If you want to increase the fuel economy on your diesel pickup, there are many ways you can do it.

Do you want to get better fuel economy from your diesel pickup? Here are some great tips that will help you squeeze a few extra MPGs out of your diesel powered pick up truck. Some of these tips are good for a few 10ths of an MPG, while others will give you substantially more miles out of every gallon of whatever you’re burning in there.

Tip 1 – Drive with the tailgate up. Sure, this flies in the face of everything you’ve been told about pick up aerodynamics since you were a kid, but it is true. Why does driving with the tailgate up get you better fuel economy than driving with it down? After all, when it’s down the air flows right over the roof, through the bed, and out the back. When it is up, the air slams into the tailgate, slowing down your truck, right? Wrong!

When the tailgate is raised, the air does not slam into it. What actually happens is that a rotating vortex of air forms in the truck’s bed. This vortex actually guides the air over the bed and deposits it gently beyond the tailgate, forming a nice smooth airflow over the bed and beyond. Opening the tailgate destroys this vortex, creates more aerodynamic drag, and kills your mileage.

Tip 2 – Drive and accelerate slower. Why sure, this is another one that you’ve heard since you were a kid, but this one happens to be true, and more so if your truck is jacked up into the stratosphere. Trucks are about as aerodynamic as the proverbial barn door, and the more it’s jacked up, the worse the aerodynamics are. It’s is a matter of both frontal area and a statistic called drag coefficient, which is a measure of how much resistance the vehicle presents to the air as it moves past. The combination of the two measures how hard it is to get your truck through the air. Jacking up your truck hits you with a double whammy. It increases the frontal area and makes your drag coefficient worse.

Since air resistance increases with the square of vehicle speed, relatively little air resistance at slow speeds turns into huge walls of air standing in the way of your truck at higher speeds. That means driving twice as fast will actually cause 4 times the air resistance. That means it takes 4 times more power to push your truck through the atmosphere at 70mph as it does when you’re driving 35mph. Take your foot out of it and you’ll save fuel.

Tip 3 – Clean up your act. All those tools you keep in the bed of your truck weigh a ton. Well maybe not a ton, but probably a few hundred pounds, especially since you keep them in that steel bed box. The combination is a heck of a lot of weight you’re carrying around every day. If you don’t use them all the time, remove them, or at least change the box to a lighter, plastic variety, especially if theft isn’t a concern. Every pound of extra weight you’re carrying takes more fuel to accelerate and take up hills. Even if your truck can tow 10,000 lbs, those 250lbs of extra tools you’re lugging around will still cost you money. It also burns up your brakes faster when you stop, costing you even more money. You could get .5% – 1.5% increase from this alone.

Tip 4 – Get an aerocap for the bed. This is a smooth, faired cover for the bed that extends form the top of the cab to the top of the tailgate. It significantly improves aerodynamics over the bed area. In fact, tests have revealed a 4% fuel economy improvement at only 55mph, with high speeds promising even better returns. These things must be expensive, right? Hardly, you can build one for less than $100. Even if you buy one and get it color matched for your truck, it should still set you back less than $500. Obviously you’ll have to remove it if you’re carrying anything in the bed that is too large.

Tip 5 – Conserve momentum when driving. This is one of the most effective driving techniques to increase fuel mileage. One of the reasons that hybrid vehicles deliver such outstanding fuel economy is because they recapture energy through regenerative braking. Since you can’t do that in your truck, you are going to conserve the momentum you have already built up.

There are 2 keys to accomplishing this. The first is to look far ahead when driving and anticipate when you might need to stop. Every time you use the brakes, you are turning your momentum into useless heat. That heat cost you precious fuel to get. Look at the traffic signals and traffic ahead of you. If traffic slows or the light turns red, get off the accelerator and coast. Your goal is to coast up to the light and get there after it has turned green, so you never have to stop. The same with heavily traffic situations. If traffic is slowing to a crawl or a complete stop, try to anticipate the flow, so you can slow down, but never entirely stop. In heavy traffic you’ll often be foiled by drivers cutting in ahead of you, but it is worth a try.

