Skip to main content

Yes, you can go green with your car

Who doesn’t want to go green: green with their home, their work, their transportation. There are ways that you can go green in all of these areas. In this blog, we’ll be focused on how you can go green with your car.

Recycle


One way to go green with your car is to recycle. Recycling, in the automotive sense of the word, means that you’re careful with how you dispose of fluids and parts that could adversely affect the environment. For instance, what do you do with the oil from your car when you do an oil change? And if you don’t do the oil change yourself, what does the shop, where you bring your car, do with the old oil?

If you change your car’s oil yourself, find an environmentally friendly place to drop off the oil – somewhere that reuses the oil in an environmentally safe manner. If you drop the car off somewhere for an oil change, ask them what they do with the old oil. Make sure they handle it responsibly.

The same holds true with other fluids, such as antifreeze/coolant. It also holds true for old parts that are replaced on your car. If you have any hope that you can go green with your car you’re going to make sure that your tires, battery and other parts don’t wind up in a landfill somewhere. Old tires are often used as material for roadbeds. The lead plates in a car battery are recycled and used for new batteries, as is the plastic body of the battery.

Maintain


Keep your vehicle running properly and it will burn less gasoline and burn it cleaner. Maintaining your car to go green with your car includes having the oil changed on schedule, tuning up the car when scheduled, or when it starts running rough or inefficiently, and ensuring that the tires have the proper air pressure.

Other factors can affect the efficiency of the way your car operates. For instance, you’ll want to make sure the frontend is properly aligned. Replace your car’s filters as scheduled, check the gas cap to ensure it is working properly. Does it tighten properly? Do you smell gasoline coming from the vehicle? One reason that the ‘Check Engine’ light may be on in your dashboard is that the gas cap is bad.

Track Your Car’s Performance


If you’re aware of how your vehicle is operating you’re more likely to recognize when it’s not operating optimally. Notice how it accelerates. Pay attention to how it idles when you’re at a stop. Listen for unusual sounds when it’s running. You can also track your car’s gas mileage

A car’s gas mileage is a good indicator of how it’s running. To track the mileage is fairly easy; simply divide the number of miles you drove from fill-up to fill-up and divide by how much gas you put in the tank during the last fill-up. If you do this on a regular basis, you’ll notice when the mileage drops. That’s a pretty good indicator that something is wrong.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Is your antifreeze safe from freezing this Richmond winter

You still have time to have it checked Well, there’s no denying it – winter tends to get chilly here in Richmond. We have to deal with snow and ice on the roads, scraping the same off our windows and windshield, and staying warm while we drive. Of course, you had your antifreeze checked before winter rolled into town. What?! You didn’t have your antifreeze checked before winter clamped down on Richmond? So, how’s your antifreeze doing?  If you haven’t had it checked, there’s really no way of knowing, is there? This car has overheated in the middle of a Richmond  winter. But, on the other end of the spectrum, the antifreeze can also freeze if it's not up to its job. Hopefully, you haven’t had a serious problem with your antifreeze already. If you did, you’d probably know. When antifreeze fails, it’s a potentially catastrophic condition for your vehicle’s engine. You could have hoses that have burst because of freezing antifreeze. Worse than that, your engine block may have crac...

Blocks of ice falling from cars in McHenry could cause accidents or damage

We’ve all seen those blocks of snow falling from behind the rear tires of a car when the snow rolls into McHenry . Fortunately, they’re just packed snow that will disintegrate under your vehicle’s tires as you simply drive right through them, right? Don’t count on it. Those blocks of snow are often packed so tight, condensed by the thaw-and-freeze cycle, that they’re anything but oversized snowballs . They’re often more like boulders.  Hit one of those blocks and the collision between the block and one of your tires could send you careening off the road or into oncoming traffic. In some cases, they’re so solid you could pound them with a sledgehammer with little effect. They truly can represent a serious road hazard. The problem is that it’s difficult to tell how solidly they’re packed when you see them on the road, left their unwittingly by another driver. Either way, your best bet is to try to avoid them. But you want to be careful dodging blocks of ice in the road, too. You need...

Get out to McHenry Music Festival for a good time and music near to home

Some folks here in McHenry will load up the car and head out to Red Rock Amphitheater near Denver to see a show. Some will go to the MSG Sphere near Las Vegas. Some will go to the Bonaroo Festival Concert to see a show. That’s quite a bit of driving and you’d better make sure your vehicle is up to the trip. What happens, however, if something goes wrong – if your vehicle breaks down while driving there or back? What happens if the show is canceled, as happened this year with the Bonaroo Festival? We’re talking about some serious inconvenience, aren’t we? Wherever you go, whether your driving to Colorado, Nevada, Tennessee or anywhere else in this continent, you want to perform your due diligence and make sure the vehicle is up for the trip before you go. And it doesn’t really matter if you’re driving somewhere to see some live music or for any other purpose. A breakdown can be costly and may put you at the mercy of weather conditions or nefarious characters that come across you while y...