When your neighbors are manufacturing meth, and your other neighbors are running a crack house–who cares about banning cigarette smoke? I’m far more worried about an explosion, and the heavy "character" traffic.

It’s good to keep lit cigarettes away from the meth lab.

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I am thinking of buying one of the car vacuum cleaners, which can be plugged into the cigarette lighter socket in the car. I would like to know whether this will affect the car battery. Where is the power for this socket coming from? Is it taking directly from the car battery, or if the ignition is on, will it take from the gasoline power?

The battery if the engine is not running, and from the alternator if the engine is running.

Works the same as the headlights or the radio. Don’t worry, it’s not much of a current draw unless your battery is shot or your alternator is defective.

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Or do we use the same amount of fuel using the cigarette lighter socket than if we weren’t using it?
Thanks!
I only thought it might because obviously electricity can’t be free, and the electricity from the lights etc comes from the battery being charged by the car engine running and using FUEL to power the battery, so surely not using the battery would save fuel? Or is it negligible and if we didn’t use appliances the energy would be lost as heat and friction anyway?

A tiny amount of fuel is used.

Lets say that you cruise at 60mph, your vehicle uses 15hp (11.2kW) to maintain that speed. You ipod charger uses maybe 10W. So your fuel economy will drop by 10/11200 = 0.09%

Thus is you get 30.00 mpg at a steady 60mph with out charging the device, now you’ll get 29.97 mpg during the time it takes to charge the device.

To put this in perspective, if you change your cruising speed by ¼ mph, it will have a greater effect on your fuel consumption than charging an ipod or cell phone.

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