How you can save fuel and the environment
Driving and Car Maintenance Transportation accounts for 66% of U.S.
oil use -mainly in the form of gasoline. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to improve gas mileage. Driving Tips:- Idling gets you 0 miles per gallon. The best way to warm up a vehicle is to drive it. No more than 30 seconds of idling on winter days is needed. Anything more simply wastes fuel and increases emissions.- Aggressive driving (speeding, rapid acceleration, and hard braking) wastes gas. It can lower your highway gas mileage 33% and city mileage 5%. Drive at lowest and constant rpms; 2000 rpm are enough; you can save up to 30%. Even a Porsche can be driven at the 4th gear at 20 mph and at the 6th gear at 50 mph with 2.5 times less fuel consumption.- Avoid high speeds. Driving 75 mph, rather than 65 mph, could cut your fuel economy by 15%.- When you use overdrive gearing, your cars engine speed goes down. This saves gas and reduces wear.- Use air conditioning only when necessary.- Clear out your car; extra weight decreases gas mileage. Each 60 pounds increases fuel consumption by 10%. - Reduce drag by placing items inside the car or trunk rather than on roof racks. A roof rack or carrier provides additional cargo space and may allow you to buy a smaller car. However, a loaded roof rack can decrease your fuel economy by 5%.- Check into carpooling and public transit to cut mileage and car maintenance costs. Car Maintenance Tips:- Use the grade of motor oil recommended by your cars manufacturer. Using a different motor oil can lower your gasoline mileage by 1% to 2%.- Keep tires properly inflated and aligned to improve your gasoline mileage by around 3.3%.- Get regular engine tune- ups and car maintenance checks to avoid fuel economy problems due to worn spark plugs, dragging brakes, low transmission fluid, or transmission problems.- Replace clogged air filters to improve gas mileage by as much as 10% and protect your engine.- Combine errands into one trip. Several short trips, each one taken from a cold start, can use twice as much fuel as one trip covering the same distance when the engine is warm. Do not forget that in the first mile your car uses 8 times more fuel, in the second mile 4 times and only after the fourth mile it becomes normal.Long-Term Savings Tip- Consider buying a highly fuel-efficient vehicle. A fuelefficient vehicle, a hybrid vehicle, or an alternative fuel vehicle could save you a lot at the gas pump and help the environment.See the Fuel Economy Guide (www.fueleconomy.gov) for more on buying a new fuel-efficient car or truck. Source: www.eere.energy.gov and http://www.vcd.org/155.html |
How you can save fuel and the environment
In ,
Energy Saver wrote in part: Each 60 pounds increases fuel consumption by 10%. Although unnecessary weight decreases fuel economy, where do you get this large number? If you add 60 pounds to a mere 2,400 pound car, which is a lightweight car in USA, you increase its weight by 2.5%. Combine errands into one trip. Several short trips, each one taken from a cold start, can use twice as much fuel as one trip covering the same distance when the engine is warm. Do not forget that in the first mile your car uses 8 times more fuel, in the second mile 4 times and only after the fourth mile it becomes normal. Although combining errands saves fuel and reduces wear on the engine, where do you get such extreme numbers? These numbers sound extreme for fuel consumption, that should show up in my fuel consumption, and they do not. Could these be figures be for engine wear instead? Or are you paying attention to a fuel gauge, whose reading can be affected by temperature changes and by pressure changes in the fuel tank? Source: www.eere.energy.gov and That particular page does not have any specific energy saving advice or specific energy consumption figures that I saw at 5:35 PM EDT 4/18/09. If that page provides a path to others having energy saving advice or energy consumption figures, then you should post a link or a few further along that path instead. http://www.vcd.org/155.html That one is in German and with metric figures. You should be saying what you cited that page for, in some form what the page said, any applicable metric figures as well as translations to figures in mile-based units where applicable. It may apply to your figures for usable gears at specific speeds of the Porsche that you mentioned (and that I snipped). I have not actually looked into seeing if that article supports your claims, though with maybe 10 minutes to an hour with some online German == English dictionary or another I could check it out. ============= Most of what you said does make sense. However, you should have done a little more homework. Figures that sound unusual, extreme, "eye-popping" or "Wow" should be investigated; treated skeptically with effort to see if they get proven or disproven or turn out to be still under investigation or debate, or turn out to be speculations with little effort noted yet to prove/disprove. Spouting or repeating hard-to-believe figures can harm your cause if it can be shown that they are exaggerated or otherwise untrue. ============= As for ideal RPM of a car engine - that is where the "torque curve" is highest, for a specific degree of throttle that achieves the amount of horsepower you need to use (as opposed to RPM where the "full throttle" torque curve is highest). If your car has an automatic transmission, ideal RPM in a specific "speed/gear of the transmission" for a specific degree of throttle is where torque times output RPM divided by input RPM is maximized. With some automatic transmissions, maximizing fuel economy in stop-and-go driving is not with gentrlest acceleration, but "slightly hard" acceleration to get RPM to where ratio of output RPM to input RPM greater (until gentler acceleration allows the transmission to shift to a "higher gear"). I would say accelerate "slightly hard" until fast enough for letting up on the accelerator pedal to make an automatic tranny to shift into 2nd, then push from 2nd with some work otherwise done with 1st. Automatic trannies appear to me to have lower losses in higher "gears". When accelerating past 30-35 MPH or so, somewhere around there I often like to ease up on the "gas pedal" to kick into 3rd to work a higher gear of the automatic transmission where is has less "slip" (in terms of shortfall from ideal ratio of output RPM to input RPM). Some automatic trsnsmissions have a "lock-up torque converter" - allowing ratio of output RPM to input RPM to match what is ideal, greatly reducing (but not completely eliminating) losses in the automatic transmission, very important with steady speed driving at 50-plus MPH. My experience with 1993 and 1995 (especially 1993) Olds Delta 88 "Royale/LSS" indicates to me possibility of "torque converter lock-up" in "second-highest gear" as well as highest since I sense 2 more "ranges between sensed shifts" than the number of "gear ratios" that automatic tranny for this car has been cited to me to have. With a stick-shift, fuel economy in stop-and-go traffic is maximized by accelerating when solidly in gear and doing so mainly at RPM where the engine's torque curve (at degree of throttle in question) runs high. One thing usually more than anything else when driving where there is a stop sign every block - lower top speed usually reduces fuel consumption more than anything else. Most of the energy output of the engine ends up in the brakes, and "kinetic energy" of your moving car is proportional to square of its speed. When driving where you have to stop (or where you are "culturally allowed" to slow to "crash avoidance slow speed") every block, then slower top speeds maybe around 20-25 MPH do well for fuel economy. Slower than 20 MPH for top speed before braking every block may achieve further improvement in fuel economy when I have to drive where there is a stop sign every block, but there gets to be a point where I would rather not increase my driving time to reduce environmental impact, cost-per-mile of driving, and wear-and-tear on my car. Meanwhile, I do achieve maybe 15-18 MPG on average when driving a 1995 Olds Delta 88 where there is a stop sign or a traffic light every block, and over 20 MPG with such a large oldish car on the portion of PA Route 3 between I-476 and Garrett Road. I did not do much worse with a 1993 version of that car, close to no worse at all once I get the automatic tranny to kick into 3rd. - Don Klipstein ) |
How you can save fuel and the environment
Hey,
its a good article about saving the energy and environment.Its a useful way of enhancing the awareness of how important the environment and the energy. Posted from the Free Home Improvement Forum at http://www.spicyhome.com |
All times are GMT +1. The time now is 09:50 AM. |
Powered by vBulletin® Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Copyright ©2004 - 2014 DIYbanter