WhiteKnight

Before I begin let say that I use Forscan and the car is producing no codes. What is happening is that when I start the car first thing in the morning I get a strong rumbling, perhaps metallic in character sound coming from the front end of the car as I sit in the cabin while it is still in park; it sounds like the engine is trying to die but not dying . This sound will eventually go away as the car warms up to operating temperature. Further, if I open the hood I cannot hear the sound in the engine, I only hear it in the cabin. I have noticed that when the engine turns off there is a strong, short hissing noise almost like a balloon deflating ( hear this in the engine compartment, not the cabin). The car drives down the road properly. It is only when the engine starts and stops and it is very noticeable when the car is in park first thing in the morning. My initial thought was maybe the engine was misfiring but there are no codes for a misfire. My next thought was that maybe it is the engine mounts but I am not getting any vibration in the cabin, just noise. When I open the hood with the engine on the engine doesn't seem to vibrate excessively, there is some vibration but its not actually shaking. It could be the transmission but there doesn't seem to be any issues driving the car. The hiss noise made me think maybe some kind of leak, like a vacuum leak but again I am getting no codes. It's bothering me. Something clearly is wrong but I don't know what it is. I am now wondering if maybe it is dirty fuel injectors but I feel like at this point I am grasping at straws. Any one experienced something like this? 2015 Cmax hybrid, 130K miles. Thanks.

There are two different battery metrics using ForScan. There is "days in service" and there is "age in months". Forscan is showing me that my days in service is 100 (correct, I replaced battery three months ago)) but I noticed that when I did the reset it did NOT change the age in months. So it Forscan is reporting that I have an eight year old battery with 100 days in service. This doesn't seem correct to me. It seems to me that the reset feature should be resetting BOTH metrics, not just one. Can anyone confirm what is correct?

120k miles and want to change my plugs. What size of socket adapter is he using in length @ 5.27 in video. I know it is 5/8 socket but how long is it?

Rather than starting a nw thread I am going to post my issue here since it obviously related. I have not had an issue with my cmax starting. What happened was that I was looking at the battery for other reasons and I noticed some corrosion/sulfide on the negative battery terminal. Since the battery is exposed to the cabin I didn't like the idea of breathing in sulfide. So I measured the battery with a multimeter and it read slightly less than 12V. So I then used Forscan to check the battery. The charging voltage was reading 14.5V but the SOC was only 20%. I also notice a few fault codes saying that some of the modules had experienced a low voltage condition. So I decided to keep an eye on it. A few weeks later I noticed that the SOC charge was reading zero but the car was still starting. Odd. Given that Forscan is reporting the life of battery at 61 months I decided to take it to the dealer and stick in a new battery. However, the battery test at the dealer came back with a low battery (12V) but that battery health was good. So I had them charge the battery back up an hour and their equipment showed a battery with 13.3 volts. I then went back to the car and before driving off looked at the data in Forscan. Weirdly, Forscan is still showing the 12V battery SOC as zero. So I am not sure what to think now. Forscan's readings do not jibe in any way with independent dealer testing, making me wonder about the reliability of that software. Also, I don't understand why the battery accepted a full charge from the dealer's equipment but the cmax itself is unable to recharge the battery to full health even with the proper charging voltage. Does anyone have any thoughts, insight, theories as to what might be going on here?

This would confirm what the dealer told me. My post about the topic on the Forscan forum generated lots of views but no replies. Searching through that forum the Cmax doesn't seem to generate much interest. I did some further internet research and there does seem to be people who have reprogrammed other Ford vehicles to turn off DRL but the procedures they were using to do so were, frankly, beyond my technological sophistication. So I guess I am out of luck. It is disappointing.

There is no configuration option for the DRL on the left hand display in my 2015 cmax se. I will try the forscan forum. The other option I am thinking about is some type of exterior cover like one can make a cover for the grille. That would option would be less than ideal in many ways but is a last resort I suppose.

