Just A Coincidence?
Or bad gas?
Jan was going into work with me this morning, and since the Jeep was a little low on gas, I decide to stop off at the CircleK/Valero over on Hwy 6 to just get a few gallons so Jan wouldn’t worry. But I didn’t want to fill up here since they’re so much more expensive than Costco where I had planned to fill up later.
So I only got about 4 gallons, and under the circumstances, I’m really glad I didn’t get more.
Pulling out of the station, we didn’t even get a block away before the Jeep’s engine started bucking and missing, with a very rough idle when I let off the throttle.
Considering the days/weeks of rain we’ve been having, my first thought was water in the gas. Especially since an Exxon station up in Cypress got caught with the same problem last week with cars dying right in the station lot.
As long as I didn’t get on the gas very hard, it would cruise along OK, thought I could tell it was missing constantly. So my next stop was the O’Reilly’s on FM517 for a bottle of HEET gas treatment to see if I could get rid of some of the water. And after a few miles, things did smooth out a bit. Enough so that Jan felt comfortable driving it the rest of the day.
Later in the afternoon as we were heading home, I did stop at Costco for another 12.5 gallons. And after a bit things seemed to clean up some more. I could push it a little harder before it started bucking again. But it was better, though it still had a definite miss.
Since the Check Engine light was flashing I was going to see what code it was throwing, but then realized I had never moved my Bluetooth Scan Tool from our Dodge Dakota over to the Jeep.
With this plugged into the vehicle’s diagnostic port I can use the Torque Lite app to read the OBD2 fault codes and also clear them later.
So I’ll hook it up tomorrow and see what’s going on.
With the Scan Tool only about $13 and the free app, it’s a great deal
I’m also going to dump in a can of Seafoam Injector Cleaner tomorrow to see if that helps.
After I got to work I called the CircleK and talked to the manager to see if anyone else had reported any problems. But according to the manager, no one else had any problems.
So, just a coincidence that the Jeep started acting up 1/2 from the station, or not?
Thought For The Day:
“It takes less time to do a thing right, than it does to explain why you did it wrong.” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
