Ford F150 - Gauges sweep on startup..

OK, sometimes on start up my gauges sweep all the way full, then return to normal position. It's a 2002 F150 Lariat. ANy ideas?

It's likely that your battery or alternator is failing. See this thread:
http://www.fordf150.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=28123

Keep us posted.

Ah. I know its the orginal battery, 4 years old, so i will start with checking that. Thanks!

Batteries have a short life span in the Florida heat.

Cheers

The best is take a picture of that!

Checked the battery and alternator last night. Battery was done to about 10 volts, alternator is fine. Replaced the battery with an Optima Red top, back on the road again...

Thanks guys!

They are just doing a self diagnostic. If you have the LCD odometer, hold down the reset button when you start the truck and you will get a whole bunch of info...if you can decipher it.

Thank god it was just my battery.....i have no money

This is something I have noticed on my truck for years now and I never thought anything of it. I'm an aircraft mechanic and we have very similar gauges that always do a "sweep" upon initial powerup so I never thought much of it until I saw this thread. I just changed my battery about two weeks ago so when I go out to my truck today I'm going to check and see if it stopped sweeping. I don't even pay attention to it anymore because I've always thought it was normal. Are you guys talking about a quick 3-5 sec sweep and then getting normal indication or are you talking about getting a 20-30 second sweep? Just curious.

A low battery causes ALL the guages to do a full sweep.

A good battery won't do it.

Steve

Wow, my gauges don't sweep anymore. Like I said before I just changed the battery two weeks ago for the first time at 90000 miles. The sweep has been going on for as long as I can possibly remember since I have owned the truck. I just figured it was a self test. I guess I've had a "bad battery" for a long time. I guess you could say I got everything out of it that I could!

I noticed my Speedo quickly jumping to peg and back down to 0 MPH on start-up, too. Unfortunately, I just recently had to replace my alternator, and at that time, the battery was tested to be good, just not getting the charge from the bad alternator. HOWEVER, just yesterday the Speedo jumped again...with a new alternator and a battery that was confirmed to be good. Still confused.

So if we can get the gauges to sweep when the battery's weak how can we mod them to sweep all the time?? and do the ranger's also sweep?

I'm getting a 3-5 second sweep of all the gauges. I checked the battery voltage, it's 12.3 volts when not running, and 14.35 volts when running. This was after 3 days of sitting.

I'm at 112k miles, and still on the original battery. Could it be the alternator? I haven't been experiencing any electrical issues, just the gauge sweep at start up.

thedirtysouth, get your battery load tested, better yet just replace it. A bad alternator won't cause that. Batteries usually are good for about 5-8 years so that sounds about right.

http://www.fordf150.net/articles/idx.ph ... truck.html