What Kind of Maintenance Should I Do on My Car?

What maintenance should I do on my car? Welcome to Mercie J where compassion and craftsmanship come together. I'm Rick Smith.

Now first of all in terms of how often you should do these maintenance items, I recommend that you do a lot of research. There's gonna be a lot of confusion out there, there's gonna be a lot of different opinions, so be careful on just taking one thing and going with that because some intervals are going to maybe be too often and cost you too much but other intervals may be too long and not actually take care of your car.

So some of the decision-making on that too is, how long am I gonna keep the car? But as far as what you should maintain. So the first thing I always tell people on the list is fluids.

So you need to regularly change your oil. One of the most expensive things to not maintain because of the damage it'll do, is your coolant or radiator fluid, whatever you want to call it, antifreeze. But servicing that regularly saves a lot of my clients a lot of money, ignoring it costs them a lot. And then the third major fluid that we typically focus on would be the transmission.

So next on our list would be filters. So when you're changing that oil, you should change the oil filter. We also have a cabin air filter, and that's going to protect some of your air conditioning system and heating system components. It's also gonna give you fresh air to breathe.

And then we have the engine air filter. And here in the desert the cabin air and the engine air filters, they should probably be done about once a year about every 15,000 miles, because we have a lot of dust particles that they filter out.

Next on my list would be cleaning. So we have carbon that can build up in the engine. So that should be cleaned out on a fairly frequent basis. And that's gonna depend partially on what type of injection we have. So a direct injected car, the more often you do that, the better that's gonna help your fuel economy. And the more it's gonna help prevent that carbon from building up dramatically.

On port injected vehicles, it doesn't have to be done as often. So a little bit of research on what you have and how you need to do it. The other thing that makes a pretty big difference is having your car actually detailed. Because it seems like if you keep your car really clean, you will tend to drive it a little more gently so it’ll last longer. It also makes you feel a little bit better about owning the car, you'll actually like it a little bit more.

Next on my list is, I would put tires. So we want to, on a fairly regular basis, do alignments to make sure that we don't wear those tires. We want to regularly inspect the suspension to make sure that nothing's worn, they can wear our tires. And then lastly, we want to rotate our tires on a regular basis so that they wear evenly and we get as long of a life out of them as possible.

So those are kind of the basic things we also have on some vehicles, differentials, transfer cases and some other gear train components. Those don't get serviced as often so they can get ignored sometimes. So you have to look at your own individual vehicle, but I hope this has kind of been helpful to you to understand some of the things to maintain on your car.

Thanks for watching, until next time, safe travels and blessings to you.

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