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Saving Money on Fuel.

| Health & Science, Lifestyle

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The price of fuel is down but will it stay that way, will we be prepared for the next increase, can we improve our miles per gallon?

Do you know what hypermiling is?  Hypermiling is doing things that save on fuel.  Many hypermiling techniques can cost you a lot more than they save.  Drafting trucks can improve your MPG but also get you a very large ticket, increase your insurance and you lose time while the ticket is being written, which is money.  You may also have to pay a big price, the big sacrifice, if it causes an accident.  Doing 45 mph on the freeway can produce the same negative results as drafting.  If someone wants to hypermile at 45, it would be best to do it on a back road or alternative route. 

I’ve toured, raced and done a lot of recreational bicycle riding.  Riding on the white line reduces friction and can slightly improve MPG in cars.  It also causes a lot of flats and ruins a lot of tires.  Cars and trucks blow debris off the normal paths on the highway.  Usually, the debris doesn’t make it completely off the road and ends up on the white line or shoulder.  If anyone pulls onto, or drives, on the shoulder, that debris is pushed back onto the white line.  How many MPG do you have to save to pay for a tire?  What if it’s necessary to call a tow truck or if a blowout or flat causes you to slide off the road, what’s the cost involved and what about inconvenience and lost time?

Coasting downhill can save on fuel but, you can be in trouble if you shut off the engine or coast in neutral.  If you rely on power steering, you won’t have any with the engine off.  If you get a little over your head in a corner, for whatever reason, and need to steer into a slide, you can’t if the vehicle is in neutral, and things can happen too quickly to engage the transmission.  Having very successfully raced front wheel drive cars, it became obvious if you wanted to finish, you had to have drive on the front wheels in the corners.  Applying the brakes in a corner, in a front wheel drive car, is probably the quickest way to end up in the ditch.

Statistics and testing have proven that for every 5 mph above 55 you lose 10 percent of your fuel economy.

If you have a real time fuel consumption meter, use it.  We have a ScanGauge® and it’s proven worthwhile.  The biggest complaint I have is, I don’t care about most of the superfluous stuff that comes included.  I’d like a bigger display that only tells me the important things, like real time MPG, trip MPG, throttle opening percentage and engine RPM (if you don’t have a tachometer), and it should be large enough so you can read it without taking your attention off the road or having someone else riding shotgun to read the tiny display for you.  Some vehicles come equipped with real time readouts in miles-per-gallon and are more user friendly than the after market models.

Just about everyone knows maintaining recommended tire pressure and removing excess junk from the trunk can save on fuel.  Sludgy oil has increased viscosity (thickness) and increased viscosity causes more drag on internal engine parts which reduces efficiency.

Before we left on our summer trip, our mileage began fluctuating.  It would be excellent one time and normal or poor the next.  There was no set pattern, which is one sign of a bad 02 sensor.  I replaced it and our mileage was consistently good for about 1500 miles, when it started doing the same thing again.  I replaced the new sensor with another new one while at our son’s in Oregon, and we haven’t had the problem since.

In a vehicle that gets 30 MPG on the highway, it can get as little as 10 MPG in town and on short trips.  Brakes and the labor to replace them, especially if the rotors have to be surfaced or replaced and cylinders have to be rebuilt or renewed, can cost hundreds of dollars.  Some people get 100,000 miles out of their brakes and others get 20,000 or less.  I’d bet their fuel economy figures run in concert with their brake life.

 

Filed under: Health & Science, Lifestyle
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About Larry Miller

