Essential Motoring 101

The tips written here are not 100% mine but merely a sharing effort by yours truly. I got this from my email forwarded by my other half and I find it VERY useful to all of us drivers in Malaysia since oil prices are on the surge. Let us all be wise people to maximise our money’s worth. This article was written by an engineer in the petroleum pipeline business in San Jose, California, US of A.

Fuel prices increases, so are our knowledge!

Here are the tricks:

• Fill up your car/truck in the MORNING only. This is because the temperature in the morning is more cool, which makes the petrol more dense due to the underground location of the storage tanks. On hot temperatures, petrol expands therefore evaporation occurs rapidly. So if you are filling petrol in the afternoon or the evening, you will not get exactly the right litres of petrol for your tank - lesser in fact due to evaporation.

• Do not fill up when you see a tanker filling up at a petrol station. It is most likely that the dirt and sludge at the bottom of the underground tank may get stirred-up during fuel delivery. When you pump petrol into your car, you will also be transferring the dirt from the tank to your car - the engine might experience sluggishness, hence engine failure.

• Fill up your car tank when it is half empty (or half full) because the more petrol you have in the tank, the less air there is , the less likely for the petrol to evaporate, especially when it is warm.

• The trigger of the pump head for petrol dispensing usually have 3 levels of speed - slow, medium and high. When you fill up, do not squeeze the trigger to the maximum (full speed) You should be setting it at slow speed to minimise vapor creation during pumping. Hoses at the pump are corrugated, where, the corrugation act as a return path for vapor recovery from petrol that has already been metered. If you are pumping at high speed, the agitated petrol will contain more vapor, which is being suck back into the underground tank so you are getting less petrol for your money.

Hope the above pointers will help in giving you more savings on your next trip to the petrol station. Now everything has gone up and soon, most probably after the General Elections, the new (hiked) price of petrol will be announced. This is just an assumption based on the current price of crude oil at more than USD100 a barrel… SIGH.

Whats your opinion on the petrol price hike this time around ? Your comments are most welcomed. Cheers.