This technique avoids wasting the fuel it takes accelerating from a complete stop or a very slow speed, and sometimes can save you 10% depending on driving conditions.

Tip 6 – Drafting large trucks ca save substantial fuel, but can also get you killed. If you use this technique, make sure you’re not too close. Even having a large truck 100 feet ahead of you can offer substantial aerodynamic gains at freeway speeds. The problem is that at 65mph, you’re only about a second behind a vehicle at 100 feet. Thatb is about half the distance experts recommend for safe driving. Sure you can use the “I can stop faster than he can.” logic, and that may well be true when you’re talking about an 18 wheeler, but it is a big risk to take. If you do this, it is essential to be paying 100% attenuation at all times.

Tip 7 – Replace your factory air intake with a free flowing, after market unit. This reduced restriction in the intake tract, often leading to a 3% – 5% fuel economy improvement, depending on the truck you’re driving.

Tip 8 – Replace the exhaust system with a free flowing exhaust. Similar to the reasons that cause your engine to operate more efficiently when you change the intake system, you can do the same thing with the exhaust. Any time you lower the resistance, especially on a turbo charged engine, where exhaust tuning is less of a concern, you will improve fuel economy, throttle response, and hp/torque. All in all, a great deal.

Tip 9 – Maintain your truck. There is no sense in spending any money on any sort of add on if your truck isn’t operating at peak efficiency in the first place. Proper tire inflation, clean air filter, clean fuel injectors, and regularly changed oil all factor into your truck’s fuel mileage. Keeping your injectors clean is a matter of using a fuel additive at regular intervals. Crawling under your ride every few months to check on things, change the oil and lube things up isn’t a bad idea, either. A fuel additive will also help ensure there is no water in your fuel system and increase fuel lubricity, both of which are important to maintaining optimum performance. After spending 2 hours at the side of a road, in the middle of nowhere, waiting for a tow because the F-350 I was driving had gotten water in the fuel system, I can vouch for the fact that water and diesel do not mix.

Modern electroncis have done wonders for driveability, performance and feul economy. Thankfully, you can take it even further with some minor mods.

Tip 10 – Add an Electronic Control Unit (ECU) programmer targeted at increasing fuel mileage. These days virtually all engine and transmission functions are controlled by one or more electronic processing units. So it was only natural for people to soon try and market ECUs optimized for more power and better fuel economy. There a half a dozen or more of these things on the market from such manufacturers as Hypertech, Edge, Bully Dog and Jet. You’ll not only get improved fuel mileage, you’ll typically get improved performance as well. Several of theses units let you change the tune for your application. That means if you’re towing, for example, you can set the ECU in tow mode to increase low and midrange torque. It is easy to set it back to fuel economy mode for increased fuel economy in normal driving when you’re finished towing. As an added bonus you’ll often get lower exhaust gas temperature, lower noise, and better throttle response when using these performance ECU systems.

How to Tell If Engine Modifications Pay Off

It is all well and good to spend several hundred or thousand dollars on increasing your fuel economy, but will you ever get your money back, and if so, when will that payoff arrive? It is all a matter of simple math.

Say you drive 20,000 miles per year and your truck averages 14mpg overall. That means you’ll burn about 1,428 gallons of fuel in a one year period. As this is written, the national average for diesel fuel is $3.07 a gallon. That means that you’ll spend $4,384 a year on fuel at current prices. If your modifications net you a 15% fuel economy increase, your mileage will go from 14mpg to 16.1mpg. Your annual fuel usage will drop to 1,242 gallons, costing you $3,813, and saving $571 per year. How much did your modifications cost?

If you spent $1,000 on an ECU programmer, a performance exhaust, and a free flow intake, you’ll be earning money on your modifications in only 21 months If you are going to keep your truck for longer than that, it makes sense to go ahead and install those modifications, because they will pay for themselves fairly soon, and then save you almost $600 per year. In most cases these mods not only give you better fuel economy, but added power too. It’s kind of like getting something for nothing or buy one, get one free.

To find the best deals on exhaust systems, intakes and ECU programmers for your truck click here now.

