Check Engine Light on/off
 

Greetings Friends. Re: 95 LeSabre, 3.8L. The past month or so, I have been experiencing an on/off condition with my check engine light. The sequence goes something like this. Start car up in the a.m the light goes on. Shut off and restart doesn't go on right away and may or may not come on. Had periods of 1 1/2 to 2 days when it doesn't go on at all. Had a period like that when it didn't go on for over a day and a half and then about 6 p.m yesterday. I put gas in and this a.m. I turned the key on and started and it came on again., That's pretty much the whole story about it that's been going on for over a month or so. Car is running fine with nothing obvious showing up. Fluids OK, Filters clean, etc. Thanks for any help.

Problems like this can be difficult to locate. What you can try is to carefully unplug and plug back in any plugs you can see. Hopefully this is just the result of loose or bad connection. There are many sensors that can do this with a poor connection.

How about the gas with the ethanol and additives they put in it?

I really don't think so, because if that were so there would be many more complaints.

Now it stays on and I'm trying to locate a reader. There are a lot on ebay but most are out of my range, being on fixed income. I did take the connector to the oxygen sensor apart and it looks ok and clean.

As long as the check engine lite isn't blinking you might consider driving to one of the local auto supply stores like Autozone,O'Reillys etc., they will read the code(s) for free.
Then post it /them here and we should be able to assist you.

For two days, my check engine light stayed on. Yesterday evening (9/16) I was reading some material about the simple things that might cause the check engine light to come on and one of them was a leaking or cracked gas cap. I went to the garage took the cap off and examined it and it is fine, actually, it is relatively new. I screwed it back on. Today (9/17) I planned to go to Advance Auto and have them hook up their scanner to read the code. I got in the car turned the key on and NO LIGHT! but I went to Advance Auto anyhow. The guy connected the reader and all he got was a LINE ERROR which told us nothing. The reader he has was an OB-II which I understand is not enough and won't read the code. As I understand it, the Line Error means that it didn't make the connection to be able to read the code, so I guess Advance Auto's scanner couldn't read my codes. Now, since the light hasn't gone on today, yet, can I assume that the gas cap might have been making my check engine light go on? Maybe after I've gotten gas I haven't been tightening the cap tight enough. We'll see. I'll keep everyone posted.