Ways to use less gas (less gas means less carbon!)
- Change your fuel cap – the seals on gas caps can go bad, meaning that gasoline is evaporating right into the atmosphere
- Remove excess weight from your car – if you still have kitty litter, sand, or other tools for winter driving, your car has to work harder to accelerate, and burns much more fuel.
- Don’t jackrabbit – flooring your accelerator every time you want to speed up wastes a lot of gas and dumps a lot more carbon into the atmosphere
- Have a MotorVac service performed – this will help your car use fuel more efficiently and will clean out carbon deposits that are building up in your car! Watch a segment I did about MotorVac here.
- Replace dirty spark plugs – a dirty spark plug doesn’t fire as well, resulting in wasted fuel that enters the environment.
- Make sure your tires are properly inflated – improperly inflated tires can cost you as much as 1-2 miles per gallon in fuel efficiency.
- Keep your speed below 60mph whenever possible – fuel efficiency drops off above 60mph, meaning you’ll have to burn much more gas.
- Replace your engine’s air filter – a clogged air filter can lower your vehicle’s fuel efficiency by 10%!
Tips for pumping gas
Thanks to Nina, who passed these tips along after she watched my “Go Green” episode!
- Only fill up your car when the ground is cold – higher temperatures mean that the gasoline you’re pumping is partially going straight into the atmosphere.
- Don’t squeeze the trigger to the fastest setting – pumping at a higher velocity results in more of your gas becoming vapor, which the pump is designed to suck back into the underground tank. Pumping at a lower velocity means you’ll get more gas for your money and less fuel will escape into the air.
- Fill up when you’re only at HALF – as your gas tank drops below half-full, it becomes easier for the remaining gas to evaporate. Plus, with all of the impurities in gas these days, the lower your gas level, the better the chance that those impurities that have settled in your tank will stir up and get burned up with the fuel, meaning more pollutants in the atmosphere.
- Finally, avoid gas stations where the gasoline truck is pumping into storage – like in the point above, the gas truck adding new fuel to the underground tanks is probably stirring up the impurities that had settled to the bottom. Adding those to your tank increases that chance that that dirt and grime will get burned and put into the air.
