Still Loving My Hyundai

I had to go to the dealership this morning. When I shut the car off last weekend, it made a kind of clanking gurgle (technical term !) for 5 seconds or so. It sounded like something's timing was off. I lifted the hood, determined I needed a quart of oil, but doubted that had anything to do with it. So I called Richard over.  The only thing he could posit as a cause was an old belt. Most likely the serpentine belt, especially after I contacted the dealership and verified that the engine has a timing chain, not a belt. 

That greatly erased one worry, that of destroying my engine by procrastination. The chain should last "forever," per their service department. The car currently records a history of 145,500+ miles, a long way from forever in my many Accents' driving history. The serpentine belt has an official expectation of 50k miles. (Uhhhh, oops?) It was definitely due for replacement. 

More Googling, and I researched the consequences of continuing to drive the car if the serpentine belt snapped. So long as my only "long" trip was to the dealership, the car shouldn't overheat to get there. Still, it was a cautious half week with only a couple <1 mile trips. I didn't even drive far enough to get that quart of oil. The dog's toenails had just been done, the larder was full, there were few club duties in the next few days, so I found no need to invoke my paranoia by putting the car to the test. 

Well, at least not paranoia over that part. Back to Google, I tried to find out how much the new belt installation would cost. Results ranged from $860+ installed down to $78 if they didn't count installation. I did of course. No way was I going to fool around with that on my own or with some wannabe mechanic. There were the usual offerings where I could get a more precise quote if I gave them a lot of information. 

Screw that!

I at least had one ace in the hole. When we switched satellite companies, we were promised a "rewards card" with a debit balance of $300. It wasn't good for cash, only for purchases. I'd been waiting and waiting. At first I thought I'd apply it two weeks ago to the annual renewal of our Rec Center dues, or at least a bit over half of it. But that deadline came and went so they got paid out of the budget.  

Then Steve and I agreed a good place to spend the money was in replacing the propane grill. The old one had a leak somewhere in the line between tank and grill. We'd researched getting a new line but our grill only had them from some RV supply store. Not worth the effort. No grilling for over a year, but we got by. Now that the card was coming, and my daughter was coming to visit, having a functioning grill seemed like a great idea.  I went online, found a decent price and decided to get one delivered. The old one went to the curb and disappeared instantly, before we could even call the garbage company for a price to haul it away. (Good luck, whoever you are!) The new grill also came out of the budget with no card in the mail yet. We'd spend that amount on some regular bill or something and juggle the books later. Last time we'd switched and gotten one of those cards, it simply was applied in full to a bill, with no payments needing to be paid until the $300 ran out. They were happy, we were happy.

Saturday the mail included the long awaited card. FINALLY! It at least would pay $300 worth of the new belt installation worst case, or have a balance left in the best case. Turned out we had the best case. I now have to keep track of the balance and be sure to spend it within 6 months. That won't be a problem. Remembering the 4 digit pin if I used the card somewhere which required one might have been. I know I wrote it down. It just wasn't where I keep the rest of the information for logging into the Satellite company website. Fortunately, after finding out the car dealership didn't require it when I used it there, it popped back into my head... an hour later. Steve and I developed a system for pins, basing them on a word instead of random numbers. To use it we just have to look at my phone number pad where numbers = letters in order to come up with the numbers. It's just like an ATM keypad, which helps us every time Steve needs to change his bank pin number because somebody's stolen his card number... again. And yet again. He comes up with an apt word (not all are curses) and then spells it into the ATM.

I keep the pin with the card, on the same piece of paper wrapped around the card which has the latest balance. WTF you say? It's not the actual code. Just another word that cues my memory. We've already found out that the local grocery store will accept the end balance on one card and the rest of its payment from another, or cash, so we can spend every penny. 

With that card, in a way, my serpentine belt replacement was free. Not only that, but had I been paying more attention, and replaced the belt every 50,000 miles just because somebody decided the old one only lasted that long, I'd have already bought two more in the meantime.  That's one of the reasons I love my Hyundai. Now if this one is like my last one, I should need to get the starter replaced at around 287K. Then there'll be the decision as to whether to replace the tranny shortly after the 300K mark.  I'm not halfway there yet. The car is a 2013, bought at the end of 2013 after that school bus rear-ended me. It got less than a year of high work miles on it before I retired, and gets few enough miles now to require only two oil changes a year with our traveling back and forth to Minnesota. With my luck with several of these cars now, this one may outlive me.