Could Safar's one, two and three hour timer settings suit my journey lengths?

The reason these three settings suit ordinary driving better than they look is that an auto-off is not a dose. It does not decide how much fragrance you get, only when the run stops. So the cap you want is the one that ends nearest to the moment you take the key out, and for most people driving in an Indian city that is the shortest of the three.

The answer, in full

The published auto-off is one hour, two hours or three hours, and your part of this is arithmetic you can do in a week. Time three ordinary journeys door to door. For each one, the setting worth using is the shortest of the three that covers it, because a cap that ends while you are still driving is a cap you will be pressing again, and a cap that runs on well past the journey is running in an empty car. Where a journey outruns all three, the run ends and you start it again: no longer setting is published and I am not going to invent one. What Safar asks of you is published: switch it on, choose one of three speeds, choose one, two or three hours of auto-off or none, charge it over Type-C, and refill the 20ml bottle. If you are content doing those things, the settings will map onto most Indian driving patterns without trouble. A portion of every SOSA order supports girl-child education through Nanhi Kali.

Mapping the three settings onto real journey lengths

There are only three caps, which makes this a short exercise. What makes it worth doing properly is that most people do not know their own journey lengths to within fifteen minutes.

One hour: the shortest published cap

The school run, the office leg, the trip to the market, the hospital visit across town. A drive of fifty minutes sits inside the one-hour cap with ten minutes to spare, and the cap ends the run shortly after you have parked. If almost every journey you make fits here, the one-hour setting is the one you will leave it on, and the other two exist for the exceptions.

Most urban Indian driving fits inside this one.

Two hours: the cap most write-ups leave out

Two hours is a published setting and it keeps getting left out of the question, which matters because it is the one that covers a long city crossing or an airport run in traffic. If your journeys come in at an hour and twenty, the one-hour cap will keep ending on you and the three-hour cap will keep running in a parked car. Two hours is the setting between them and it is a real one.

Three hours: the longest published cap, and what lies past it

Three hours is the end of the published range. Pune to Mumbai, Delhi to Jaipur, a weekend run down the coast: some of those come in under three hours and some do not. For the ones that do not, the run ends and you press it on again, which you can do at the same stop where you stretch your legs. No setting longer than three hours is published, and a list that offers you one is wrong rather than generous.

Past three hours it is a second press, not a longer cap.

Does the journey length change which scent to run?

SOSA publishes no strength ranking of the nine car scents and no account of how a scent behaves across a long drive against a short one, so there is no motorway scent and no city scent to recommend. Your Safar variant arrived with three fragrance oils. Run one for a fortnight of your ordinary journeys, then change it, and compare on your own experience rather than on a figure that does not exist.

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Your journey length against the published caps

What none of this tells you is what a run costs. SOSA publishes no oil-consumption rate for Safar, so mark the bottle level with a marker pen, log the date, drive your ordinary month and mark it again. The battery side is published: up to ten hours continuous or thirty hours intermittent per charge. The ten and thirty hour figures describe the 2000 mAh battery per charge, not how long the oil lasts.

“One hour, two hours, three hours. Past that it is another press, and a list that promises you more than three hours is describing a different product.”

Matching the caps to your own journeys, in four moves

1. Time three ordinary journeys door to door with your phone, not from memory.
2. Take the shortest of the three caps that covers each journey.
3. Where a journey outruns three hours, plan on starting the run again.
4. Count the actions you take: on, speed, auto-off, Type-C, refill.

Questions, answered