3 Ways to Sip Fuel & Save Money By Managing Idle Times
“How can I save money on gas for my vehicles?”, Is a common question across the board for business owners and operations managers when talking about their fleet. What if you could use less fuel and save time? The most cost-effective ways to save money on fuel for your fleet are limiting downtime, reporting idle times, and managing logistic routing.
1. Fuel inefficiencies biggest culprit is the time it takes to fill your tank
We see time and time again when we talk to customers that they have no idea how their fuel or time is spent. By reporting on your idle times, you are able to set alerts of idle times of longer than 10 minutes, which would be the max time that it would take to fill a truck. Anything longer than that should be shut off. Practicing shorter idle times also helps protect your engine because of the constant unnecessary wear.
2. The fast math of long idle times
When working with customers we have seen idle times of 10 min, 17 mins, and all the way up to one and a half hours idling on a job. Now take that day, month, or even year and what does that give you?
- 100 hours per vehicle
- X 25 vehicles in your fleet
- = 2500 hours of idle time
That is a lot of fuel.
An idling heavy-duty truck uses about 0.8 gallons of fuel per hour. With diesel fuel prices reporting at $2.71 per gallon, as of January 1, 2020, for 2,500 hours is about $6,700+ for a fleet of 25 vehicles per year. With that in mind, Razor Tracking’s Idle Time alerts, we are able to see a 30% efficiency increase by limiting idle times to less than 10 minutes.