60 mph: 7.0 sec.

0-60 with 1-ft Rollout: 6.7 sec.

1/4 Mile (sec @ mph): 15.3 sec @ 93.0 mph

60 - 0 mph Braking: 123 ft.

700 ft. Slalom: 68.8 mph

200 ft. Skid Pad: .89g

No surprise here of course. The Si performs better. I just thought it would be fun to see the performance range of Honda's beloved Civic. I know which one I'd rather have.

An Afternoon at the Pump

Yep, that's me chilling out while the Civic GX gets filled up with clean natural gas at our local station. With only a quarter tank remaining, it took 24 minutes before I finally gave up and stopped the pump. Before explaining that, lets go back a bit.

Since I hadn't filled the GX in about a year, I had no idea what the code was assigned to my credit card from the filling station. Without that code you need to watch a little movie that explains how to use the pump. Not a bad idea since explosion is bad, but it would be nice if I could hear the video without putting my head up to it, thus making it impossible to see the screen. The photo at right wasn't staged. I then properly secured the pump handle to the Civic, lifted the required handle and waited for the pump to do its thing. And by thing I mean make a scary noise before sending gas into the pump. Again, photo below not staged.

While a gasoline pump provides a constant stream of fuel, natural gas differs in its flow. Sometimes its quick, but most of the time it's glacial, with the thousandths of a gallon increment moving about every half second. As I sat with my issue of Classic Cars, I kept peering over at the gallon equivalent read-out moving ever-so slowly. After 24 minutes, I noticed the Percentage Filled read-out. It read 100. Then I read underneath it that I should have shut off the pump when it hit 100 — there is no automatic shut off like a gasoline pump. The damn video didn't say anything about that. Who knows how long it had been on 100, but the gallon equivalent read out was still slowly going north. I stopped the pump, didn't explode, packed up my chair, magazine and Dr. Pepper.

Turning on the car, the fuel gauge slowly added little digital Chiclets. It finally rested on one short of completely full — after 5.423 gallons and 24 minutes. This has something to do with pump pressures optimized for the tank, yada yada.

Now, yesterday I mentioned how buying a Phill unit is a difficult prospect these days. Yet even if I was parked in John O'Dell's house with his Phill unit, I wouldn't have got the job done any faster. Far from it. According to Mr. O'Dell, it would take about 8 to 10 hours to fill up on an average day, starting with more fuel in the tank than I had. To Phill it completely, it would take 20 hours. Awesome.

I'm not sure what any of this says about the viability of the natural gas Honda Civic, or the Phill, or the Pickens plan in general, but I know I wouldn't like living with the GX as my only car. At least I'd get in some good reading, though.

James Riswick, Automotive Editor @ 32,665 miles

No Rug Burn Here

Hopped in the long-term Civic GX this morning and noticed that the floormat was scooched up over the base of the pedal.

I wouldn't normally have noticed - it wasn't much of a scooch - but I'd just written a piece about that massive Toyota safety campaign and pending recall for scrunched-up floor mats that were jamming gas pedals, so the subject was on my mind.

The Honda's mat has a fairly elaborate securing system under the front edge of the driver's seat, and best I can figure it wasn't fastened after being cleaned at the car wash.

Fortunately, the Civic GX's pedal is floor mounted, so there's no gap between pedal and floor for the mat to slip into and cause a jam - the problem, apparently, with those 3.8 million Toyotas and Lexuses with pedals that hang down from the firewall and don't touch the floor.

Way to go, Honda!

An yeah, I drove all the way to the office - 54 miles on the freeway - before unscooching the mat and resecuring it.

Phill Error Hobbles Home Refills

I've got blowdown failure.

It's not fatal, but it does gets a little frustrating. It's been taking an extra 30 minutes or so to get the job done every night.

Seems like each time I hook the 2007 Civic GX up to the Phill home natural gas fueling system, a red error light pops on before I've walked the 20 feet to the door leading from garage to house.

The first two green lights on the fueling indicator display also light up when I go back and push and hold the Phill's "stop" button, as instructed in the service manual I got when the Phill was installed nearly two years and 2,000 operating hours ago.

The handy dandy Phill error decoder pages in the manual tell me that the problem is "blowdown failure," an apparent obstruction somewhere in the Phill's nozzle or fuel filler hose - or maybe the car's fuel filler inlet.

It's the first problem we've had with the fueling unit since it was installed on Feb. 28, 2008.

I've tried cleaning the visible parts with rubbing alcohol and a blast of compressed air, but so far no good. The light comes on and the fueling stops every time I pull into the garage and plug in with the Phill.

On the plus side, everything seems to work okay after I turn the thing off, wait about half an hour and restart- I've so far not been able to refill the GX's tank.

But I know it's just a mater of time until it all stops functioning.

You may recall that the manufacturer of the Phill went belly up earlier this year and the company that bought the rights is redesigning the system and has relocated manufacturing to its BRC Gas Equipment subsidiary in Italy.

We've not heard when the Phill's replacement will be offered for sale in the U.S., but the new owner, Fuel Systems Solutions, did provide for ongoing service of the existing few hundred home units.

We called today about ours, and left a message with our assigned regional repair provider. We're now waiting for a call back.

Meantime, we're also trying to chase down the new manufacturer to see what's up with that replacement CNG home fueling station.

There's a bill in Congress that would provide subsidies to automakers to build more natural gas-fueled cars and trucks and big tax credits to consumers who buy them, so the demand for CNG and LNG vehicles may be heading up.

Be a real shame if there was no home fueler available if that happens.

Stay tuned for more as we try to find out what's happening here with the Phill (now sold in Europe as the BRC FuelMaker Phill) and wend our way through the mysteries of getting repairs for our no-longer manufactured unit..