Came home yesterday after a short ride. Thought I turned off 4he truck. I went into the house and 5 hours later came out to get something out of the truck and found the engine was still running. What kind of fool would do that. The truck runs so quiet and smooth I didnt notice. What kind of possible damage could I have done. Went to fill the gas tank and it sure didnt use much gas just idling.

 

No damage, police cars do that all the time. If I discovered that I'd done that on my truck, I probably would have taken it and ran it hard for a couple of miles to blow the condensation out of the exhaust. I would still run it hard next time you use it, after it warms up.

 

You didn't do any damage. The general consensus seems to be these engines are not the best if you idle them often for long periods, but I wouldn't worry about 5 hours. Mine sees at least that much during the week (abet, not all at once) and I'm around 22% idle on the hour meter. No isssus yet.

But a little "Italian tune-up" wouldn't hurt either. Put it into Sport mode and go play to heat things up.

 

22%? Holy crap, you must do a lot of city driving.

 

When the Crown Victs idled a long time at an accident scene, the exhaust would dump what looked like a gallon of water from each pipe as the Officer drove away.

 

Oh yeah, even the new Expolrers do it.

 

In my line of work (oilfield) mine idles a good bit when I'm on a land location.....No issues as of yet.

 

Construction site trucks idle all day long and these trucks last for hundreds of thousands of miles.

 

Idling in general isn't good for the engine, but you didn't hurt it. I don't see your location, but one of the big is the engine cooling off in cold climates when the climate control is pumping out heat, but this late in the year this isn't usyally an issue.

The couple gallons of gas and a few extra hours on the engine clock would be the only damage.

 

Vehicles that do a lot of idling, like police cars, are susceptible to rod and main bearing fatigue. This is due to the fact that their fluids run hotter because of the lack of airflow helping to keep things cool. But those vehicles idle all the time so you can rest assured you did no damage.

 

There are a lot of police crown vics out there with 150,000 miles or more with no engine failures. The cooling system is beefed up enough to stay at normal operating temp while extended idling with the a/c on and all emergency lights on. This done with the temperature at 115 degrees.

 

Wouldn't cause a problem but when you opened the door with the engine running the truck didn't make a bunch of annoying binging and bonging sounds?

 

I have to chuckle at this, as I deal with trucks that idle 24/7 (fuel truck comes around every 24 hours) for months on end in Arctic conditions and depending on the engine typically no real issues come about (although the 3V V10s need a high idle to help with oiling).

During the winter my trucks and car can idle as much as 1.5-2.5 hours a day depending on temps and whats going on that day, never an issue other then fuel use.

 

Completely forgot about my experience when I lived in Minnesota. There was a couple of times when the temps were hovering around -55F, and I had to have the car outdoors. I'd carry two sets of keys, and lock the car up idling for fear that it wouldn't start at he end of the day. That would be ~~ 8+ hours of idle time. This was back in the 1970-71 days.

 

The company I used to work for that worked on the slope, those trucks were never shut off, the contractor would have refueling trucks come around every so often and refuel the vehicles.