F-150 Tidbit

During this cold winter the heater on our F-150 hasn't been working the best. We thought it was kind of strange since it worked awesome in years past, I thought about changing out the thermostat a few times but I just figured it was the super cold weather causing it. (the temp gauge seemed to indicate the temp was OK) Well on our way home two weekends ago the check engine light kicked on. I waited until the next weekend to finally bring the truck to O'Reilly's auto parts store to use their computer and check the fault. They let you use their diagnostic computer for free which saved me about $50. The error code came back with something "not enough antifreeze for closed loop operation". I was taken aback by that since I had enough antifreeze in the truck. I took it in and asked the guy about it and he said it's probably a stuck open thermostat. He said the truck is basically running in warm up mode all the time and that I was probably getting bad gas mileage. Man did he hit that on the head, the truck has been getting terrible gas mileage. For the most part I never monitored it until gas started hitting $4 a gallon. We drove up to Little Falls and I put in a new thermostat. On the way home the heater worked great and the trucked seemed to get about double the gas mileage. I'm anxious to fill up the truck again to see what mileage we'll actually get.

So I'd just like to give a thanks to O'Reilly's for offering the free use of their computer. It was pretty handy to find the problem and just buy the parts all in one shot. I recommend it to you do it yourselfers if you ever want to run diagnostics on your car.