Just thought I would make a note that if you are seeing weird timezones in your FuelPHP programs that you should checkout fuel/app/config/config.php around line 72

/**
 * DateTime settings
 *
 * server_gmt_offset    in seconds the server offset from gmt timestamp when time() is used
 * default_timezone        optional, if you want to change the server's default timezone
 */
'server_gmt_offset'    => 0,
 'default_timezone'    => 'America/Denver'

I have already set these to my local timezone of  ‘America/Denver’ but you can simply comment them out and the default from your php.ini will take effect.