By John Richardson
Portland Press Herald
PORTLAND, Maine — What’s black and white and green all over?
City officials hope the answer will soon be patrolling Portland’s streets.
The Portland Police Department is testing a device that could make its gas-guzzling cruisers more fuel-efficient.
The gadget, the Idleright Fuel Management System, keeps a cruiser’s lights flashing, and its computer and video camera powered up, when the engine is off.
The system monitors the car’s battery strength and automatically starts the engine to recharge the battery when it’s running low. When the battery is charged again, the system shuts the engine off.
''Sometimes, (at) accident scenes or a crime scene or a traffic (direction) job, those may entail a cruiser running for hours’’ to keep the electronics going, said police Cmdr. Michael Sauschuck. ''If there’s any way for us to reduce our fuel use in these economic times, we’re all for it.’'
While the experiment isn’t over, officials say the Idleright device has much more promise than solar-powered battery chargers that were the subject of a similar experiment. The city installed the small panels on two cruisers last month but quickly decided they didn’t work.
For Portland, which has a municipal fleet of about 550 cars and trucks, idling is no small issue.
The city’s plow trucks, trash trucks, police cruisers and other vehicles used an average of 362,000 gallons of fuel a year before 2008, when the city began an initiative to reduce that number by 5 percent a year, said Kevin Austin, Portland’s fleet manager.
Austin and others trained city employees to save fuel by accelerating and slowing down gradually, obeying speed limits, keeping vehicles maintained and tires inflated, combining trips and even walking whenever possible.
The city also adopted a no-idling policy for all vehicles except police cruisers and emergency medical vehicles, which also keep electrical systems operating.
Once or twice a week, Austin said, ''my phone rings from a taxpayer who may see a vehicle here or there idling, and we follow up on it.’'
He notifies the driver’s supervisor, who reminds the employee of the need to shut off the engine when parked.
A full fiscal year into the effort, the city had reduced fuel use by just 0.5 percent, Austin said.
He attributes the disappointing results in part to the city’s decision last winter to haul snow off the streets with its own trucks rather than giving the job to contractors, as it did in previous years.
So far this fiscal year, the results are much more promising. Fuel use in August, September and October was down more than 5 percent, Austin said. ''We’re maintaining about an 8 percent reduction right now.’'
Austin hopes to get even more savings out of the police fleet.
The city has only 16 front-line police cruisers, but they run almost 24 hours a day. And, Austin said, they spend a lot of time idling - and effectively getting zero miles per gallon.
The city tried small solar panels that sent about 5 watts of power into the batteries of two cruisers.
It wasn’t enough of a boost to keep the electronics from quickly draining the cruisers’ batteries, officials said.
''They’ve got so many on-board electronics. When they shut down, it does not take long to draw down the batteries,’' Austin said.
The Idleright test unit was installed only two weeks ago, so it’s too soon to tell how much it could reduce idling time or how much fuel it might save, said Austin and other city officials.
But officials are hopeful about the device, which connects to a vehicle’s electrical system and costs about $400 to install permanently.
''The car will literally start itself and shut itself off. It seems like it will be a good system,’' Sauschuck said.
City officials said they plan to keep testing the device and looking for ways to conserve, although fuel prices are lower than they were when the effort began.
''It is saving money, and it’s also cutting our emissions significantly. And we all know the fuel prices are not going to stay the same,’' Austin said. ''We need to be vigilant about this.’'
Copyright 2009 Portland Press Herald