Search:

Why Warming Your Car in Winter is Burning a Hole in Your Pocket

Winter is a hard time for drivers and car owners. It wreaks havoc on your fuel mileage. Chances are you are an unwitting ally to hurting your gas mileage. The wrong idea about warming your car up might be burning a hole in your pocket.

Most drivers are in the habit of warming their cars up in cold weather. They are under the mistaken idea that their car needs to warm up for a considerable amount of time to operate properly. Older vehicles may have needed to warm up but current cars do not.

Many drivers idle their car for 5 to 10 minutes in the winter to let their cars warm up. You should not let your car idle for more than 30 seconds. You need no more than 30 seconds of idling to circulate the engine oil before you can drive away on cold days

When you idle your car you are burning gas but not going anywhere. When that happens it means you are getting zero miles per gallon. You might think that idling your vehicle for just a few minutes or so is no big deal, but you are wrong.

To illustrate how much fuel is being burned by letting your car idle for 5 to 10 minutes consider this. Let's assume you idle your car on the short side, only about 5 minutes to warm it in the morning. The likely scenario is that you idle your car for 5 minutes again, before you drive home.

That means your car is idling for 10 minutes per day. If winter is considered to be November, December, January and February, then winter is 120 days long. If you idle your vehicle for 10 minutes each day for 120 days then you are idling for 1200 minutes during the winter season.

1200 Minutes is equivalent to 20 hours. Idling your car for only 5 minutes per start amounts to letting your car sit and burn gas going nowhere, for 20 hours. Can you imagine letting you car sit and idle for 20 hours? Of course not. Then why idle for the equivalent of 20 hours of burning gas if you don't have to?

The correct way to warm your car and economize your gas is by driving it. Many drivers don't realize that other parts of the car need to warm up in order for it to operate efficiently. The transmission, the wheel bearings, the tires and other moving parts also need to warm up. The catalytic converter on the car doesn't operate at its optimum until it heats up to between 400C and 800C. The only way the other parts of the car can warm up is by driving. It turns out that the only way to completely warm up a car with all of it's parts is to drive it.

One of the easiest things you can do to prevent the loss of fuel economy in the winter is letting your car warm up efficiently. Warm it by driving it not by idling it. Changing the way you warm your car is also good for the environment. You end up burning less fuel which slows down burning a hole in the ozone and stops the burning of that hole in your pocket.

Article Source: http://www.inpop.net

Scott Siegel has written a 143 page book of automotive industry insider information on saving gas and dollars at the pump (beatthegaspump.com). Visit us to learn how you can get better gas mileage. Find out how to improve gas mileage.

Share and Enjoy:

del.icio.us reddit newsvine myweb furl blinklist

netvouz simpy ma.gnolia connotea technorati