Does your air filter need replacing?

If you religiously maintain your car, you might have encountered the maintenance plan set by the manufacturer as outlined in your owner’s manual. While it’s good to go by the book, having the presence of mind to sense when you may need to have it checked is also a useful skill. 

Given how dirty the air is in the city, and perhaps behind another automobile while stuck in traffic, filters can get dirty much faster compared to driving out on an open highway. Also, if you frequent a lot of dusty roads and trails on your journey, filters can go back quicker, perhaps even earlier than the manufacturer’s recommended interval for replacement. With that in mind, here are a couple of ways to tell that your car might be breathing through a dirty air filter. 

An automotive air filter, as its name suggests, filters air out and makes sure that debris doesn’t get into the engine’s combustion chamber. It’s really as simple as that, but such a simple part can actually save you a few drops of fuel per journey and perhaps a large headache should debris enter your motor’s combustion chamber. 

The most common type of air filter on the road is paper. Paper air filters are the most effective at catching debris, but they’re not the best at letting a ton of air in. Oiled cotton filters, on the other hand, flow a lot better and are next to paper filters in terms of popularity. Performance filters don’t filter the air as well as a traditional paper filter but they let more volume in. Oiled filters are often used in performance applications, and installed to help a car achieve more power and torque by allowing a more unrestricted flow of air into the engine, and they need cleaning rather than replacing. 

Since most vehicle airboxes are covered, determining whether your filter is clean or dirty will take a bit of mechanical sympathy. You have to pay a little more attention to how your car drives for this, and perhaps remember how it was when it was new. Having these bits of information in your head can help you tell whether something is wrong with the car. 

Hard starting is one of the indicators that your car has a clogged air filter. If the battery, starter motor, and all other electricals are okay, and if your car is mechanically sound, a clogged air filter could be causing your car to stumble and struggle to start. It’s one of the factors that may affect a car’s ability to fire up. 

If you notice that your vehicle is a little rough around the edges at idle, while crawling, or while going at low engine speeds, then that may be a cause to open up the airbox and check the state of the filter. Jerkiness may also be caused by a number of other factors, but a clogged airbox can be a contributing factor. 

On the other hand, you may also check out how well your car gets up to speed while merging on the highway. If things do take a little longer than usual (given that you’re not fully loaded), then perhaps it’s time to check the airbox and see if your filter is dirty. 

Reduced fuel economy is another indicator that your air filter may be on its way out. With less air in the engine, it’s likely that the car will struggle to make more decent power. With traffic held constant, and with highway miles logging the same way they did before, you could figure out that your car is consuming more fuel than usual if you’ve been logging your fuel economy with all other factors more or less constant with each other. 

All of the other ways to feel whether you have a dirty filter pale in comparison to actually checking it. For most cars, it’ll be pretty easy to get into the air intake box and might involve a few screws and clips that you have to get to. 

Once out, inspecting the filter is pretty self-explanatory. Fun fact, most paper filters are color yellow. They can also be green, red, blue, or any other color depending on the manufacturer, but one of the most common colors we’ve seen is yellow. If you’re seeing nothing but black, then that’s definitely a sign that you need to replace your paper filter. The same can be said for performance filters. If you see no more color on the filter, then it’s time for a clean.