Tucked away in a Timaru residential garage is an A-grade car and truck mechanic with more than 20 years' experience who is promoting the half measure as a way to save fuel and oil.
Steve Blakemore-Terry says fuel can be saved, running costs can be reduced and savings can be made on oil - by not putting so much in the sumps of our car engines.
Mr Blakemore-Terry said dipsticks were too generous on the amount of oil an engine needed to run efficiently and half the amount it took to top up the sump was all that was required.
He advocates running car engines on no more than the mid-way point on the dipstick for quicker engine warm-up times, therefore taking less time to reach maximum fuel economy, and less oil waste by reducing internal oil splash ‘‘most of which is sloshed up the bore to be burnt unnecessarily in the combustion chamber''.
He points out that no engine damage can occur because the oil level is still within the engine manufacturer's recommendations.
‘‘So why are we wasting it?''.
Mr Blakemore-Terry is a qualified mechanic who several years ago operated a mobile repair business in Christchurch known as the Dynamic Mechanic.
A man who liked to solve problems with logic rather than assumption and guesswork, he spent many hours sitting in Christchurch traffic thinking about methods of improving his fuel economy, he said.
‘‘So I took a lateral approach to the problem and one of the solutions I came up with popped into my head when I considered how much energy was required to heat a litre of cooking oil from zero degrees up to about 100 degrees.
‘‘Then I considered about 70 per cent of our trips, certainly mine, were only up to about 20 minutes and in our engines most of the fuel used in a car is used up in that warm-up period, on short trips here and there.
‘‘Most people will notice that typically after an oil change, oil would burn quite rapidly down from the high mark to about midway on the dipstick over about the first 2000km or so of the car's travelling and then it would kind of plateau at the midway level before burning quietly down to the low mark over a much longer period of time,'' Mr Blakemore-Terry said.
‘‘So I did some experiments on my own car, running it just above the minimum oil level on the dipstick and found that not only was I putting in less oil for the equivalent distance travelled, but my fuel economy improved because my engine reached operating temperature more quickly.''
By running the oil level lower, less oil was available inside the engine to be splashed up the bore to be burnt unnecessarily and there were huge savings in oil costs, he said.
‘‘That oil saved stays on the shelf, sparing the atmosphere the extra emissions and the engine the longer warm-up times.
‘‘The saving could be as much as a half litre in a small car through to about three litres on a big diesel engine, just by running on the midway point on the dipstick,'' he said.
He said the oil was still being burnt, but at a greatly reduced rate.
Mr Blakemore-Terry wondered what such savings could mean if extrapolated over all the vehicles in New Zealand.
‘‘Say there were a million of New Zealand's cars running on this principle. That could be a million litres of oil still sitting on the shelf not being burnt and pushed into the atmosphere.''
Mr Blakemore-Terry said the oil light on the dash was simply the ‘‘idiot light''.
‘‘People who never check their oil will sooner or later see the oil light come on.
‘‘What's the first thing they do when they see the light? They top the oil level back up to the full mark and the first half was burnt at the greater rate again.''
Mr Blakemore-Terry acknowledged there would be those who would be dubious about his ideas and those who would see the logic immediately.
‘‘There will be those who see my theories as radical.
‘‘But if people adopt my theories gradually I would expect that over another 10 to 25 years we will see a huge reduction in environmental pollution,'' he said.
‘‘The worst polluting motor vehicles are those more than six years old. That's two-thirds of our global fleet.
‘‘Here's a way to help the environment that also saves folk money.''
