I took my car off the road for the winter with my gas gauge working fine. I am now having some problems with it since I have put it back for the summer. When the car starts up my gas light goes on and the gauge will go all the way down. After I drive it for roughly 5 minutes the gas light goes, off and the gauge goes to the proper level of where it should be depending on how much gas I have in my car. If I stop driving and say park in a driveway keeping the car on after a min or two the light comes on and it goes back down. It seems that unless the car is moving the gauge thinks I am on E. Any ideas?

 

its possible that the float started to rot and half of it fell off & its sinking, or you could justhave a bad wire connection somewhere.

 

Mmm, I thought of the wire connection though the consistency of its actions made me double think the bad wire. It doesn’t seem like the wire would consistently work after the car gets going for like 5 mins and then stop after the car has been sitting running a few minutes. It probably is the float rotting. I mean the gauge worked fine in December, then the car sat in a garage until May only being started up 2 times each month it was sitting there, so my guess is while sitting the float slowly rotted away. How hard do you think this is to replace in terms of do it yourself?

 

tank has to be empyt first off, then i would pull the sending unit assembly out of it and check it out, look under the pass. side its not too hard to take out.
you may want to check grounds and whatnot, and maybe the dash cluster itself even first.
go over the easy stuff before getting into the harder work.
maybe someone else has some other suggestions.
its rare but i have seen floats break off and they half sink or sink when sitting still.

 

Alright thanks, I am lifting up the car to replace some belts on it romorrow so I will look while I have it up.

 

Alright, so if I were to take apart my dash, what should I be looking for wire wise? I looked under the car and the wires seem to have a solid connection. And it almost seems that if the tank is more than 1/2 full everything will work great, but if its somewhere near 1/3-1/4 to E the car does the thing I described above.

 

i would go with the sending unit starting to go bad.