General Car Maintenance We Take for Granted

We all know that regular maintenance is required for our vehicle.  Regular oil changes, wheel alignments, tire replacements; all are part of a maintenance schedule.  While these can easily be put on a calendar, there are a few items for your car that are just as crucial, but easily forgotten.  These should also be part of your regular maintenance schedule, and can easily be done during a routine oil change or brake inspection.

Replacing Your Air Filter

The air filter in your car helps your “breathe” easier.  It keeps dirt and other debris from entering your engine and robbing your car of its fuel efficiency.  When the air filter becomes clogged, you start to lose fuel efficiency, causing you to fill up more often at the pump or accelerate faster to get up to speed.  Your engine needs air to create the correct air-fuel mixture to create the explosion inside the combustion chamber.  When the air is restricted, or isn’t clean enough, you don’t get a large enough explosion to maintain your engine’s fuel efficiency and it requires your engine to work harder.  That’s why it’s important to change your air filter on a regular basis.  Sometimes you can do this yourself, but you may need to have one of our mechanics do it for you.

Spark Plugs and Wires

Your spark plugs are what create the necessary spark for the combustion chamber to get your engine going.  Eventually what happens over time, the carbon left over from the explosion inside the combustion chamber will build up on the spark plug and create an inadequate connection between the two points.  A weaker spark means that your engine needs to work harder to get up to speed.

The spark plug wires are just as important.  Over time, the wires start to become brittle and may crack or separate and it reduces the amount of electricity going to the spark plug.  The wires are multi-stranded to help with flexibility.  These kinds of wires are created for bending over and over again, but eventually they may start to fray and lose their performance.  A loss of performance will, once again, cause the engine to work harder to create the power that is being asked of it.  

Getting a New Fuel Filter

Another important filter of your car is the fuel filter.  Without it, you’d be introducing harmful impurities in the fuel into your engine and causing harm to it.  Like the air filter, it starts to become clogged and lets more of those impurities into your engine.  When this happens, you will start to notice a decrease in fuel efficiency and horsepower, indicating that it’s a good time to have it replaced.  This is best left to the pro’s as it may require special tools and there is a slight fuel leak when the filter is taken off.  Also, a lot of the time, the fuel filter is rusted or corroded onto the fuel line and in doing this type of repair yourself, you may end up damaging your fuel line and having an even higher repair bill.