I am going to post my experience here in case anyone comes to this thread in the future. The age on my battery in the 2015 CMAX I bought reads 60 months (five years). I'm not quite sure how a four year old car gets a five year old battery, but whatever. Using the forscan tool the state of charge on the battery reads between 10-20%. I used a multimeter to test the battery. To avoid the door open drain I crawled in through the back seat and measured it with all the doors closed and car turned off. The reading was between 11.9 and 12V. Given that there tends to be some slight natural impedance from the wires I'd say the real voltage is about 12v-12.1v. This jibes with Plus 3 Golfer's comment above "You can also, after the car has been off for several hours, measure the battery voltage with a meter with the car off. If you get around 12.0 volts or lower, I’d put the charger on as your SOC is likely around 20% or less." I tried to charge the battery by letting the engine run. In an hour it improved the SOC from 17% to 20%. So trying to use the car to recharge an old battery is a waste of time and money. It might be possible to hook up a 1.25 amp battery tender to the built in 150W outlet and charge the battery that way, so it would give the battery a dual charge but that might be overkill; I haven't tried it The curious thing is that I have had no problem starting the car whatsoever. In fact, it got below 20 degrees F here recently and the car started like a champ. So a low SOC charge will not prevent one's car from starting.

Thanks for your reply Bill-N. The first thing I did was go to the dealer and inquire about daytime running lights. My local dealer said that if the car had daytime running lights that was programmed at the factory and could not be changed on the SE, only on the SEL So that was why I was looking at another way to turn them off, like pulling a fuse. I do have the Forscan app but I don't know how to use that to change the feature on or off on the SE.

My prior vehicle had what I called stealth mode; if the car was started with the parking brake on all interior and exterior lights would not illuminate. Is there a way to replicate this feature in my cmax SE? The problem I have is that every time I start the car (put it in drive mode) the headlights come on. I can't figure out a way to stop this. I went so far as to pull Fuse 74 ("headlamp supply") under the glove compartment but that had no effect on the actual head lamps. I dearly miss this stealth mode feature, now that it is getting cold, and I would love to figure out a way to make my Cmax do it.

Thank you for the reply. Do you know the names of the specific PIDs? When I was playing around with forscan some of the names are very similar to one another and I could not find an explanation of what they might do. For example, what exactly is the difference between hybrid battery SOC and hybrid battery state of charge "displayed" and why would they be different?

Why? Prudence. In theory the hybrid battery meets needs in terms of capacity but probably not in fact. I have several power accessories that pull between 900-1000 watts each. I only run them for short bursts of time (4-5 minutes) 1-3 times a day. That power draw is much too big for the built-in 150W plug so that would mean some type of direct connection to the hybrid battery--for a newbie like me, probably not a great idea. Also, I don't know what effect that level of power draw would have on the longevity of the hybrid battery. Seems like a bad idea, but maybe I am wrong. So that is why I want a second battery, to protect the hybrid battery from the high power draw of my accessories. If I draw to much power (say, by forgetting to turn one off) I've only killed a $200 item rather than a $3000 item.

I have bought forscan, I figured it was worth the cost just to be able to monitor tire pressure. But what other PID should I be tracking regularly?

I am new to hybrid cars and to my cmax (2015) so if this question has an obvious answer forgive me. What I want to do is attach a second 12V battery to my cmax (not replace one, have two batteries). Since the hybrid doesn't have a conventional alternator I can't use a typical two battery set-up that conventional cars can use. So what I thought about doing was using a B2B charger (such as one linked to below) to charge the auxiliary battery. https://www.sterling-power-usa.com/SterlingPower12volt-12volt-30ampbatterytobatterycharger.aspx This would mean, however, that the puny 12V battery would now be regulating the voltage of not only the hybrid battery but the 12v auxiliary battery too. To visualize: Hybrid battery<---cmax12v battery---->12v auxiliary battery. Can the cmax 12V battery manage that safely without messing up the hybrid battery or the car's electronics?