Has anyone tried that CarMd or does anyone have any other suggestions for in-home diagnostic devices?

 

The CarMD looks to be an over advertised, over priced code reader. At the top of this forum is a Sticky with lots of comments on most of the readers in the market.

 

Scotty, what I personally do is I have spent $70 on a basic code reader from the auto parts store. From there, you can read the engine codes and get what is causing the check engine light to flash. From there, you can either post the codes here or you can do a little bit of research yourself and see what you can find (information from other Ford products will be relative to your search). You can do most of this in just a few minutes.

Now, to make things a bit easier, you can find a copy of the JTIS CD, there is a section in it that you can look up the codes you are getting and it will list the most likely suspects. If you have multiple codes, then you normally narrow it down to a single component by looking at what parts they recommend replacing and see which ones are common to all of the codes.

Please note that I specifically talk about engine codes. If you are wanting something that can read the body codes, tranny codes, etc, then you are going to be dropping quite a pretty penny to be able to do that since you will be into the professional level readers. The higher end ones are nicer for the fact that they will give you a brief explaination of what the code is and the high, high end ones will give you real time data logging/viewing of the engine. If you do some looking around, there are some kits out there that you can take your laptop/higher end hand held devices and plug a cable into it that will plug into the car. Then, with their special program, you can get a lot of these same features (but not all and the options vary between each one and what device you are using). These can run normally around $200. So, that is another option.