THE petrol in my tank is the cheapest in my area. But I don’t drive around jotting down price fluctuations every day – I signed up to petrolprices.com and the people there do it for me. They email the prices to me, and it’s free.

Petrol price data is provided by Catalist in association with Arval, which gives the site some added authority. Catalist collects and maintains information for more than 10,000 UK petrol stations from the hundreds of thousands of fuel card transactions processed across the country each day.

The website maintains a simplicity throughout. The main focus on the homepage is the search engine which will provide users with the average, cheapest and most expensive fuel prices for the postcode area they type in.

To get full access to the site’s database, visitors need to fill out a quick online registration form. This is worth doing. Once registered, users can get a more refined search which names petrol stations and prices within a 20-mile radius.

The service also provides a map of station locations with clickable logos displaying their addresses. Users can choose to be updated with the latest fuel prices of up to three postcode areas of their choice. Updates can be received daily, twice a week, weekly or monthly.

The main focus of this site is on fuel prices, but there are other sections which provide information for drivers. The ‘price of petrol’ may be a particular eye-opener for drivers unsure of how their money is divided to pay for a litre of fuel.

Other areas worth inspecting include: fuel tax explained, fuel types explained and a rundown of different fuel providers and their details.

It makes real financial sense to sign up to this site. Everyone who drives a car needs fuel, so why not find the cheapest?

The lowdown:

The site: www.petrolprices.com.

We like: Easy to use, invaluable service

We don’t like: No minus points we could think of