www.iFourWinns.com

With the price of fuel to tow your boat (or for any other vehicle for that matter), do you ever clean your MAF sensor? This sensor, located in your engine's air intake, normally consists of either one or two tiny, fragile wires, or a plate. It senses the volume of air entering the engine, and the engine's computer uses the signal to control air/fuel mixture. The sensor gets dirty over time, causing the signal to become inaccurate. The result is often a too-rich mixture, reduced power, pinging, or a combination of all three.

Any decent shop can do this, but I'd bet they charge $100 for it. On many cars you can do it yourself with a screwdriver, a T20 security Torx bit, and a can of this:



A can of it is ~$7.00US at a common auto parts store. According to the MSDS', this product contains the same active ingredient (hexane) as CRC's QD Electronics Cleaner, but the MAF sensor cleaner has a higher percentage of it.

Mine is over 10 years old and had never been cleaned. It was obviously way overdue, and I was also due for a new air filter. It makes sense to do one job at the same time as the other. I've noticed in the past couple of months that my truck seemed to have a tad less power than normal and was pinging under load now and then. We'll see if this improves things. Total time for this job was about 30 minutes. Now that I've done it once, it won't take more than 15 next time.

Specific instructions on accessing the sensor on your make & year vehicle can probably be found with nothing more than a Google search. Here's my sensor before cleaning:



And after. You have to look closely, but it's quite a difference:

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Mike
2005 Four Winns 230/240
VP 5.7GXi/DP
1998 F-150 XLT
Boat Pic

Excellent post, Mike. We use the CRC Mass Airflow Sensor cleaner all the time, and recomend it as a part of regular preventative maintenance (we do BMWs), for all applications that use either the earlier Hot-wire" or the newer "Hot-film" typs MAFs (Mass Air Flow sensor). This should be done annually.

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Gordon Arnold
New Hampshire

2003 268 Vista ..................................................................Prior: 97 245 Sundowner

Do our boat motors have the same set up?

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2000 248 5.7L DP
'92, '94 SXI 750, '08 STX 15F, '12 Ultra LX 300
Videos

I don't think marine engines use MAF sensors. The fuel injected engines do, however, have IAT (intake air temperature), MAP (manifold absolute pressure), TP (throttle position), CT (coolant temperature), and other sensors like cars have, and they can go bad too (but I don't think there's anything to maintain on them).

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Mike
2005 Four Winns 230/240
VP 5.7GXi/DP
1998 F-150 XLT
Boat Pic

Great post, i should try that on my 300k mile pathfinder.

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Guns kill people like spoons make people fat.
2007 Horizon 190 Gxi
97 Pathfinder SE 4x4
73 International Scout II

This isn't much of a data sample, but I'll start with this.

My overall 15 month average MPG prior to cleaning the sensor was 13.85. That average is skewed a bit by towing, but not that much (especially last season ). That's quite a drop from the average during the first two years of the truck's life, when it was running in the low 17's.

In the first 100 miles since the cleaning, virtually all in-town stop & go driving, I got 16.03 - over 2mpg better, if the average holds. If anything, the average should be even better, as this first 100 miles had almost no highway driving in it.

The first tow of the season was yesterday, around 140 miles, at an average of 9.10mpg. As bad as that is, it's better than the 7-something I was getting before.

The truck is definitely idling much smoother, pinging under load has nearly disappeared, and the truck just seems slightly more "solid" out of the hole.

I'll update again when a more meaningful sample is available.

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Mike
2005 Four Winns 230/240
VP 5.7GXi/DP
1998 F-150 XLT
Boat Pic