Had the truck (2012 F250 CCSB 4x4 XL/FX4 6.2L gas w/ 3.73 gears) out on the return leg of a 3500 mile two-week road trip, towing a 31 ft bumper pull TT. Overall the truck pulled and handled great, with one exception. Stopped briefly for a few hours to have lunch with a relative; the truck sat for maybe 2-3 hrs with an ambient temp of ~95F. Got hot enough inside the cab to over heat and shut off the tablet I use for GPS/navigation and to run Torque (an OBDII dashboard app). When I turned the truck on, pretty much every alarm light came on, and a litany of error messages scrolled thru the DIC. As I was pretty close to being in the middle of nowhere, and everything seemed to be running fine despite the errors, I got out of the drive way and down the road a bit before I turned it off and restarted. Everything but the check engine light cleared, and a scan for errors/faults with the OBDII app) showed only one remaining - P260F.

A little reading through the owner's manual seemed to indicate that the check engine light would either clear over the next few start/run cycles, or it wouldn't. Looking up the code on the interweb didn't reveal anything that was either too scary - or very helpful in the immediate sense. Drove to the next scheduled gas stop, and when I turned the engine back on after fueling, the check engine light was clear. But the error code still shows when I run a scan using the OBDII app.

If there isn't any easy way to clear/reset that error, I'll definitely take it in to the local Ford shop now that I'm back home. But I am kind of wondering just WTF happened, what made the dash go berserk like that, and what the long-term implications are? Anybody here have an educated guess?

 

was the tablet connected to the OBDII connector ??? while you went to lunch ...

remember the OBDII is a 2 way street.... hand shaking, protocols.. procedures.

 

Yes, it was. That crossed my mind initially when everything 'blew up'... but with the one code still in and not clearing I'm less certain that the app on my tablet could have caused a fault on the ECU....

 

That code is for the emisions vapor canistor, no big deal because it will clear itself. It may have been going through a gas tank vacuum test when you shut the hot truck off, it thinks the gas cap was not tight. I wouldn't leave my laptop live and hooked to the port when the truck is shut down because the Torque app could be running all kinds of test and messing with the computer in the truck.
Denny

 

We had just filled up about 15 minutes before the truck had been parked, so there's always the possibility that the cap *wasn't* tight. I definitely checked it thereafter, though

How long should it take to clear? It's been a couple days... numerous fill-up... over a thousand miles

 

Clear it with Torque. Then monitor it for a bit. The high ambient heat, the laptop/tablet draining the battery, the fact that it was connected to the OBD-II port at the time, who knows. It's best to clear the code, which will probably clear the KAM (Keep Alive Memory), and the PCM will relearn.

Let us know what happens

 

I guess I did not make myself clear..

it is possible .. the tablet... went nuts from the heat.. and put out data garage into truck computer...
as the old saying is'""""""" trash in,,, you get trash out.......

reset your truck computer... even disconnect truck battery for a few minutes... your call