I was born in Los Angeles in 1940. My father was a fighter pilot instructor during WWll and we moved from coast to coast, maybe that’s where I got the nomad in my blood. After graduating from high school in 1958 I joined the Marines. That lifestyle wasn’t for me and upon my discharge I went on with my life, and have never looked back. I worked briefly for a Caterpillar dealer in Riverside, CA before moving back to N. California where I was a welder and truck driver for a chemical company. Truck driving wasn’t my calling anymore than being in the Marines, and I went back to work for another Caterpillar dealer steam cleaning dirty tractor parts and welding. They sent me to schools, lots and lots of schools. I spent as much time going to trade schools as I did at work. I went from cleaning parts to apprentice field mechanic, to mechanic to the parts department to satellite store manager in less than two years. They wanted me to move to Sacramento and be a salesman: I moved to Oregon to learn to commune with nature. I went to work for another heavy equipment dealer and was later contacted by the World’s largest Lorraine Crane dealer and offered the position of purchasing agent and general parts manager. In 1967 I was offered a line of automotive parts and supplies and went into business for myself. My business revolved around eleven race cars that we maintained for others, driving race cars professionally and maintaining high end sports cars. I was a championship and regional champion driver. My business was the largest import parts and service, non dealer, in the state until I sold it in 1979. We went sailing in 79, first to Mexico and then Hawaii. I was an award winning Trans-Pacific sailor and sailor of the year, Hawaii, Island of Kauai. An opportunity presented itself in Hawaii during 1981 and I was back in business, importing Japanese auto body and hard parts. I also felt the pull to write and began freelancing for magazines and newspapers in 1982. My main focus in my articles is, and always has been, health, wellness and fitness. Most of us have heard the saying, “Time is all we have.” I disagree. Our health is all we have, because without our health, we have no time. I was a US Olympic team hopeful in racewalking and held all the records for the state of Hawaii. As a sponsored athlete in my forties, I finished first in nine marathons in a row in my division, qualified for the Ironman® and was the state USCF cycling champion five times in Hawaii and Oregon. Celinda and I were married in 1988 after a three year engagement. We sold our businesses and organic farm and sailed back to Oregon. After our sailboat boat was sold, we moved to Joseph, Oregon, two miles from the trailhead into the Eagle Cap Wilderness. We were caregivers for my mother the last ten years she was alive. We moved to New Mexico in 1995 because it was too cold for my mom in Oregon during the winters. Celinda designed, and I engineered and built our strawbale house. I began writing the weekly health column for a local newspaper in 1996, and still do. In 2000, I took the summer off to do a four month, 4000 mile, hike, bike and kayak odyssey. I’d been writing health, fitness and sports articles since 1982 and the journey produced a full-length, nonfiction, first person adventure book, Yol Bolsun, May There Be A Road, which can be bought from Amazon.com and others over the Internet. The summer of 2001 was spent hiking. kayaking, fishing and exploring the southwest. In 2002 Celinda and I spent the summer in Canada learning the hospitality business at a resort in preparation for doing promotion for the resort in the US. Most of 2003 was spent reestablishing the trees and landscape that had died during the stay in Canada. We had a house sitter and the house sitter had an ex-husband, and that’s a long story. In July of 2004 I did a solo kayak trip on the Snake River, taking pictures, writing articles and pencil sketching the journey. I hope to do another kayak adventure on the Snake River during the summer of 2008, on the section I missed in 2000 and 2004. In 2005, I returned to Canada to the resort where we’d spent 2002. I was supposed to be there for the month of June. I’d contacted people I’d met in 2002 and they came back to Canada to fish, hike and spend time at the resort, Echo Valley Ranch and Spa, while I was there. My one month became five and then it was off to Spain to do the El Camino de Santiago as a travel companion with one of the guests who’d returned to Canada in June. During the summer of 2006 a friend from Ireland, who I’d met in Spain the year before, came to visit in NM and we fished, hiked and explored the White Mountains of AZ. He’d never slept out in the wild in a tent before, and it was quite an experience, for both of us. My newspaper articles were put on the Internet beginning in 2002. I was asked to give public speaking engagements, photo and video presentations, on various subjects for the library in Deming, NM and continue to do so. In 2006 I videoed and produced a DVD for the Smithsonian Institute’s travel exhibit “Between Fences.” NMFILMS had a conference by invitation only, which I attended. While attending the conference, I realized that film making wasn’t what I wanted to do but I still wanted to use my sixteen years of experience and enjoyment of videoing and photography. During the winter of 2005, I discovered that no one on record had ever run from the Arizona border to the Texas border, a distance of 165 miles. During the spring and summer of 2006 I trained for the run and the run was completed in October, 2006. In late 2005, I began building and maintaining websites incorporating all the things I enjoyed about video, photography, travel and the out of doors. 2007 has been a summer of upgrading the home and property which resulted in a downgrading of my enthusiasm for being located in one place. If we don’t like what’s happening in our life, we need to change what we’re doing. Celinda and I are ready to pull up roots and move on. I guess I’ve come full circle. I’m ready to revert back to my childhood, and a nomadic lifestyle.

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