Friday, September 12, 2008

Gas

Pray for the people in Galveston and Houston. Please.

3.99 per gallon @ J&W Market in Hazel Green. Limit $20 or roughly 5 gallons.

What can we do?

1. Full-car policy: on Sunday, call your neighbors who attend your church. Work out a carpool with them. Heck, pick up the Baptists too if their church is on the way.

2. Going to a high-school football game tonight? Same thing. Going to Sam's to get groceries? Same thing.

3. If you are thinking about complaining, imagine you are in a car packed with your family, the dog and two of your neighbors heading out of Houston right now and paying the same amount for gas and still limited to 5 gallons per stop.

4. We are a city of some of the best engineers in the world. Start a Get Off Gasoline Club and hold contests for the most novel workable ways to cut down on consumption.

5. Turn off the AC in your car at night and open the windows. 4/40 worked for our grandfathers and our fathers and it will work for us. Make the wind blown look trendy.

Adapt. It's the American Way!

4 comments:

John Cowan said...

It's not clear that opening your windows actually helps save gas: the increased drag may, depending on the model, actually increase consumption over running the a/c.

Best of luck to all.

Anonymous said...

All for saving fuel. Full car strategy, e.g., very good. But #5 is dicey. Wind resistance is killer of efficiency, and many modern cars designed to minimize drag with windows closed. The windvane-open, windows-open approach of our grandfathers probably counterproductive re saving gas. Fun, yes, but not gas-efficient.

Len Bullard said...

True. I know that, dudes. On the other hand, I said 4/40: four windows rolled down and forty miles per hour.

Reducing speed reduces consumption. It may not offset the drag, but it creates a new habit.

John Cowan said...

Yeah. Unfortunately, at 40 mph you get hosed by the inefficiency of the Otto cycle gasoline engine at low RPMs. They work much better when running either all-out or off, which is what happens in hybrids.

The much-hated double nickel was chosen for sound engineering reasons: it's the local minimum you get when you add up the loss curve due to drag (direct) and the loss curve due to the engine (inverse). Learned that from my high-school physics teacher back in the 70s.

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