You can save money on gas by buying your gas with a credit card that gives you a rebate for gas purchases. These rebates can be upwards of 6%, depending on which rewards card you choose. Unlike a decade or so ago, many consumers eschew the using an oil company gas card in favor of a traditional Visa or MasterCard that gives some type of reward or rebate for gas purchases. The reasons for this are many, but suffice it to say that flexibility is definitely not the oil company credit card’s strong suit.

With an oil company credit card you’re limited in two ways; one, you have to use it for purchases at a gas station, and two it has to be a gas station owned or affiliated with that specific oil company, for example, Chevron or BP. Need to pick up a new HDTV or 5 lbs of bananas and a large combo pizza? Too bad.

That sort of inflexibility has consumers fleeing company gas cards for the greater options provided by credit cards that pay rewards for gas purchases, but can be used in any store that accepts credit cards, and for any purchase the consumer might wish to make. In many cases they’ll get rewards or rebates for these other purchases as well.

One way to save gas is to use one of these gas rebate credit cards and, this is important, pay off the balance every month, so you’ll accrue no interest charges. Failing that, at least search high and low to find the card with no annual fee and the lowest interest rate possible. Click here to check out a vertical credit card search engine that lets you do just that, find the gas credit card with the lowest interest rate, and more importantly if you’re trying to maximize your gas rebate, the biggest rebate.

These things change with the winds in the financial sector (which lately have risen to hurricane force), but as I pen this you can get a gas reward of up to 10%, depending on the particular card. Don’t forget to avoid any card with an annual fee, unless it’s extremely small and the rewards for your specific type of use far outweigh the impact of the annual fee. That’s a very important point, you must remember to give careful consideration to your expected use of the different cards when making your decision. The offers are varied (and seem to change with the wind) so you have to look at your past credit card usage, and examine how any prospective new card would fare if you were using it instead. Calculate the different rewards percentages for each type of purchase, and total your expected total annual reward dollar amount.

You can use the gas reward percentage to directly offset the price at the pump. For example, if the reward percentage for a particular card is 7%, that is effectively a discount on gas prices that’s applied to the final price you’ll pay. Two more things to consider here; some credit cards have a maximum rewards amount, so keep that in mind when making your decision, and if you fail to pay off the balance every month, you’ll pay an interest rate that I can almost guarantee will be higher than your reward percentage.

So, you can use a credit card gas rebate to effectively save money on gas, if you find the best card, and be careful to use it correctly. It is just one more strategy to save money on gas you can keep in your arsenal. Go here to use that gas rewards search.

….until next time.

Biodiesel is simply making diesel fuel out of biomatter. The great thing about using biomatter to make diesel fuel is that it’s renewable. Essentially, you need more fuel, you just grow more! The fact that diesel vehicles tend to get better fuel economy (not gas mileage) than their gasoline powered counterparts is just icing on the cake.

Currently there are several ways to make biodiesel. The different methods use varying materials and different processes to produce the biodiesel fuel. In a second I’ll take a look at the different ways of synthesizing biodiesel and what is needed to do it.

Can some of these be made in your garage? Ya, sure, you betcha! In fact there are complete biodiesel reactors you can buy (well, you might be able to buy them, but at around $3K, they’re still a bit too rich for me) as we speak.

Although they sound like the two aunts you had when you were a kid, methyl and ester are actually the foundation of biodiesel. Biodiesel begins as a natural plant or animal based oil. The precursor for biodiesel can be from many different sources, such as used restaurant fryer oil or plant-based oils. Crops can be grown specifically for use in producing biodiesel or waste products can be recycled to make biodiesel. Many seed or bean crops yield high quantities of oil that are suitable for making biodiesel.

The actual chemical process used to create biodiesel from these base oils involves replacing the glycerin in the base oil with alcohol through the use of a catalyst. The oil is combined with the catalyst and methanol, then heated. The catalyst is used to accelerate the reaction and speed up production. Used oils are completely filtered before being mixed. This can be avoided is virgin oils are used, although pre-filtering is still a good idea.

After the reaction is complete the mixture will stratify. The top layer will be the biodiesel. The original glycerin that was replaced by the alcohol will be on the bottom. There will be a layer of soap in the middle. The unwanted soap and glycerin are discarded, leaving only the fresh biodiesel.

