Conserving Gasoline

The jokes about needing to take out a loan to fill the gas tank are losing their humor as gas prices climb and remain high. This necessity is taking a larger chunk out of the family budget and for most of us, our income has not increased to meet the added expense. So, what do we do? We have to conserve.

For my family this has meant some simple but cost-saving efforts. We've calculated that every time we have to go to town (we live about 7 miles outside of our small town area) it costs us anywhere from $4 - $10. This realization helped everyone to make the most of each trip. My daughter is in town daily because she has swim team and dance practices after school during the week. It is more economical to let her drive than it is to drive back and forth to run her around. If she has time between activities, she spends it hanging out in the coffee shop, bookstore or a friend's house rather than driving home and going back in.

We keep a running list of errands and items we need from town. If it's something that can wait, it waits. If it's something we need urgently, we have our daughter pick it up for us while she's in town. Or, alternately, we have our neighbors pick it up for us when they are in town. Our immediate neighbors and us have all begun to communicate with each other before we go in. If I just need a gallon of milk, they'll gladly pick it up while doing their own shopping or running errands. And, I do the same for them. We conserve our trips.

When we need to run errands, I make out the route that is the most efficient use of time and gas. I list the stops in the order in which I need to make them. We also ride-share with our neighbors for some of these errands whenever possible. There's no sense in all of us driving in and going to the same places or nearby.

We're having more of our bills direct-drafted from our banking account so that we don't have to spend $.43 on a stamp or $1.00 driving it to the office. We use the online postal service to purchase stamps and mail packages, saving us trips to the post office whenever possible (although, at times it's confusing and we still have to go in).

Those are all pretty simple, conserve-your-trips-to-town steps we've taken. But, we are stepping out further. I recently read an article on "hypermiling" and have begun to apply the principles to my driving. I'm teaching my daughter as well. It's really very simple steps you can take to conserve even more fuel:

1.) Record your gas mileage at each fill-up and track it. Awareness is a good thing, plus you can track your improvement.

2.) Don't drive aggressively. Leave a space buffer between you and the car in front of you. This will allow you to coast more and apply your brakes less. The more you speed up and then hit your brakes, the more gas you are wasting.

3.) Minimize your time stopped at red lights. Again, don't accelerate up to them and then hit your brakes. Coast in to them, letting the vehicle slow down before you hit the brakes. If you're in stop and go traffic, just coast as much as possible instead of accelerating.

4.) Start slowly from a stop. If you drive an automatic, pause for a second after you take your foot off of the brake pedal and move to the gas pedal. Most automatics will start moving forward on their own, slowly. This saves fuel as it takes more energy to place an object at rest in motion than to accelerate a moving object. No jack-rabbit starts!

5.) Use your cruise control to accelerate. This way, you can accelerate in measured increments and not have to hit the brakes because you over-estimated how hard to press the pedal for your acceleration needs.

6.) Keep your car in good repair and well maintained. Check the air pressure in your tires and make sure they are all the same (I've seen this have a pretty decent impact on my mileage). Keep your filters clean, air, fuel, and oil. Keep your car tuned up. When my car was properly tuned up, we increased our mileage by 4 mpg.

We live in a hilly area, so the easiest thing for us to do is coast more! There are also some adaptations one can make to their vehicles, but this is all a little too mechanical/techie for me.

For now, we'll just stick with conserving our use of our vehicles and hypermiling. Every penny saved is helpful.