Engine Light and Gas Tank Level

[cheungderek]

I have a 97 Venture. The Engine Light was ON a few weeks ago with message "System Too Rich". The mechanic said it was the Oxygen Sensor. He reset the code and ask me to monitor the situation.

I think I get Engine Light ON when my Gas Tank is below 1/4. When I fill up the tank and drive for another 30km, the Engine Light turns off automatically.

Is the problem still related to the Oxygen Sensor?

BTW, any cheap ODBII and ABS reader on the market for Venture?

thanks

[cdru]

Your O2 sensor likely is going south. They do have a limited life, usually around 100k miles they start to go south. Being a 97, I bet you still have the original sensor and significantly more then 100k miles on the current sensor, don't you? There shouldn't be any definite link between your tank being low and your check engine light.

If the engine returns to normal operating conditions, the light can turn itself off and the code can delete itself. Certain codes have different behaviors depending on the severity. Without looking up I couldn't tell you how P0172 (IIRC that should be System Too Rich Bank 1) behaves.

Re: the scanner, define cheap. Actron sells several models for under $100 that will read and reset codes. I have a Actron 9135 that reads codes, reads saved data, and reads real time data. Not sure about airbag data though. I can't recall ever seeing a consumer scan tool that explicitedly said it read airbag error codes.

[jhong1226]

abs as in air bag system or antilock brakes? the actron scanner part number is cp9145, i think.

[cdru]

You are correct, I do have the 9145. The 9135 just reads the codes and gives the brief description as to what the code is, but doesn't do real-time data displaying. The 9135 just shows the code and you have to look it up. All of them have the ability to erase.

[AOneill]

Originally Posted by cdru

Your O2 sensor likely is going south. They do have a limited life, usually around 100k miles they start to go south. Being a 97, I bet you still have the original sensor and significantly more then 100k miles on the current sensor, don't you? There shouldn't be any definite link between your tank being low and your check engine light.

If the engine returns to normal operating conditions, the light can turn itself off and the code can delete itself. Certain codes have different behaviors depending on the severity. Without looking up I couldn't tell you how P0172 (IIRC that should be System Too Rich Bank 1) behaves.

Re: the scanner, define cheap. Actron sells several models for under $100 that will read and reset codes. I have a Actron 9135 that reads codes, reads saved data, and reads real time data. Not sure about airbag data though. I can't recall ever seeing a consumer scan tool that explicitedly said it read airbag error codes.

I don't know about you but I'm having the same problem, you can read more on it by searching the posts within the last month about the advice I recieved. Pretty good stuff. The only difference is that my fuel tank will read erratically set the engine light on and start working really bad. I put the fuel cleaner to it to help clean possible bad connections in the sending unit, helped a bit. This weekend the tank is comming off to clean manually the connections and hopefully find an obvious problem somewhere. I'm puzzelled why the fuel guage seems DIRECTLY related to engine light/engine/trans problems. And everybody I spoke with sofar will say their not related at all...weird..All I know is that when I'm dirving and fuel guage is below half.. the guage will usually start to climb to full, the engine light will illuminate and the van will start working like a bag of dog %%&*$#. Fill it with gas the problem goes away engine light out van works great Spoke to another friend and he said its probably bad connection in sending unit and computer getting false readback or signal we'll see this weekend.