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Finally caved and bought a $25 code reader from Amazon
I always thought you needed a fancy $300 scanner to diagnose anything useful, but my 2003 Corolla started throwing a check engine light last month and I didn't want to pay a shop $100 just to read it. That cheap little Bluetooth OBD2 reader hooked up to my phone in 2 minutes and told me it was just a bad oxygen sensor post-cat. Anyone else get by with a budget scanner or am I asking for trouble?
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the_seth3mo ago
I bought a $20 one off eBay for my old Ford Ranger and it actually showed me the exact misfire count per cylinder. Ended up being a bad spark plug wire that was arcing against the exhaust manifold, fixed it for like 8 bucks. Sometimes the cheap stuff works just fine as long as you're not trying to program modules or something.
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aaronf402mo ago
Yeah, the "arcing against the exhaust manifold" part is a classic. That's the kind of thing that only shows up when you get a cheap scanner, right? You spend twenty bucks to find an eight dollar fix, and suddenly you look like a genius. Meanwhile my buddy spent four hundred on a Snap-On scanner and still couldn't figure out why his check engine light was on. Turns out it was just a loose gas cap.
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grace_perry442mo ago
Honestly @aaronf40 hit it perfectly. Ngl, the cheap scanners are the real MVPs for basic diag, they cut through all the fluff. Sometimes you just gotta trust the simple tools over the flashy ones.
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