Are you hearing a ton of knocks and pings coming from your car’s engine? That’s a message you can’t ignore and L&D Automotive has some clues for you about what might be causing these sounds.
Neglected Maintenance
This sounds worse than it is, but if you’re overdue for even simple maintenance, that can affect engine performance in your car. Oil changes, filter maintenance, and more all ensure that your car’s engine is working as it was designed to work. Waiting a bit too long in between services can be enough to cause engine knocks.
Combustion Errors
Combustion needs three things in order to happen in your car’s engine. Your car needs fuel, spark, and air, in just the right mix. If there’s too little fuel or air, or the spark isn’t there when needed, the engine misfires. That’s what you’re hearing when you hear knocks and pings in the car’s engine.
Exhaust Problems
Your car’s exhaust tends to be overlooked in terms of what it does for engine performance. By ensuring that all of the smoke and residue left over after combustion leaves the engine, that gives your car’s engine a clean space in which to do it all again. Leftover stuff hanging around? Can cause engine knocks.
Broken Knock Sensor
Detecting knocks and solving what’s causing them is a big goal of our computer’s engine control module. That’s why knock sensors in the engine are meant to collect data about knocks and relay that information to the ECM. A knock sensor that isn’t able to detect knocks can’t give the ECM any information that it can use to solve the problem.
Incorrect Gas Choice
It’s important that you use the right type of gas in your car. Your owner’s manual will list out what octane levels of gas you should be putting in the tank. Buying a lower octane level can cause misfires, which end up becoming knocks and pings. It can feel a bit like the octane recommendations are the manufacturer being all up in your business, but there’s a reason for it.
Engine knocks aren’t something that you have to just learn to live with and that’s that. These sounds are your engine telling you that there’s something wrong. L&D Automotive in Lavon, TX, can help you to determine what’s causing these sounds in your car so you can get the right repairs the first time around.