How My Family Accomplished a 25 Percent Reduction in Annual Gasoline Consumption

With gasoline now at $4.00 per gallon my family and I have decided that it time to change our fuel consumption habits and take positive steps to reduce our fuel usage by 25%. By our way of reasoning a 25% reduction in gasoline consumption has the equivalent effect of buying gasoline for $3.00 per gallon.

Weird math? Perhaps so, but it has provided us with an incentive to make a concerted and honest effort to save a resource we can no longer afford to waste.

We are a family of four, have two cars, one lawnmower, one weed eater, and one blower ...all of which run on gasoline.

Our first step was to determine our baseline by measuring our current gasoline consumption.

As all of our gasoline purchases are made using a credit card it was fairly easy to convert monthly charges into purchased gallons of fuel for the previous year. We were surprised to find that our annual consumption reached 1,725 gallons per year. At $4.00 per gallon our annual fuel cost would be nearly $7,000. This would give us a targeted savings of 431 gallons per year and a cash savings of $1,725.

The next step was to determine where the fuel was being consumed.

We developed a list of major activities that require the use of gasoline in our family. The list included commuting to work, commuting to school, weekly shopping and errands, business travel, two teenagers using the car on weekends, Summer and winter vacations, attending church, holiday travel and small engine use (lawn mowers, edger, and blowers)

We used this list to estimate/calculate the quantity of gasoline consumed by each activity. For example the quantity and cost of fuel required for commuting to work was calculated as below:

Commute To Work: We knew that the majority of fuel was required to fill the family car which was used to drive to and from work five days a week. This required a drive of 44 miles round trip, 5 days a week and 50 weeks per year for an annual distance of 11,000 miles. Optimistically, we calculated our in-town mileage performance at 14 miles per gallon. This resulted in annual fuel consumption of 786 gallons required to commute to work.