If, like me, you don't have £1275 lying around,you will probably have to borrow money to buy an LPG conversion. I could have used my student loan to buy it, but decided on getting a 0% Credit Card (from halifax) to buy the conversion on. I did this for a number of reasons:
- I wouldn't pay any interest on borrowing the money, as long as I paid it off within the introductory period (10 months)
- If anything went (goes) wrong with the conversion, the credit card company are equally as liable as the converter! I picked this tip up from: http://www.lpginfo.co.uk/. Unfortunately, the author of this webpage got royally ripped off by a rogue trader, but got his money back off the credit card company. Handy tips and guides are on that website.
- Psychologically, I would use the savings in petrol (I usually pay £200 a month, I was hoping to reduce that by at least £80) to pay off the conversion, or at least the bulk of it.
2. The savings
As I said, the 2.2 litre Astra is a nice car, but it's nippy, and I'm 23, so I like to drive it fast occasionally. I also work about 15 miles away from home and my girlfriend lives about 15 miles away as well, so all this means I was spending about £50 a week on petrol. (Therefore about £200 a month). As I write, the sums are as follows:
LPG is about 54p a litre, petrol is now 115.9p per litre so LPG is cheaper by more than half.
BUT! - you only get about 80-95% of the efficiency of petrol with LPG so at best LPG is very nearly half as cheap as petrol.
BUT! (2) you dont only run on LPG, many people find themselves spending about £15 or £20 on petrol each month, as it is best practice to start, and turn off the engine, whilst on petrol.
As I said I was hoping to save £80 a month, this would enable me to pay off 2 thirds of the installation within the credit card introductiory period, I would pay the rest off with whatever student loan I had at the time. Or I could transfer it to another credit card.
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