Sipping Fuel Feeling Fuelish
The place to find all thingsthat will help you save money by getting better fuel mileage.

Did you know that April 20th thru April 26 is Tire Safety Week? I didn’t but I know about it now.

Tire safety is an important item that largely gets ignored by a lot of people.

I believe it was Mark Donahue that said “your tires are all there is between you and eternity”, or something like that.

When it comes to saving gas, tires are just as important. Under inflated tires reduce your gas mileage by as much as 3% to 4%.

So if you normally get 30 mpg, under inflated tires will reduce your mileage to 28.8 mpg.

The technical reasons are fairly straight forward. Under inflation causes more rolling resistance then a properly inflated or slightly over inflated tire does.

Its like trying to roll a bean bag down a hill vs. a basketball. You can get a bean bag to roll but it takes a lot more effort and constant attention. A basketball will just go with the slightest amount of effort.

I say over inflated because you could over inflate your tires slightly above what the auto manufacturer recommends as long as you do not exceed the maximum pressure that is printed on the sidewall.

You will have to watch your tires carefully for un-even wear. An over inflated tire can wear out in the middle of the tread where an under inflated tire will wear on the outsides. If you see excessive wear lower the pressure a few pounds and continue to watch.

I personally have my tires inflated to 40psi with a maximum of 44psi on the sidewall and there has been no excessive wear at all.

Find out more info about saving money on gas at SippingFuel

We here at SippingFuel have decided to take this Saving at the Pump a little more seriously and have begun an experiment. We will be taking our daily ride and will be applying some of the techniques and technology to save some green. You can follow along at The Sipping Fuel, Fuel Economy Experiment
Please feel free to offer comments or suggestions as we travel down this road.
For more info please go to SippingFuel

Thanks and we’ll see you there.

In reading the myriad amount of information geared toward reducing your gas consumption I have come across a constant that is hard to ignore.

A majority of what can and should be done has to do with the nut behind the wheel. That’s right bucco it’s you.

The first thing is having a properly maintained car. Sounds fair enough to me and according to Energy and Environmental Analysis, Inc. you will conserve approximately the following.

Properly performing engine 4%
Clean Air Filter 10%
Proper Tire Pressure 3%
Recommended Oil use 2%

Even better then that according to the Federal Government a larger amount is to be conserved by this way.

I say conserved because you are really not gaining any additional mpg’s by taking care of these things, you are simply allowing your vehicle to attain the mpg’s that it can get in it’s current form. So you are not really gaining, but conserving what you already should be getting.

Shedding weight 2%
Every 5mph over 60 7%-23%
Driving erratically 5%-33%

With the biggest potential hit being taken by driving erratically, this is basically treating the gas pedal as an on/off switch. And the faster you go the more gas you use. Makes sense doesn’t it?

This (finally) gets me to my point of slowing down to save gas and money.

This is based entirely upon my experience with a 100 plus mile a day commute. Slowing down just doesn’t seem to be an option and if you think about it. It almost seems un-American! After all our nation has been based on freedom and quite frankly we don’t like being told what to do.

This includes speed limits. Part of my daily commute is opposite of the rush hour traffic and on this part of hi-way it is nearly a free for all when it comes to speed. When we are faced with an open hi-way we are going to go as fast as we are comfortable going.

Unfortunately by doing so you are tossing your hard earned dollars thru the exhaust pipe. Using my car as an example, on a good day I typically get 34 miles per gallon. This is driving within 5 mph of the speed limit. If I bump that speed up by 10 mph my mileage would go down to roughly 28 mpg.

Or a 6 mpg drop.

Put another way with an average fill up of 10 gallons that is 60 miles less that I was able to drive between fill ups. And that my friend is a little more then a one way trip to work. So now I am filling up every 2 days instead of every 3.

Work that out for the year and that is 182 vs. 121 visits to the pump with an average fill up costing me $30 that is a difference of $1830. I don’t know about you but I have a lot of other things to do with this amount of coin then giving it to any of the oil companies.

So lets change our idea of what it means to be an American and vote with your foot. Slow it down just a bit and not only will you be helping the environment but you will also be helping to keep your wallet a little fatter.

To find out more, visit Sipping Fuel

This past week, independent truckers staged a protest by forming a convoy and driving slow down on the hi-way or just by hanging out at the fuel stops along the way.

I happened to hear this as a short statement on a local radio station and when I looked online for the story there was very little mentioned about it.

This is, of coarse, to protest the high price of diesel fuel and to get President Bush to lower prices by tapping into the countries reserves.

When I first heard this, my immediate thought was its one of those internet deals that get passed along in e-mail telling everybody to not buy gas at all on Tuesday. But apparently it was the real deal but it seems very few people took notice.

Like I mentioned, a search of the internet found a small mention from the AP and a couple of local stories. Not what I would expect from a nation wide slowdown of the hi-ways and by-ways.

Like the aforementioned “don’t buy gas” protest, the focus of the protest, in some opinions are going in the wrong direction. Have you shipped anything lately? Ever see the “gas surcharge” being charged to you?

Well it seems that this surcharge is not actually getting to the people that are buying the gas. It is being taken by the numerous middle men that the shipping industry is made of. Now I don’t know all that much about this but it is an interesting take on the problem.

While I am sure this is part of the problem, it does not address the fact that gas prices are way too high and oil company profits are equally high. I hope that the truckers continue their protesting and that some one will actually take notice and more importantly get something done about these outrageous prices.

Find out what you can do to save money at the pump by going to SippingFuel