Dirty Body

My truck has had a stalling problem for a while. When I would pull up to a stop sign or a red light, it would occasionally stall. Sometimes it didn't though. Very random and not terribly annoying except when stopped at a hill. Luckily, it's pretty flat here.

The "check engine" light never came on. I scanned the computer for error codes. Nothing. I googled the problem and came up with various things. Bad throttle position sensor, vacuum leak at the intake manifold, dirty throttle body, bad plug wires and several more. My personal opinion was that it was the throttle position sensor, so I bought one of those and a can of throttle body cleaner (not to be confused with carb & choke cleaner, they are completely different).

Well, I took off the throttle body and it was indeed pretty dirty. Including a little doodad called the idle air control valve. I grabbed my son's toothbrush and cleaned that sucker up real good. And it worked. Rarely does the cheapest solution work and I returned the throttle position sensor to the store.