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homelabforge edited this page Nov 2, 2026 · 6 revisions

Units

MyGarage lets you set the unit for each kind of measurement separately, so you can read distances in miles while filling up in litres, or keep tire pressure in PSI on an otherwise metric account.

Find it in Quick settings (the gear icon in the top bar), under Unit System.

Imperial, Metric, or Custom

Three choices:

  • Imperial - miles, US gallons, MPG, PSI, Fahrenheit, pounds, and tread in thirty-seconds of an inch
  • Metric - kilometres, litres, L/100km, kPa, Celsius, kilograms, and tread in millimetres
  • Custom - eleven separate controls, one per quantity, in the Custom units section below the buttons (click it to open or close it)

Picking Imperial or Metric clears any per-quantity choices you have made and applies the preset everywhere. MyGarage asks you to confirm before it does, because that discards your custom set.

The Eleven Controls

Under Custom you choose each of these independently:

Quantity Options
Distance mi, km
Speed mph, km/h
Length ft, m
Volume US gal, UK gal, L
Fuel economy MPG (US), MPG (UK), km/L, L/100km
Pressure PSI, kPa, bar
Temperature °F, °C
Mass lb, kg
Torque lb-ft, Nm
Tire tread depth /32 in, mm
Gallon used for MPG US, UK

That last one looks redundant and is not. MPG names a gallon even when you fill up in litres, so the gallon your economy is measured in is a separate choice from the volume you enter fuel in. If you buy fuel by the litre but think in MPG, this is the control that decides which MPG you get.

A Vehicle's Own Odometer Unit

A vehicle can use a different distance unit from your account, for example an imported car whose odometer reads kilometres on a miles account. Open the vehicle, click Edit, and set Odometer unit:

  • Account default (...) - follows your own units (the default)
  • Kilometres (km)
  • Miles (mi)

That vehicle's distances and speeds are then shown and entered in its unit: odometer, service intervals, trips, speeds, and its reports and exports. Fuel economy and cost per distance keep your account setting.

The field appears on vehicles that track distance.

Engine Oil Is Quoted in Quarts

One quantity does not follow your volume unit directly. Nobody quotes an engine's oil capacity in gallons, so oil capacity is read in quarts wherever fuel is read in gallons: US volume gives the US quart, UK volume gives the Imperial quart, and a litre reader sees litres as before.

This was wrong before v3.3.0. Oil capacity shared the fuel volume unit, so a reader on US gallons was asked for gallons of engine oil. Entering 12 for a twelve-quart engine stored 45.4 litres, and the card then read 12 gal straight back, so nothing on screen looked wrong. If you recorded an oil capacity before upgrading, open Fluids & Torque on the vehicle and check it.

If You Use UK Gallons

There used to be a standalone US/UK gallon switch in Settings → System. It is gone, replaced by the Volume and Gallon used for MPG controls above.

If your instance was set to UK gallons before upgrading, your account was converted to a Custom unit set holding the UK gallon, so what you read does not change on upgrade. Two things are worth knowing:

  • Choosing Imperial gives you the US gallon. There is one imperial preset and it is the US one. To keep the UK gallon, use Custom and set it there. The confirmation dialog says so before you commit.
  • Some older fuel prices may read about 20% high. If a price was entered while the instance was already set to UK gallons, it was stored roughly 20% too high and now reads back that way. Re-entering the price you actually paid corrects it. If the record was entered while the instance used US gallons, it is correct and needs nothing.

When You Are Not Signed In

Units work without an account. If you are signed out, or the instance runs with authentication disabled, your choices are saved in that browser instead of to an account, and you get the full set of controls either way.

An administrator can set the instance default in Settings → System, under Default units for this instance. It applies to signed-out visitors, to every client when authentication is disabled, and to each new account when it is created.

Your Data Does Not Move

Measurements are stored in metric internally no matter what you read them in, and conversion happens only when a value is displayed or entered. Switching units changes what you see, never what is recorded.

One consequence worth knowing: opening a record and saving it without touching a unit-bearing field posts the stored value back exactly as it was, so a round-trip through the edit form cannot drift.

Where Your Units Apply

Units follow you into the web app, PDF reports, notifications, and CSV exports.

Two places deliberately do not follow them:

  • Inbound webhooks expect metric (kilometres, litres, kWh), because a script posting data has no user whose preference it could read.
  • The homepage widget API has no user either: the v2 endpoints return both unit systems (odometer_km beside odometer in miles) and your tile picks one; the original v1 endpoints return miles only. See Homepage Integration.

CSV Exports

Exports are written in your own units, and each column names the unit it holds: Odometer (mi), Volume (gal_uk), Price Per Unit (gal_us). Import reads the unit from the file's column headers rather than from your account, so a file exported by one account imports correctly into another with different units.

See Fuel Tracking for the full export and import story.

See Also

  • Fuel Tracking - fuel economy, gallons, and CSV round-trips
  • Tires - tread and pressure units
  • Dashboard - where your units show up first

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