wildyams

Car Trouble & My DVR

I had a rather interesting Saturday. I got up at around 11 or so when the cable guy showed up to switch out my HD box for a box that does HD and DVR. I am really happy about having this new setup, as I can now use my Tivo a little differently. I am going to use my HDTV DVR to record all Laker games and any movies I have not seen that are going to be on HD Cable, and I am going to use my Tivo to record everything else that I have any interest in seeing. All I do is I take about an hour once a week (usually on Sundays) and just flip through the upcoming schedule and select all the stuff I want to see, and then whenever I have time I watch what I've recorded. It's very convenient

After the cable guy left, I ran out for a bit and my car began to show that it was overheating on the temperature gauge. Naturally I was upset, so I pulled my car over to check it out; but as I slowed down I noticed that the needle dropped down to a normal setting, and it only went up when I hit the gas. This different than what I've seen in other cars when they've overheated, so I wondered if that meant the thermostat was broken or something. When I pulled over there wasn't any coolant coming out of my car and I didn't smell anything, so I figured that was a good sign, and assumed I was probably ok to drive to the nearest mechanic and have them check it out, so I hopped in and drove off to look for one. The first place I came to, the guy said he had just looked at his last customer so I was out of luck (he must have been getting ready to go to lunch or else he closed real early on the weekends or something), so I went on to the next place I found. At the next place, however, nobody there spoke English very well at all, so we both had a real hard time understanding each other. From what I could determine, the guy said my temperature sensor was bad, so he unplugged it and said I should go get a new one, but it was ok to drive for the time being. Because of the language barrier I wasn't too confident that this was ok, but I figured I could go to the nearest AutoZone and ask them about the part. However, as I was driving to the nearest place, my "Check Engine" light came on. I assumed this was because I now had something unplugged in my engine, but it still made me worried. At the AutoZone they said they didn't have the part, so I left and decided to look for another mechanic to get a second opinion about whether this was ok.

The next guy I found did speak English, and was very helpful. He had me run a whole series of checks on my car and narrowed it down to a couple things that could be wrong. He said that I may just be low on coolant, and if so, I needed to refill that, otherwise I could possibly cause my head gasket to explode, which would be extremely expensive to fix. Unfortunately, I couldn't check to see if I was low on coolant till my car cooled down (which took about 3 hours, probably because it was the hottest part of the day, and it was close to 90 on Saturday). He did find out that my fan was not turning on when the thermostat was climbing above where it should, so I may have a defective fan switch, but he said in the meantime I could bypass that by always running my air conditioner, which would turn that fan on anyway. He said if my coolant was at the right level, then it was probably either the fan switch or a defective temperature sensor, or my thermostat was bad. Well after waiting around for the couple hours till my car cooled down (apparently if you open your radiator while it's hot, it will spray you with coolant), I saw that my coolant level was at the top, so according to the mechanic it must be one of the above-mentioned parts. He said I could still drive the car in the meantime with that minor malfunction, but that I should get the parts directly from the manufacturer, and that I should at the very least get this fixed before summertime when it will get hot again. Having driven my car around for the last two days with the A/C on, I haven't had any more problems other than minor fluctuations on my temperature gauge, so I feel like I have (hopefully) dodged a bullet on this one.