This article will tell you about six car habits that you need to add to your daily life. And we’re writing about simple checks that you can make on your car at home. And I would recommend doing this at least every six months, if not more often than that. Indeed, you will want to check some of these items more often than once every six months. But these are simple checks that you can do at home to make sure your car is in good running condition.
So, we’re going to start with the exterior of the vehicle. First, examine the tires that break the suspension. And then, we will dive under the hood and start looking at filters and fluid checks.
1. Tires check
On or off-road rims, there are three things we want to be looking at, the tread depth, the tire pressure, and how the tire is wearing. Now starting with the tread depth on all tires, you’ll wear our indicators. So, you’ll notice them within the grooves and what these indicators tell you if you roll your finger across from one tread block over to the next, over top of one of the tread wear indicators. And it runs perfectly smooth across rather than falling into the groove and then back up. If it runs perfectly smooth across then, that means you need to replace your tires.
2. Tires Pressure
Next, it’s essential to make sure your tires are correctly inflated, more often in off-road rims. You’ll find the tire pressure information on the inside of your door jamb or within your owner’s manual. And you want to make sure that this tire pressure doesn’t get too low. Because this can result in uneven wearer fuel economy and increase your chances for hydroplaning. And finally, we get to tread wear, so if you look at your tire and you notice that the center of the tire is wearing down more than the outside of the tire that probably indicates your tire pressure is too high.
If the outsides are worn down, but the center isn’t as much, your tire pressure is likely too low. And if you notice that one side of a tire is wearing far more than the other side, then it probably means you need your alignment readjusted. So, checking tires often is one of the essential car habits you should adopt.
3. Brakes Check
Next, we’re going to inspect the brakes. Now you can the wheel using the spare tire kit from the vehicle’s back. But often, you won’t have to remove the wheel. You can look through the holes in the rotation and look at your brake pads. So, looking at a brake pad, a new brake pad will typically have around 12 millimeters of pad material remaining. And you want to start thinking about replacing it once that pad material gets down to about three millimeters. If you’ve only got one or two millimeters left of pad material, you want to replace those brake pads. Often when these brake pads get down to about three millimeters, they’ll have a metal indicator in there, and you’ll start hearing a screeching sound from your brakes, letting you know that it’s time to replace them.
4. Shock Absorber check
Moving onto the shock absorber, you want to ensure you don’t see any fluids leaking out of the damper. You also want to look for any visual damage on the shock or the springs. And make sure everything looks like it’s in good working condition. And again, you don’t have to remove the wheels to do this. You can rotate your steering wheel to one side and look in from that angle. Spin the steering wheel to the other side and then look in from a different angle.
5. Underneath the Hood check
Next is looking underneath the hood. Now the first thing you’re going to look at is the engine oil. You’re going to want to find the dipstick and pull it out. And as you pull it out, we’re going to wipe down the entire thing using a towel. So, we’re going to clean it off, the way we can get a good reading once we insert it back in. so once we know that it’s clean, stick it right around in. Then we are going to pull that out and read it. So, looking at the dipstick once it’s pulled out after you’ve cleaned it off, and then stuck it back in, and then pulled it out once more, you will see that there are two little indicators. So, you want your oil level to be somewhere between the two indicators.
If you don’t see any oil, you might want to add about half a quart to the engine and then recheck the engine oil level using the dipstick and add as needed. But, again, you want to ensure that it lies between the two indicators. Now, as far as how frequently you should be changing the oil, refer to your owner’s manual. And one thing you also may want to look for is if you see a silkiness in the color of the oil that can indicate that coolant is getting in within your engine oil. And so that’s a big problem you don’t want to have that happening. So, make sure that it’s either clear we’re starting to get darkish. That darkish color comes from the oil-holding contaminants before you change it out.
6. Different Vehicles
Depending on your vehicle, you’re going to have different fluids that you need to check. So, for example, the vehicle has electronic power steering, so there’s no power steering fluid to contain. So, instead, you want to check the brake fluid, so you’ll see A max and a minimum indicator line on the brake fluid reservoir. And so, you want to make sure that the brake fluid is between the two indicator lines.
You’ll see the same thing on your coolant reservoir, so somewhere near your radiator or coming from your radiator, you’ll have an expansion tank for the radiator, and you’ll see a min and a max line. You want to make sure that the coolant Falls between the min and the max line and, of course, top off your windshield washer fluid as needed.
7. Filters check
Next, we move on to filters, and there are two filters we’re going to want to inspect. The first of which is the engine air filter. And often don’t require tools to gain access to, and you can pull these out and inspect them with just some clips. And you will see if there is a little bit of debris in there. You can shake out some of that debris and then put that back in or replace it with a new filter.
The second filter we want to check is the cabin air filter. So, you’ll generally find this behind the glovebox. And it usually won’t require any tools to remove. So, pop that out and inspect.
These car habits can prolong the life of your car and save you from accidents as well. Help you reach a proper decision while going for the new jeep grand Cherokee.