Check Your O2 Sensor

We talked before about oxygen sensors going bad. A bad oxygen sensor will think there is not enough fuel in the air-fuel mixture and add more. The result will be too much fuel for the amount of oxygen and not all of it can be burned. The extra unburned fuel will be wasted with the exhaust. Remember that your engine is an air breather.

This video compares a bad and a good oxygen sensor to show the difference. The two sensors are given time to warm up. Then a rag is wet with brake cleaner. Because the brake cleaner is combustible, the sensor treats it as fuel. The good sensor indicates the presence of fuel (full rich) as long as there is still brake cleaner in the rag. The bad sensor after a short time shows full lean. The bad sensor thinks there is far too much oxygen relative to fuel even though the situation is the opposite. You do not want this to happen in your car!

How to Change Your Own Oil Filter

Your car's engine depends on three filters: the oil filter, the air filter and the gasoline or fuel filter. These keep the engine's "lifebloods" of gas, air and oil clean. Dirty clogged oil filters will result in a bigger pressure drop across them, lowering the oil pressure in the engine. If the pressure loss is too great, oil filters are designed with a bypass value that opens and lets unfiltered oil through. Why? Because dirty oil is better than not enough oil. Loss of sufficient oil pressure can destroy the whole engine. The pressure drop across the oil filter goes up with engine RPM. At very high RPM, say around 4000 RPM, the bypass valve will normally be open due to the large pressure drop at this RPM. Dirtier filters have lower RPM thresholds for opening the bypass. Thus with a dirty filter, every time you rev up your engine you may be letting a shot of dirty oil through.

Dirtier oil is more viscous and the particles of debris in it may wear directly against the moving metal in the engine. This increases engine friction, which lowers fuel economy. So clean oil filters can help get better mileage. You can change your own oil filter and save some money. It is really easy. The video shows how. Watch and learn!

The video below has the part about changing the oil filter. The video above is the introduction and also shows how to change your own oil. If you want, go ahead and buy a K&N HP-1010 Oil Filter from Amazon now!