One of the big attractions of biodiesel is that so many different materials are suitable to use for creating the base oil. One that is holding great promise for commercial applications is algae. Some algaes contain high quantities of high quality oil that makes great biodiesel.

Unlike many other base stocks, algae uses no agricultural land, so using it to make biodiesel doesn’t impact crop availability or prices. It also has high yield and algae can be genetically manipulated to increase efficiency even further. As an added environmental benefit waste CO2 from various industrial sources, such as that created by coal fired power plants can also be consumed in the process of growing the algae.

Here are some of the other benefits to using algae as the bas stock for biodiesel.

1. Algae can be grown on many types of land, such as deserts or near industrialized areas. This land is often unsuitable for housing or agriculture and would otherwise be unproductive.
2. Algae produces orders of magnitude more oil per acre than any terrestrial crop
3. Algae utilizes less water than traditional crops
4. Algae can grow in fresh water, brackish water, salt water and even polluted water. In fact it can be used to clean polluted water during the course of it’s growth.
5. Algae will not drain the earth’s potable water supply
6. Algae can help reduce global warming by sequestering atmospheric CO2. This in addition to above described benefits of using waste CO2 from industrial processes.

Several commercial ventures are well underway to commercialize what’s termed algecal biodiesel. Some of these are GreenFuel Technologies, PetroAlgae, Solayzme, and Redmond, WA based Bionavitas. Bionavitas uses special technology to ensure light reaches throughout the vessel used to grow the algae, compensating for the fact that as the algae grows, it tends to disrupt light infusion into the vessel.

What about making your own biodiesel? Many people do this, and the basic process as is described above. If you are trying to save money on fuel, making your own biodiesel could be just the ticket. You have to be the do-it-yourself type and be willing to play Mr. Wizard, but it is definitely possible. Depending on the source you use for the biodiesel base, it can be made for under $1.00 a gallon, certainly an attractive proposition in this day of $4.50 gallon petro diesel.

If you are ready to start making your own backyard biodiesel fuel, you first have to secure a reliable source of base stock. You can get to be good friends with the local burger joint owner and try and weasel him out of their used fryer oil, but many of these relationships have already been made.

A word of caution when making this stuff.

You can kill or injure yourself when making biodiesel, so be very careful. You’ll be using nasties such as lye and methanol. These are hazardous chemicals, and you can easily be blinded, burned, or otherwise scared for life if things should go awry. You need to wear a face shield, a respirator and gloves all rated for protection against hazardous chemicals before you begin the process of making your won biodiesel. Saving $3.00 a gallon isn’t worth losing your hand, an eye, damaging your lungs, or ending up shot to hell un dyin’.

The above cautions are one of the attractions for using self contained biodiesel reactors such as the Fuelmeister II, the $3,000 unit I spoke about at the beginning of the post. Using a commercial, self contained biodiesel production unit will give consistent results, and make the process easier, faster and safer than doing it yourself. The Fuelmeister II can make up to 40 gallons per day, which should feed all but the largest crew cab dually for a week or so, even when towing your boat.

When making your own biodiesel you’ll use a little more than a ½ oz of lye and less than a quart of methanol for each gallon of biodiesel. The largest cost variable comes from the material used for the base oil. At the beginning, if you’re making your own, you should start small, with virgin base stock, and make small batches. After you’ve had some practice, you can start making larger batches.

There are some tings to consider when using biodiesel in your own vehicle. For instance, in vehicles made before 1990, you may have to replace the fuel lines because biodiesel can corrode the lines used these older vehicles. There are also warrantee concerns to think about. In low concentrations such as B-5 (5% biodiesel / 95% petro diesel) the warrantee will be unaffected, but check with your manufacturer before using biodiesel in higher concentrations if your vehicle is still under warrantee. It can also gel in cold weather if an additive is not used, or a fuel heater isn’t installed.

Biodiesel can be a great way to save money on fuel. If you’re prepared to put up with a little more hassle than simply pulling up to the pump with the green handle, making your own biodiesel might just be the ticket.