But have you ever added up all those “few minutes?”
Idling your engine for five minutes a day waiting to pick up your child at school, multiplied by 180 days in the school year equals 15 hours a year.. Would you leave your car idling outside your house for 15 hours? Now add in summer camp, soccer, baseball, ballet, music classes and the hours your car is idling, wasting gas and adding to the carbon output grows to 30 hours.. 45 hours… or more per year. And this goes on, year after year.
I’ve read a couple different ways to calculate the cost of all idling:
In the average passenger vehicle, one quarter to one third of a gallon is used per hour Two minutes of idle time is equals 1 minute of driving fuel consumption.
Now multiply this by the large number of parents in this country who do this and it adds up to a lot of barrels of wasted gas and a lot of extra pollution. Can you imagine how much we could reduce our consumption of oil by turning off all of those idling cars? We could all be helping the environment, saving money and reducing our import of foreign oil. We would be helping our country on multiple levels.
Do you really want the air proximal to where your children play to have high levels of Carbon Dioxide, Nitrous Oxide and other air pollutants? Remember, what your exhaust is putting out, they’re walking though and
Myths abound about operating a vehicle:
It takes more fuel to start an engine than to idle
FALSE
You need to warm an engine up for several minutes for it to run efficiently,
FALSE 30 seconds will suffice. Anything more is wasting fuel.
Starting your engine causes more wear that idling the engine
FALSE The wear and tear of starting an engine is minimal. Idling an engine is horribly inefficient and a good way to gunk up the engine.
So park your car or van and walk a few feet. Get some needed exercise and enjoy the fresh air when picking up your kids.
Want to learn more? GreenEnergyProd has a resource page with links to over a hundred sites offering information about renewable energy, energy conservation, and making green choices.
Green saves green! At the bottom of GreenEnergyProd’s main page is a link to state and federal tax credits and utility rebates to offset the cost of your new energy-friendly lifestyle. .
