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Sierra fuel sender wiring


LewisH

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Tried to get the car running today and found my old sender unit had failed and now has a hole in the pipe as a weld had broken. I have a replacement sender unit but the wiring connection is different.

My old type had a three pin plug, but the new type only has earth & stud for level sensor (same type you can but from kit spares). One of the three pins on the old type was a positive feed, which I assume is no longer needed, the other two I assume are level sensor and low fuel warning light?

I have tried connecting the sender new unit to earth and on the main sensor stud I have connected each of the two wires in turn from the old wiring but no joy. I have 12v feed to my gauge, and don't really want to run a new wire from this to the sender unit...can anyone advise what I need to do here?

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There are 3 seperate senders in the one unit of the Sierra sender.

1 goes to the guage.

1 goes to the distance to empty/MPG computer. I do not know of anyone fitting this.

1 goes to the fuel low light via the computer. Again not actually used by anyone I know.

There is a seperate connection for earth to which all are connected.

As I recall all 3 are the same. Ford had blue/yellow trace cable for the guage. I am guessing that the one with 12V is actually from the guage and should be connected to the sender. Measuring with any kind of volt meter will not load the 12V down enough to show as they are designed to not load the circuit being looked at.

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We have visited this topic before (search "fuel sender") here is the link

https://www.rhocar.org/index.php?/forums/topic/49808-fuel-sender

If you are still using the sierra loom, There should be a brown for earth, brown/red to the trip computer, brown/green to the low fuel warning, and brown/black to the fuel guage. If you still have the sierra 3 pin socket you can see which pin has the brown/black to your guage. Good luck.

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OK so I've connected it up correctly now but when the sender float is at the bottom it is reading 1/4 tank, when it is at top it reads full, but anywhere in between it shows empty. Have I got a faulty sender unit or am I still doing something wrong?

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If you have an electrical multimeter you can check the sender by reading its resistance.

At the top it should be nearly zero, increasing steadily to about 1Kohm at the bottom. (it is over 20 years since I did this and I could be wrong about the maximum value but the linear increase will be there.)

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