YOUR FUEL GAUGE - Secret you may not have known

 

 

P

erhaps you’re your fuel gauge serves just one purpose – to tell you the quantity of fuel remaining in your car tank. This is quite vital. But your fuel gauge does just more than that.

Do you recall one common experience when you enter the filling station to refuel with a new car, a rented car, a friend’s or relation’s car, or any car unfamiliar to you? You just have to struggle to find out the side your fuel tank is located – left or right side of the car. Sometimes you come down to look round the car before realising your fuel tank side. It could be embarrassing especially when there is queue at the filling station. Perhaps you have spent some time on the queue only to realise (just when it is your turn to refill) that you had been on the wrong queue.

 

Your car designer is aware of this embarrassment and had given you a quick guide to save you from it. It is as simple as ABC. Just look at the fuel gauge indicator (fuel pump icon) on your dashboard and see a “secrete triangular arrow”. The direction which the triangle points at is the side your fuel tank is located. Arrow pointing to the left shows the tank is at the left side, and vice versa.

With this knowledge, you can always tell the side the fuel tank is located any time you hop into any new-to-you car.

 

WHAT TO DO WHEN YOUR FUEL GAUGE READING GOES CRAZY

The fuel gauge primary role is to let know when you are running out of gas. In the fuel tank is little float made of foam. The float bobs on top of the gasoline; the higher the fuel level, the higher it floats. The float is attached to a thin metal rod that scrapes up against playing a resistor, which sends an electric signal to the fuel display. The signal comes from your car's battery via a small coil. The lower the float drops, the more current the resistor sends to the fuel gauge and the closer you get to "E" for empty. Of course, today's cars make it even harder to come up with excuses for running out of gas: The car might turn on a low fuel light and often an audible signal when you get dangerously low -- or even estimate how many miles you have to go before walking to work instead of driving in the comfort of your car.

                

 

Gas gauges don't fail often, even if we seldom trust them. When they do fail, the problem could be in the float and resistor system located in the tank, in the dash gauge readout or in the wiring between the two. There are some ways to tell what might be causing the problem: Poor grounding at the reader in the tank is the most common problem, so it's a good idea to check wiring first. A needle that remains on empty when you know there's gas in the tank indicates battery power is not reaching the gauge; you may need to replace defective wiring between the switch and the gauge.  Faulty wiring often is the problem when the gauge simply reads incorrectly, and the source varies depending on how the gauge reads versus how much gas is in the tank  

Of course, hybrid and electrical cars may come with a different kind of gauge -- one that measures the car's battery range -- the equivalent of fuel for those running their cars on electrical power. Devices in the first generation of these battery gauges were termed "guessometers" by some owners. It's possible that someday, all drivers will be watching their battery gauges in real time instead of estimating when the gas gauge will dip to that anxiety-provoking level. As with some digital  gas gauges that currently give driving range estimates, electric car gauges do the same with battery charge.