Engine Hours

[nvrnuf4me]

I tried a search, but no luck.

 

How important are the engine hours?

 

My DIC went blank and dealer replaced entire cluster. Now my engine hours are reset. Although I have just over 9k miles, the DIC is only reading 2 hours.

 

The 5.3 has some power, but not enough to move it that fast.

 

I have reached out to the service writer and was told that they would speak to a tech. I have not heard back as of yet and just wanted to see if anyone could tell me the importance of the truck keeping track of the hours.

 

This is all I could locate in the owner's manula about it.

 

Engine Hours: Shows the total

number of hours the engine has run.

This display may also show idle

hours, which show how long the

engine has been at idle.

[MikeNH]

It isn't critical. At most it *might* throw off the oil life for this one oil change cycle if the oil life monitor uses that value in its calculations. Beyond that it's strictly informational.

[nvrnuf4me]

Thank you MikeNH for replying. I am sure it is more for internal tracking purposes for GM and their techs more so than anything the consumer will need to worry about.

 

Until it comes time for resell or trade in. I believe it will be questioned why a truck as 60k miles and only X amount of hours.

 

Oh well, time will tell right?

[redwngr]

Most will only consider mileage when valuing a vehicle. Low hours/mileage ratio could indicate more highway driving, vs high hours that might indicate stop and go or idling.

 

For many years, all we had was mileage.

[dplarson]

I have a 2006 Suburban 1500 and when I got it I noticed hours much too low for the mileage. I started to worry maybe I had a rebuilt engine or something. Nope, it just reset periodically whenever it wanted too. One guess was under voltage while cranking or something electrical like that. I upgraded to an Escalade cluster to get a new look and the trans temp gauge for towing and the new cluster has never reset.

 

I had the mileage in the new cluster programmed to match the old mileage and asked if they could transfer engine hours (even though in my case I knew it was not accurate) and they said, no, they could only do the VIN and odometer but not the other items. I never had any trouble with the oil change calculation when my hours were resetting. I don't know how that is figured but I am sure it has nothing to do with that hour counter. In fact, I get the sense that it is strictly internal to the IPC and NOT from any other on-board system. So in other words, if the vehicle tracks hours, it would be independent of the IPC and the one displayed is pretty dumb, not connected to the on-board computer and in my case, not to be trusted.