cars

Big Green Purse

The Easiest Way to Save $20 a Month on Gas

August 5, 2008 at 4:48PM By Diane MacEachern | comment

If you have a car, stop whatever you're doing and go check the air pressure of your vehicle's tires.

Apart from keeping your car in park, pumping up your tires to their proper "PSI" - pounds per square inch - is the fastest, cheapest way to reduce the amount of gasoline you use. Tires have a tendency to lose pressure over time or when the weather changes substantially; a car driving on underinflated tires needs more gas to move. You can gain 3.3% in fuel efficiency by inflating your tires. And with gasoline costing over $4/per gallon, every 3.3% gain means money in your pocket.

That gain also affords an immediate way to increase our supply of oil. As Barack Obama has noted in his vision for an energy independent America, if we all pumped up our tires to their proper PSI, the U.S. could easily gain from conservation (i.e., using less fuel) three times as much oil as we could reap from far more costly and environmentally dangerous off-shore oil drilling. And that oil is available TODAY, not ten or twenty years hence - the time it takes to develop oil fields and convert petroleum into gasoline ...

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tags: tips, gas, cars, fuel efficient, save money

Take the Drive Smarter Challenge

May 28, 2008 at 1:39PM By Diane MacEachern | comment

Presumably, you're not the kind of person who would take a big pile of money out to your driveway and set it on fire, just to watch it burn. But when you burn gasoline, that's essentially what you're doing. And with gasoline prices now bouncing around $4 a gallon, that pile of money you're burning is getting a whole lot bigger.

Big Green Purse lists ten ways you can conserve gas today and save at least $20-$50 every month at the pump. But you can save even more by taking the Drive Smarter Challenge, a new initiative from the Alliance to Save Energy.

What's terrific about the Challenge is that it puts you in the driver's seat – literally. The website simulates you driving, then suggests up to six fuel-efficiency actions you can easily take. If you do (or say you plan to), the website immediately calculates your savings in money, gasoline, and greenhouse gas emissions. ...

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