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Resetting Oil level light on Audi A3

Coming home from work the other night, my Audi came up with an Orange oil low level warning light, as a reminder that I need to refill the engine oil on the car.

No big deal, the BKD engine fitted to my Audi comes with two warning light colours.

  • Orange – Check oil level / oil level low
  • Red – Oil pressure / stop engine (if you get this pull over immediately)

The Orange warning light illuminated so figured it was worth checking when I pulled over, sure enough it needed topping up.

Checking oil can sometimes be awkward on cars, due to the temperature of the Engine and reading the dipsticks. I read somewhere that Germans prefer to use a method of drive until the warning light comes on and then top it up. Whilst I don’t prefer this method, I can understand the preference. As it’s just a case of keeping a top up canister in the car as 1L of oil normally tops up the oil in the car to half way between minimum and maximum (I don’t know exact difference between minimum and maximum, but it’s probably about 1.8L), given that the BKD takes 3.8L of oil, the warning probably comes on when you have 2L. I’ve never looked.

I merely don’t like this approach, as you can get oil starvation issues, and oil pressure. My oil was genuinely running low because I had been idling the car a lot due to cold weather and at work on lunch, driving hard also burns the oil when exercising the Turbocharger too, so a low oil level is to be expected eventually.

Now, the main thing what bugged me, which inspired me to write this post, was the Enigne oil warning light wouldn’t clear off, even when i had topped it up. You have to go through a strange procedure (which does make sense) although is annoying before it resets. Basically when you get the warning light, most people would pull over and turn off the engine, open their bonnet and check their oil. Close their bonnet and then turn on ignition to start the car

This is how I did the procedure on mine, which replicates the above and managed to clear it.

The oil warning light then went out on the car. For some reason my Audi didn’t recognise that I’d filled up the oil. My mind was over working it and thinking it could have been a faulty bonnet lock. As normally you get a bonnet light when the bonnet is open and this wasn’t showing. So I was thinking the car hadn’t recognised I’d opened the bonnet, or I’d done the procedure wrong

I’ve had this weird issue before, and it’s normally just done to the procedure when you get the oil level warning light on the Audi, I figured I’d write down the procedure I’d used to reset my Audi level warning light as a reminder for the next time.

There are diagnostic tools on Amazon which should be able to do the same thing, but I haven’t tested these

I’ll probably forget, but next time I get an oil warning light, it will help me remember when it comes to resetting the thing on the car

 

 



 

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