Biggest Winter Gas Waster - Temperature
Many people, especially after the previous $4.00/gallon of gas spike, have begun to engage in fuel minded driving, or hypermiling. Hypermiling ranges from the practices of light maintenance and over inflating your tires all the way to simply keeping fuel consumption in mind when you drive. Many of these new hypermilers are experiencing their first hypermiling winter season, and they’ve noticed that no matter how hard they try they simply cannot hit those summer hypermiling gas mileage marks. This is because the winter presents a very large challenge, low temperatures. There are, however, a few things that you can do in order to help overcome the low temperature barrier and save on gas in winter.
The biggest gas waster, as a result of winter temperatures, is an obvious one; warming up your car. In order to avoid doing this there are a few things that you may want to know. The first is that, unless your car is pre-1980’s or a diesel, your engine only needs to warm up until the oil pressure comes up, this usually takes between 30 seconds to a minute. So letting your car idle for your engine to warm up is a complete and total waste of gas. If you do happen to drive a older car then you may want to consider a block heater, this will again eliminate the engine warm up by keeping your engine warm.
A lot of people also idle their car in order to get the inside passenger area warm enough for a comfortable ride. This is sometimes unavoidable but if you have a newer car it usually starts blasting hot air within two minutes. You may want to consider wearing a warm coat and some gloves, you should be able to tough it out for a couple of minutes until you can turn the heat on and get it pointed right at you. Another great option is to keep your car in the garage, it is much more comfortable this way and also keeps your engine warm.
A final tip here is for how you drive in cold weather. If you are heading to a few different destinations then go to the furthest away one first, this allows your engine to warm up as much as possible. It can often take a while for an engine to warm up but it takes a long time to cool down, this allows you to be running at maximum temperature for the duration of trip, thus providing you with the most fuel efficient ride possible.
Hopefully you will be able to follow these simple tips to save gas in the winter by helping to reduce the strain that winter temperatures put on you and your car.
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