Hey Everyone, I am Eric Rochow and this is realworldgreen. Today, we are going to talk about saving the earth with your car, a little bit irony there, I know. But basically, there is a couple of pretty simple things you can do to reduce your impact and you will save your car on the earth.
The first think I wanted to talk about is something really simple. It is simply your tire pressure. If you check the tire pressure in your cars, tires more than likely I am going to bet that they are probably under inflated. And believe or not, just a little bit of under inflation can mean a lot of gas that is wasted. So, get yourself one of these. You can also get yourself my pocket here I have. One of this fancy once. This is a digital one. Some kind of gadget boy will really like this one, don’t you think?
But basically, check your tire pressure. Look on the sidewall of the tire and it will say somewhere where the maximum pressure should be and that is where your tire should be ridding. Must check tire pressure.
Proper air pressure, proper air pressure right that make sense. Proper air pressure in your tires results in better gas mileage and if you do not have your tires properly inflated, you are going to waste gas. You are going to put more carbon into the air and you are going to also spend more money on gas. So it is kind of wind, wind situation again here.
Your significant might like this kind of little gadget, if they are in the digital gadgets. My refer nickname is gadget boy. They might really like this. But again, nice Christmas presents, nice birthday present, nice less, less, less in the impact on earth present.
I do not know this until recently, but for every gallon of gas that you are using your car, you are putting about 20 pounds of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So, if you have a more fuel efficient car, you are going to put less carbon into air.
Carnegie Mellon University did a study recently. It is a very high tech study that basically went into the campus parking lot and they got a bunch of their digital tire pressure gadgets here and they sample the tire pressure of 80 cars in the parking lot. And if you can believe this, only one of those 80 cars have the correct tire pressure in the car.
So, that is basically a little more than 1% of the cars in one parking lot had the right tire pressures. So you can imagine, you are magnifying by a whole city or by a whole country. That is a big impact, just a very simple thing. Every month just check your tire pressure. Twit it up a little bit. You are saving money. You are saving gas and you are saving carbon emissions.
I did my David Burg imitation in that talking heads movie, true histories.
Anyway, in United States all 2008 model year cars are mandated to have a tire pressure monitoring system in it. So there is going to be these little sensors in each tire of the car and then when the tire pressure gets below a set limit, a little light or a little warning thing is going to come out on the dash port reminding you to inflate your tires to the proper pressure. So to become a neat thing, but in the mean time gets yourself your little tire pressure gauge in every month. Just check the tire pressure. It is really simple to do and just fill it up.
Couple of more things you can do when driving your car to save fuel, save money and reduce your carbon emissions. Do not idle your car. If you stop for more than one or two minutes, if you are in a parking lot, if you pulled over and you are talking on your cellphone, turn your car off. Do not do jack rabbit starts. Do not just floor it when you come up of a red light. When you are going on a ramp onto the highway, we do not need to go 0 to 60 in ten seconds. Maybe you want to go to 0 to 60 and 50 or 20 seconds, you will definitely save gas.
These guys at edmunds.com, they did a study on this and it improves it and we will have the link. The link would be here to link to that site and you can actually see for yourself.
I do not know this until I read the Edmunds’ report, but using cruise control, will save you gas as well as. It
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