Who Knows?

This morning on the way to fill up the Jeep with gas that annoying engine warning light wasn't lit up, which may or may not actually mean anything.

Maybe it burned out.

While I can't rule out the problem fixed itself, I sincerely doubt that any of my efforts fixed anything, either. All I did was poke around under Rama for a moment looking for some obvious problem and found nothing, but who knows? Maybe he (or she) just wanted a little attention. Stranger things have happened.

When the light first came on I looked up the error code (P0456) on, of all places, the Internet and as should be expected got several thousand results. I didn't check them all, but one I did visit had some guy talking about it, with what may turn out to be an interesting symptom.

The problem, generally, has to do with a tiny leak in the gasoline vapor recovery system. It might just be a California thing (because of our history with smog we're pretty much aware of emission problems), but over the last forty years or so great strides have been made about cleaning up the air. In addition to efforts to clean up what leaves through the exhaust system, I take it the whole fuel system is now sealed as tight as a walrus' butt hole. So, instead of the gas in the gas tank evaporating into the air the way it used to, now that vapor is collected and sent to the engine to be mixed with and burned with the regular air when the pistons fire.

So far, so good.

Unless, of course, some sensor that's looking after the integrity of that system decides it has a leak somewhere (in my case, a "very small" one). It might even be that all the hoses and things are fine, but the sensor is faulty.

Anyway, that guy I mentioned earlier said that he got that error, but never when his tank was full of gas. It only showed up after driving around awhile, when some of the gas had been used and the tank was, I guess, filling up with air.

I should mention that for my Jeep, those engine warning lights will go off if the problem isn't there any more and the engine has been started three times without triggering whatever caused the light in the first place. All of which means the engineers also recognize that anything can happen once, but it also means that if the problem comes and goes, it's maybe not as easy for the Jeep to be checked out when it's in an error condition.

This has happened to me once before, and I choose not to describe the steps I went through to have the error show up at the same time I had my earlier Jeep scheduled for service when it decided not to light up the instrument panel the way motion sensitive lights illuminate someone at night messing around on the Hollywood sign.

Getting back to the present, the light had been on for four or five days, annoying me all the time. Since I didn't think it was a big deal, not like if the error was "timing belt missing" or "crankshaft melted away," I figured I'd do my best to ignore it and see what I could do or have it fixed when I felt a little better about things.

Then, this morning after I decided the dogs needed to go to the dog park and the hell with the light, we all got in Rama and the light was off. I was so happy we took the longer shortcut through the desert on one of the many trails instead of sticking to paved roads, and Rama never complained but, in fact, performed flawlessly (I should mention that other than that damn light, I never noticed anything wrong with the Jeep, even when the light was on).

After going to the park, the light was still off, and it stayed off even after filling the tank with the precious commodity known as "gas."

The light first went on when the tank was about three-quarters full and was off this morning when it was closer to one-fourth full. Now, I'll see if it comes back on. I'd like to think it's gone for good, but will be expecting it to show up after I've burned off some gas and will then decide if it's something I'll learn to live with for half a tank of gas or so.

I should also check back to see if I can find that guy's post again and see what he did.